RussianPikabu
October 4, 2017
Today I read the recently published diaries of Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand, who served at the front as an officer (he managed to hold several different ranks) during the Great Patriotic War.
I found myself thinking about how much filth there was then. Throughout the diary, the descriptions of the war and the fighting itself are extremely sparse; most of it consists of descriptions of relationships within the unit (very tense ones, I should note—for example, on February 26, 1945, a report was written against Captain Rysev, accusing him of numerous offenses: undermining discipline, beatings, and other misconduct...)
Here are a few quotations (the ellipses indicate omitted passages, so as not to overload the post):
January 21, 1945
The soldiers are behaving disgracefully. It is not enough that they steal and take away horses; they also manage to rummage through apartments and take bicycles, property, pigs, cows, and so on. People who are sincerely glad to see us, after these robberies, look at us with distrust and sometimes even hostility. I am an opponent of this kind of partisan-style behavior in the Red Army.
February 16, 1945
Another self-inflicted wound—a lieutenant (!). It is the first time I have heard of an officer shooting himself out of cowardice—he shot himself through the left hand. Young, decorated with the Order of the Red Banner and the Medal for the Defense of Stalingrad. His decorations were taken away, his personal property confiscated, he was deprived of all privileges, and he himself was shot like a dog.
Yes, at that time there was a common word, samostrel—literally, someone who shoots himself. There is no explanation in the text, apparently because the term was in everyday use. As I understand it, it referred to servicemen who wounded themselves in the hope of spending time in a hospital and thereby avoiding the front.
February 21, 1945
The day before yesterday, a women’s battalion was operating on the left flank. They were completely defeated, and the captured German she-cats declared themselves avengers for their husbands killed at the front. I do not know what was done with them, but the scoundrels ought to have been executed mercilessly. Our soldiers suggest, for example, impaling them through the genitals and other things, but I would simply destroy them.
February 26, 1945
Women on the enemy side have not appeared again since one of them had her body pierced with a stake and was sent back naked to the German positions. But it cannot be ruled out that they may appear again.
March 20, 1945
(account by Senior Sergeant Andreyev)
In the fighting for the town of Bernlikhet, he came face to face with a counterattacking enemy women’s battalion.
...
The paratroopers dealt with them quickly. The prisoners were divided into three groups.
- Russians. There turned out to be two of them.
- Married women and those whose husbands and relatives served in the same unit as they did (some identified themselves by saying: “My husband is an officer!”).
- Girls.
Only the third group of prisoners was left alive. The Russians, who were no more than nineteen years old, were shot first after interrogation.
From the third group they began dragging their “trophies” off to houses and beds, and there, over a number of days, carried out experiments on them that cannot be put on paper. The German women were afraid and did not resist; to avoid abuse by the older soldiers, they themselves begged the younger ones to sleep with them...
April 25, 1945 — Berlin
The day before yesterday, while riding a bicycle (incidentally, I had learned to ride this remarkable machine only the previous day), I came across a group of German women in the outskirts of Berlin, carrying bundles, packs, and suitcases. Local residents returning home, I thought, and after circling around I tried to get a closer look at them. Suddenly they all rushed toward me in tears, trying to explain something to me in German. I decided that their things were too heavy to carry and offered them the use of my bicycle. They nodded...
...I asked in broken German where they lived and why they had left their home. In horror, they told me about the grief that the front-line troops had brought them on the very first night after the Red Army arrived there...
...A huge two-story house with luxurious furniture, magnificent interior decoration, and painted walls and ceilings. The family was large. When our soldiers came, they drove everyone into the basement. The youngest, and probably the most beautiful, was taken away and abused.
“They stuck it in here,” the German woman explained, pointing under her skirt, “all night long, and there were so many of them. I was a Mädchen [girl],” she sighed and burst into tears. “They ruined my life. Among them were old men, pimply men, smelly men, and all of them climbed on me, all of them did it. There were at least twenty of them, yes, yes...” And she dissolved into tears.
Of course, one could argue that one person’s notes prove nothing, but there are many other sources that indirectly or directly point to what was happening. For example, according to several surviving medical records, in Neukölln, a district of Berlin, 995 requests for abortions were approved from June through October 1945, despite the fact that abortion was a criminal offense under the local penal code. For a short period after Germany’s defeat in the war, enforcement of that provision was suspended.
This post arose from thoughts about the wave of speculation that sweeps through our country every May. Any person from that period is treated almost as a saint, although that was far from the case. In essence, most people pursued their own interests and, having been forced to fight (deserters were shot), tried to make their own lives as comfortable as possible, without shying away from theft, robbery, and violence. Any war has always been a dirty, bloody, and brutal event...
Today, however, crowds, the media, and public figures aggressively pounce on any mention of the Great Patriotic War that is not saturated with triumphalist patriotism. Moreover, contrary to the Constitution of the Russian Federation (for example, “No ideology may be established as a state or compulsory ideology”), in 2014 a “law prohibiting the rehabilitation of Nazism” was quietly adopted. It includes such interesting formulations as publicly disseminating information about Russia’s days of military glory and commemorative dates connected with the defense of the Fatherland that shows obvious disrespect for society, and desecrating symbols of Russia’s military glory; denying facts established by the judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the trial and punishment of the principal war criminals of the European Axis countries; approving crimes established by that judgment; and disseminating knowingly false information about the activities of the USSR during the Second World War.
Such acts are now punishable under the criminal code by fines, imprisonment, and so on.
So much for freedom of speech.
What do you think: is it right to conceal and suppress information, rewrite history, and shut people up? If you think it is, vote the post down.
P.S. I wrote the post myself, but any plagiarism checker will of course show a lot of copied material, because there are many quotations here. If you want, remove the “mine” tag; I do not care. Besides, the idea came to other people’s minds long before it came to mine.
P.P.S. Sources:
© Pikabu
