Grandfathers the Rapists, or the Myth of the “Warrior-Liberators”

Konkretyka / Ukraine History
5–6 June 2022

One of the features of propaganda is the creation of an ideal image without a single dark spot. This is exactly how the Soviet army is portrayed in the cult of “9 May”: its soldiers are fashioned into flawless knights, although, unlike the Western armies, they did not bring freedom to Europe.

Why not “liberators”? Because the falsification of the 1947 elections in Poland and the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe through repression show that the USSR was not interested in the will of the people, which means that its army was an occupying force rather than a force of liberation.

In fact, the Red Army simply brought with it a milder regime in comparison with the Third Reich. I will certainly not conceal the fact that more than seven million Ukrainians fought in the ranks of the Red Army; moreover, my great-grandfather was a Red Army soldier.

But the key difference between the Ukrainian legacy and the Russian one is that we can speak about it openly.

So today I will show the face of the Red Army as it was remembered by German women. I have written about this before.

Grandfathers the Rapists

Let us begin with the well-known diary of Vladimir Gelfand. Incidentally, he was not an émigré; he lived his entire life in the USSR. That is precisely why his memoirs are especially interesting and valuable as testimony. I will quote in the original language from the entry of 25 April 1945 (V. Gelfand, Diaries 1941–1946):

“They poked me here,” the German woman explained, pointing under her skirt, “all night, and there were so many of them. I was a Mädchen [girl],” she sighed and began to cry. “They ruined my life. Among them were old men, men with pimples, stinking men, and all of them climbed on me, all of them poked me. There were no fewer than twenty, yes, yes,” and she burst into tears.

“They raped my daughter in front of me,” the unhappy mother added. “They may come again and rape my girl.”

“Stay here,” the girl suddenly rushed toward me. “You will sleep with me. You can do anything you want with me, but only you! I am ready to do ‘fick-fick’ with you; I agree to anything you want, only not them again!”

Note: The author of the diary was born and lived in the Ukrainian SSR and, incidentally, later helped protect these women.

Mikhail Koryakov was an officer who did not return to the USSR after the end of the Second World War and left an interesting autobiographical account. The following excerpts are from his book Liberated Souls.

On looting

In one tank division the vehicles were inspected. The tanks turned out to be so crammed with looted belongings that there was hardly room to turn around inside them. In the event of a sudden attack, the crews would not have been able to fight.

On “valor”

In the Red Army in the spring of 1945 there was a joke: the first echelon gets watches, the second gets girls, and the third gets loot.

Upstairs, above the ceiling, women’s screams and children’s crying could be heard. Agitated, I began to get dressed. The girl and the elderly Wünsch couple begged me not to go up there: they would kill me! The previous night an officer of the city commandant’s office had been killed while trying to stop the violence. All night long we listened in fear to the screams of the unfortunate women, the crying of the children, and the pounding, the pounding of heavy soldiers’ boots above our heads.

(...) I learned something terrible: in three weeks she had been raped, in total, by no fewer than 250 men! Frau Wünsch had also been raped, even in front of her husband. Two soldiers raped the half-blind, emaciated Frau Simon.

Important note: Mass rape was not punished on any comparable scale; the number of convictions was minimal.

And these are only a few examples. A separate documentary film was made from the diaries of Berlin women (Berlin 1945, Viasat History), containing hundreds of such stories; by other estimates, the number of victims ran into the hundreds of thousands.

Today the Security Service of Ukraine intercepts many conversations of occupying soldiers from which, the author argues, it is possible to understand that these stories are being repeated. The article gives several links:

• rape of a 14-year-old girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNfsp6qA-MI&feature=youtu.be
• rape of a 16-year-old girl: https://t.me/uniannet/42753

The army of the Russian Federation, like the Red Army, is described by the author as an army of rapists and looters.

And I am very sorry that my ancestors were forced to serve in imperial armed forces which, amid small rays of courage, still did not know what honor was.

Collective Responsibility: Where Is Its Limit? Berlin, 1945

31 May 2021

Collective responsibility.

How sweet and simple its meaning sounds, and how easy it is to interpret: the government of one state committed crimes against another state, therefore all of its citizens must automatically bear responsibility. But where is the boundary of that responsibility?

In a certain sense, the Nuremberg Tribunal and the reparations paid by Germany are the only correct interpretation of collective responsibility for the actions of a government. Yet there are many qualifications even here, because dictatorial or authoritarian regimes by definition do not allow the population to choose an alternative; therefore this case, too, is not entirely straightforward.

Let us leave aside the dispute over the civilized meaning of the term and move to the barbaric one: “their army committed crimes, therefore we may do the same.”

Revenge is easy to explain and its motivation is understandable. But when it is directed against people simply because they share the nationality of the aggressor, it loses any connection with the civilized world.

The idea that anything could be done to Germans was especially widespread in the Red Army and also existed in the Allied armies. Historian Robert Lilly’s book Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II records more than 11,000 cases of rape by U.S. soldiers, and a substantial share of the perpetrators were not held responsible.

The author argues that Soviet troops committed even more such crimes. The exact total cannot be established; estimates cited in the article exceed 100,000.

I will not quote all of them here, but the article points readers to these sources:

• Vladimir Gelfand’s diary — the entry for 25 April 1945;
• Mikhail Koryakov’s book Liberated Souls — p. 235;
• diaries and letters of German women and soldiers used as the basis for the Viasat History documentary Berlin 1945.

The motivation attributed to perpetrators in these sources was simple: “they are the daughters of SS men, so they must answer for their fathers’ crimes.” But does violence against underage girls somehow cease to be a crime? Instead, the author argues, such acts are called “collective responsibility”: if the victims had any connection with the Third Reich, then they supposedly “deserved it.” This barbaric explanation is still used sometimes even in the twenty-first century.

A crime is a crime, and time will reveal the truth about it. Soviet propaganda, like the propaganda of the Allied countries, always foregrounded the crimes of the Third Reich — crimes that were unquestionably no less barbaric — but, according to the author, this was also often used to conceal crimes committed by one’s own side.

Of course, criminals were punished both in the Red Army and in the Allied armies, but even according to different studies it is very difficult to establish what proportion of crimes were prosecuted; it appears to have been small.

Today, just as during the Second World War, labels are applied to entire nations, enemies are sought even on linguistic grounds, and worst of all, those who do this are only a step away from closing their eyes to real crimes. The most frightening thing is when a crime is judged not by the fact that it was committed, but by the uniform or nationality of the soldier.

I want to believe that Ukraine — which unquestionably also bears a share of responsibility for Berlin in 1945 because seven million Red Army soldiers were Ukrainians — just as Germany bears responsibility for the war and the crimes of 1939–1945, will always defend the principle that “the law is the same for everyone.” It is not by chance that the goddess Themis is depicted blindfolded.

One should not believe in the perfection of historical heroes or in a majestic golden age: the more beautiful the idol, the more terrible its real history may turn out to be.

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