What the Fascists Did to Captured Women. Brutal Torture of Women by the Fascists

13 October 2019

Women medical personnel of the Red Army captured near Kyiv, assembled for transfer to a POW camp, August 1941:

The clothing of many of the girls is half military, half civilian, characteristic of the early stage of the war, when the Red Army had difficulty providing women's sets of uniform and regulation footwear in small sizes. On the left is a dejected captured artillery lieutenant, perhaps the “escort commander.”

How many women serving in the Red Army ended up in German captivity is unknown. The Germans, however, did not recognize women as servicemembers and treated them as partisans. Thus, according to German private Bruno Schneider, before his company was sent to Russia their commander, Oberleutnant Prinz, acquainted the soldiers with the order: “Shoot all women who serve in Red Army units” (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/1190, fol. 110). Numerous facts cited here indicate that this order was applied throughout the war.

• In August 1941, on the order of Emil Knoll, commander of the field gendarmerie of the 44th Infantry Division, a female prisoner of war — a military doctor — was shot (Yad Vashem Archive, M-37/178, fol. 17).
• In the town of Mglinsk, Bryansk Region, in 1941, the Germans captured two girls from a medical unit and shot them (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/482, fol. 16).
• After the defeat of the Red Army in Crimea in May 1942, in the fishing settlement “Mayak” near Kerch, an unidentified girl in military uniform hid in the home of resident Buryachenko. On May 28, 1942, Germans found her during a search. The girl resisted the fascists, shouting: “Shoot, you bastards! I am dying for the Soviet people, for Stalin, and you monsters will die like dogs!” She was shot in the yard (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/60, fol. 38).
• At the end of August 1942, in Krymskaya stanitsa in Krasnodar Territory, a group of sailors was shot; among them were several girls in military uniform (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/303, fol. 115).
• In Starotitarovskaya stanitsa, Krasnodar Territory, among the prisoners of war who had been shot was found the body of a girl in Red Army uniform. She carried a passport in the name of Tatyana Alexandrovna Mikhailova, born in 1923 in the village of Novo-Romanovka (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/309, fol. 51).
• In the village of Vorontsovo-Dashkovskoye, Krasnodar Territory, in September 1942, captured military medical assistants Glubokova and Yachmeneva were brutally tortured to death (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/295, fol. 5).
• On January 5, 1943, not far from the Severny farmstead, eight Red Army soldiers were captured. Among them was a nurse named Lyuba. After prolonged torture and abuse, all those captured were shot (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/302, fol. 32).

Two rather self-satisfied-looking Hitler soldiers — an NCO and a Fahnenjunker (officer candidate, on the right; he appears to be armed with a captured Soviet Tokarev self-loading rifle) — escort a captured Soviet servicewoman — into captivity... or to death?

The “Hanses” do not seem to look vicious... although who knows? In war perfectly ordinary people often commit monstrous acts that they would never have done in “another life.” The girl is wearing a complete Red Army field uniform of the 1935 pattern — a man's uniform — and good officer-type boots that fit her.

A similar photograph, probably from the summer or early autumn of 1941: the escort is a German NCO; the female prisoner of war wears an officer's cap but no insignia.

Divisional reconnaissance interpreter P. Rafes recalled that in the village of Smagleyevka, ten kilometres from Kantemirovka, liberated in 1943, residents told how in 1941 “a wounded girl lieutenant was dragged naked onto the road, her face and hands cut, her breasts cut off...” (P. Rafes, “Then They Had Not Yet Repented,” from *Notes of a Divisional Reconnaissance Interpreter, Ogonyok special issue, Moscow, 2000, No. 70.)*

Knowing what awaited them if captured, women soldiers as a rule fought to the last.

Women taken prisoner were often subjected to violence before death. Hans Rudhoff, a soldier of the 11th Panzer Division, testified that in the winter of 1942 “...Russian nurses lay on the roads. They had been shot and thrown onto the road. They lay naked... Obscene inscriptions had been written on these dead bodies...” (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/1182, fols. 94–95).

In Rostov in July 1942, German motorcyclists broke into a yard where nurses from a hospital were staying. They had intended to change into civilian clothing but had not had time. Still in military uniform, they were dragged into a shed and raped. They were not, however, killed (Vladislav Smirnov, “The Rostov Nightmare,” Ogonyok, Moscow, 1998, No. 6).

Women prisoners of war in camps were likewise subjected to violence and abuse. Former POW K. A. Shenipov said that in a camp in Drohobych there was a beautiful captive girl named Lyuda. “Captain Stroer — the camp commandant — tried to rape her, but she resisted, after which German soldiers summoned by the captain tied Lyuda to a cot, and in that position Stroer raped her and then shot her” (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/1182, fol. 11).

At Stalag 346 in Kremenchug in early 1942, German camp doctor Orland assembled 50 female doctors, medical assistants and nurses, undressed them and “ordered our doctors to examine them in the genital area to see whether they had venereal diseases. He carried out the external examination himself. He selected three young girls and took them for himself ‘to serve him.’ German soldiers and officers came for the women who had been examined by the doctors. Few of these women managed to avoid rape” (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/230, fols. 38, 53, 94; M-37/1191, fol. 26).

Red Army servicewomen captured while attempting to break out of encirclement near Nevel, summer 1941:

Judging by their exhausted faces, they had already been through a great deal before being captured.

Here the “Hanses” are plainly jeering and posing — may they themselves soon experience all the “joys” of captivity! And the unfortunate girl, who already looks as though she has endured the full measure of misery at the front, has no illusions about her prospects in captivity.

In the photograph on the right (September 1941, apparently again near Kyiv), on the contrary, the girls — one of whom even managed to keep a wristwatch in captivity, an extraordinary thing since a watch was ideal camp currency — do not look desperate or exhausted. The captured Red Army women are smiling. Is it a staged photo, or did they genuinely encounter a comparatively humane camp commandant who ensured tolerable conditions?

Camp guards drawn from former prisoners of war and camp police treated women prisoners with particular cynicism. They raped prisoners or, under threat of death, forced them into sexual relations. At Stalag No. 337 near Baranovichi, about 400 women prisoners of war were held in an area specially enclosed with barbed wire. In December 1967, at a session of the military tribunal of the Belorussian Military District, former camp guard chief A. M. Yarosh admitted that his subordinates raped prisoners in the women's block (P. Sherman, *...And the Earth Was Horrified. On the Atrocities of the German Fascists in the City of Baranovichi and Its Surroundings, June 27, 1941–July 8, 1944. Facts, Documents, Testimony. Baranovichi, 1990, pp. 8–9).*

Women prisoners were also held at the Millerovo POW camp. The commandant of the women's barracks was a German woman from the Volga German community. The fate of the girls confined there was described as terrible:

“The police auxiliaries often looked into this barrack. Every day, for half a litre, the commandant would give them any girl they chose for two hours. A policeman could take her to his barracks. They lived two to a room. For those two hours he could use her like an object, violate her, abuse her, do whatever he wanted.

One evening during roll call the police chief himself came; he was given a girl for the whole night. The German woman complained to him that those ‘bastards’ were reluctant to go with his policemen. Smirking, he advised: ‘Then give those who refuse the “red fireman.”’ The girl was stripped naked, stretched out and tied with ropes on the floor. Then they took a large red hot pepper, turned it inside out and inserted it into the girl's vagina. She was left like that for up to half an hour. Screaming was forbidden. Many girls had bitten lips — they suppressed their screams — and after such punishment they could not move for a long time.

The commandant, whom the prisoners called a cannibal behind her back, had unlimited power over the captive girls and invented other sophisticated abuses. For example, ‘self-punishment.’ There was a special cross-shaped stake 60 centimetres high. The girl had to strip naked, insert the stake into her anus, hold onto the crosspiece with her hands, put her feet on a stool and remain like that for three minutes. Anyone who could not endure it had to start again.

We learned what was happening in the women's camp from the girls themselves when they came out of the barracks to sit on a bench for ten minutes. The policemen also boasted of their exploits and of the inventive German woman.”

(S. M. Fisher, Memoirs, manuscript, author's archive.)

Captured Red Army women medical personnel worked in camp infirmaries in many prisoner-of-war camps (mainly transit and staging camps).

This may also be a German field hospital in the front-line zone — in the background part of the body of a vehicle fitted out to transport wounded men can be seen, and one of the German soldiers in the photograph has a bandaged arm. The infirmary barrack of the POW camp in Krasnoarmeysk (probably October 1941):

In the foreground is an NCO of the German field gendarmerie with the characteristic gorget on his chest.

Women prisoners of war were held in many camps. According to eyewitnesses, they made an extremely pitiful impression. Camp life was especially difficult for them: more than anyone else, they suffered from the absence of elementary sanitary conditions.

K. Kromiadi, a member of a labour-allocation commission who visited the Siedlce camp in the autumn of 1941, spoke with captured women. One of them, a military doctor, admitted: “...everything is bearable except the shortage of underwear and water, which leaves us unable either to change clothes or wash” (K. Kromiadi, *Soviet Prisoners of War in Germany..., p. 197).*

A group of women medical workers captured in the Kyiv pocket in September 1941 was held at Vladimir-Volynsky, Oflag No. 365 “Nord” (T. S. Pershina, *Fascist Genocide in Ukraine 1941–1944..., p. 143).*

Nurses Olga Lenkovskaya and Taisiya Shubina were captured in October 1941 in the Vyazma encirclement. The women were first held in a camp at Gzhatsk, then in Vyazma. In March, as the Red Army approached, the Germans transferred the women prisoners to Smolensk, Dulag No. 126. There were few women in the camp. They were kept in a separate barrack, and contact with men was forbidden. From April to July 1942 the Germans released all the women “on condition of free settlement in Smolensk” (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/626, fols. 50–52; M-33/627, fols. 62–63).

Crimea, summer 1942. Very young Red Army soldiers just captured by the Wehrmacht, and among them an equally young servicewoman:

Most likely she is not a medic: her hands are clean; in the recent battle she had not been bandaging the wounded.

After the fall of Sevastopol in July 1942, about 300 women medical workers — doctors, nurses and orderlies — were captured (N. Lemeshchuk, *With Heads Unbowed (on the activity of the anti-fascist underground in Hitler's camps), Kyiv, 1978, pp. 32–33).* At first they were sent to Slavuta, and in February 1943, after about 600 women POWs had been gathered in the camp, they were loaded into railway cars and taken west. At Rovno everyone was lined up and another search for Jews began. One prisoner, Kazachenko, walked along pointing: “this one is a Jew, this one a commissar, this one a partisan.” Those separated from the main group were shot. The rest were loaded into the cars again, men and women together. The prisoners themselves divided each car into two parts: women in one, men in the other. They relieved themselves through a hole in the floor (G. Grigorieva, conversation with the author, 9.10.1992).

Along the way male prisoners were unloaded at various stations, while the women were brought to the town of Soest on February 23, 1943. They were lined up and told that they would work in armaments factories. Among the prisoners was Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm, a Jewish woman, a history lecturer at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute, who had passed herself off as a Serb. She enjoyed particular authority among the women POWs. Speaking in German on behalf of all of them, E. L. Klemm declared: “We are prisoners of war and we will not work in military factories.” In response they were all beaten and then driven into a small hall where the crush was so great that no one could sit down or move. They stood like that for almost twenty-four hours. The defiant women were then sent to Ravensbrück (G. Grigorieva, conversation with the author, 9.10.1992. E. L. Klemm, soon after returning from the camp and after endless summonses to the state-security authorities, who sought to force her to confess to betrayal, committed suicide).

This women's camp had been established in 1939. The first Ravensbrück prisoners were women from Germany, followed by women from European countries occupied by the Germans. All prisoners had their heads shaved and were dressed in striped (blue-and-grey striped) dresses and unlined jackets. Underwear consisted of a shirt and pants. No bras or belts were issued. In October a pair of old stockings was issued for six months, though not everyone managed to make them last until spring. Footwear, as in most concentration camps, consisted of wooden clogs.

The barrack was divided into two sections connected by a corridor: a daytime room containing tables, stools, and small wall cupboards, and a sleeping area with three-tier bunks and a narrow passage between them. One cotton blanket was issued for two prisoners. The block elder lived in a separate room. A washroom and lavatory were located in the corridor (G. S. Zabrodskaya, “The Will to Victory,” in *Witnesses for the Prosecution, Leningrad, 1990, p. 158; Sh. Müller, The Locksmith Team of Ravensbrück. Memoirs of Prisoner No. 10787, Moscow, 1985, p. 7).*

A transport of Soviet women POWs arrived at Stalag 370, Simferopol (summer or early autumn 1942):

The prisoners carry all their meagre possessions on themselves; under the hot Crimean sun many have tied kerchiefs over their heads “like women” and taken off their heavy boots.

The same place, Stalag 370, Simferopol:

The prisoners worked mainly in the camp's sewing enterprises. Ravensbrück produced 80% of all uniforms for the SS troops, as well as camp clothing for both men and women (Women of Ravensbrück, Moscow, 1960, pp. 43, 50).

The first Soviet women POWs — 536 people — arrived at the camp on February 28, 1943. At first everyone was sent to the bathhouse, then issued striped camp clothing bearing a red triangle with the inscription “SU” — Sowjet Union.

Even before the Soviet women arrived, the SS spread a rumour through the camp that a gang of women murderers was being brought from Russia. They were therefore placed in a special block enclosed with barbed wire.

Every day the prisoners rose at 4 a.m. for roll call, which sometimes lasted several hours. They then worked 12–13 hours in the sewing workshops or camp infirmary.

Breakfast consisted of ersatz coffee, which the women used mainly to wash their hair because there was no warm water. They pooled the coffee for this purpose and washed in turn.

Women whose hair had survived began using combs which they made themselves. Frenchwoman Micheline Morel recalled that “the Russian girls, using factory machines, cut wooden slats or metal plates and polished them until they became quite acceptable combs. A wooden comb cost half a ration of bread, a metal one a full ration” (Voices. Memoirs of Prisoners of Hitler's Camps, Moscow, 1994, p. 164).

For lunch the prisoners received half a litre of thin soup and two or three boiled potatoes. In the evening five prisoners shared a small loaf of bread mixed with sawdust and again received half a litre of thin soup (G. S. Zabrodskaya, “The Will to Victory...”, p. 160).

One Ravensbrück prisoner, Sh. M., testified in her memoirs to the impression Soviet women made on the camp's inmates:

Sh. Müller wrote in her memoirs: “...one Sunday in April we learned that the Soviet prisoners had refused to carry out some order, referring to the fact that under the Geneva Convention of the Red Cross they were to be treated as prisoners of war. For the camp authorities this was unheard-of insolence. Throughout the first half of the day they were forced to march along the Lagerstrasse (the camp’s main ‘street’) and were deprived of lunch.

But the women from the Red Army block (as we called the barrack where they lived) decided to turn this punishment into a demonstration of their strength. I remember someone shouting in our block: ‘Look, the Red Army is marching!’ We ran out of the barracks and rushed to the Lagerstrasse. And what did we see?

It was unforgettable! Five hundred Soviet women, ten abreast, keeping perfect formation, marched as if on parade, stamping out their step. Their footsteps beat rhythmically along the Lagerstrasse like a drum roll. The whole column moved as one. Suddenly the woman on the right flank of the first rank gave the command to start singing. She counted: ‘One, two, three!’ And they sang:

Arise, vast country, Arise for mortal combat...

Then they sang about Moscow.

The fascists were bewildered: the punishment of marching humiliated prisoners of war had turned into a demonstration of their strength and defiance...

The SS did not succeed in leaving the Soviet women without lunch. The political prisoners had taken care in advance to save food for them” (Sh. Müller, *The Locksmith Team of Ravensbrück..., pp. 51–52).*

Soviet women prisoners of war repeatedly astonished both their enemies and fellow prisoners with their unity and spirit of resistance. On one occasion twelve Soviet girls were placed on a list of prisoners to be sent to Majdanek, to the gas chambers. When the SS men came to the barrack to take the women away, their comrades refused to hand them over. The SS eventually managed to find them. “The remaining 500 formed ranks five abreast and went to the commandant. E. L. Klemm acted as interpreter. The commandant drove those who had come back into the block, threatening to shoot them, and they began a hunger strike” (Women of Ravensbrück, p. 127).

In February 1944 about sixty women prisoners of war were transferred from Ravensbrück to a concentration camp in the town of Barth, to the Heinkel aircraft factory. The girls refused to work there as well. They were then formed into two ranks and ordered to strip down to their shirts and remove their wooden clogs. For many hours they stood in the freezing cold; every hour a female guard came and offered coffee and a bed to anyone who agreed to go to work. Three girls were then thrown into a punishment cell. Two of them died of pneumonia (G. Vaneev, *Heroines of the Sevastopol Fortress, Simferopol, 1965, pp. 82–83).*

Constant abuse, forced labour and hunger led to suicides. In February 1945 Zinaida Aridova, a military doctor and defender of Sevastopol, threw herself onto the camp's electrified wire (G. S. Zabrodskaya, “The Will to Victory...”, p. 187).

And yet the prisoners believed in liberation, and that faith sounded in a song composed by an unknown author (N. Tsvetkova, *900 Days in Fascist Dungeons, in In Fascist Dungeons: Notes, Minsk, 1958, p. 84):*

Hold your heads high, Russian girls! Hold your heads high, be brave! We have not much longer to endure, In spring the nightingale will come... And open the doors to freedom for us, Take the striped dress from our shoulders, Heal our deep wounds, Wipe the tears from swollen eyes. Hold your heads high, Russian girls! Remain Russian everywhere, always! There is not long left to wait, not long— And we will be on Russian soil.

Former prisoner Germaine Tillion gave a distinctive description in her memoirs of the Russian women prisoners of war who arrived at Ravensbrück: “...their cohesion was explained by the fact that they had passed through the school of the army before being captured. They were young, strong, tidy, honest, and also rather rough and uneducated. There were also educated women among them (doctors, teachers)—kind and attentive. In addition, we liked their defiance, their unwillingness to submit to the Germans” (Voices, pp. 74–75).

Women prisoners of war were also sent to other concentration camps. Auschwitz prisoner A. Lebedev recalled that the women’s camp held parachutists Ira Ivannikova, Zhenya Saricheva and Viktorina Nikitina, doctor Nina Kharlamova and nurse Klavdia Sokolova (A. Lebedev, *Soldiers of the Small War..., p. 62).*

In January 1944, for refusing to sign consent to work in Germany and to be reclassified as civilian workers, more than fifty women prisoners of war from the camp at Chełm were sent to Majdanek. Among them were doctor Anna Nikiforova, military feldshers Efrosinya Tsepennikova and Tonya Leontyeva, and infantry lieutenant Vera Matyutskaya (A. Nikiforova, *This Must Not Happen Again, Moscow, 1958, pp. 6–11).*

Anna Yegorova, a navigator in an aviation regiment whose aircraft was shot down over Poland, was captured with concussion and burns to her face and held in the Küstrin camp (N. Lemeshchuk, *With Heads Unbowed..., p. 27. In 1965 A. Yegorova was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union).*

Despite the death that reigned in captivity, and despite the prohibition of all contact between male and female prisoners of war, love sometimes arose where they worked together, most often in camp infirmaries, and brought new life. As a rule, in such rare cases the German administration of the infirmary did not prevent childbirth. After the birth of a child, the mother who was a prisoner of war was either transferred to civilian status, released from the camp and sent to the place where her relatives lived in the occupied territory, or returned to the camp with her child.

Thus documents from the camp infirmary of Stalag No. 352 in Minsk record that “nurse Aleksandra Sindeva, who arrived at City Hospital No. 1 on 23 February 1942 to give birth, left with her child for the Rollbahn prisoner-of-war camp” (Yad Vashem Archive, M-33/438, part II, fol. 127).

Probably one of the last photographs of Soviet servicewomen who fell into German captivity, 1943 or 1944:

Both have decorations: the girl on the left wears the Medal “For Courage” (the dark edging on the ribbon); the second may have a Medal “For Battle Merit.” It is sometimes claimed that they were airwomen, but this is unlikely: both have plain enlisted shoulder boards.

In 1944 the treatment of women prisoners of war became harsher. They were subjected to new screenings. In accordance with the general provisions on the screening and selection of Soviet prisoners of war, on 6 March 1944 the OKW issued a special directive, “On the Treatment of Russian Women Prisoners of War.” It stated that Soviet women prisoners of war held in camps were to be screened by the local Gestapo office in the same way as all newly arriving Soviet prisoners of war. If a police screening established that a woman prisoner of war was politically unreliable, she was to be released from prisoner-of-war status and handed over to the police (A. Streim, *Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener..., p. 153).*

On the basis of this directive, on 11 April 1944 the head of the Security Police and SD issued an order that unreliable women prisoners of war be sent to the nearest concentration camp. After arrival in a concentration camp, such women underwent so-called “special treatment”—execution. This was how Vera Panchenko-Pisanetskaya, the leader of a group of seven hundred women prisoners of war working at a military factory in Genthin, died. The factory was producing a great deal of defective output, and an investigation established that Vera was directing the sabotage. In August 1944 she was sent to Ravensbrück and hanged there in the autumn of 1944 (A. Nikiforova, *This Must Not Happen Again..., p. 106).*

At the Stutthof concentration camp in 1944, five senior Russian officers, including a woman major, were killed. They were taken to the crematorium, the place of execution. The men were brought in first and shot one by one. Then the woman was brought in. According to a Pole who worked in the crematorium and understood Russian, an SS man who spoke Russian mocked the woman, making her obey commands: “right turn, left turn, about turn...” The SS man then asked her: “Why did you do it?” What she had done, the witness never learned. She replied that she had done it for the Motherland. The SS man slapped her and said: “That is for your motherland.” The Russian woman spat in his eyes and replied: “And that is for your motherland.” There was confusion. Two SS men ran up to the woman and began trying to push her alive into the furnace used to burn corpses. She resisted. Several more SS men ran up. The officer shouted: “Into the furnace with her!” The furnace door was open, and the heat set the woman’s hair on fire. Although she resisted vigorously, they placed her on the cart used for burning corpses and pushed her into the furnace. All the prisoners working in the crematorium saw this” (A. Streim, *Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener..., pp. 153–154).* Unfortunately, the name of this heroine remains unknown.

Women of Liberated Europe Through the Eyes of Soviet Soldiers and Officers (1944–1945)

As a continuation of the subject and a supplement to Elena Senyavskaya’s article posted on the site on 10 May 2012, we offer readers another article by the same author, published in a journal.

At the final stage of the Great Patriotic War, after liberating Soviet territory occupied by Germany and its satellites and pursuing the retreating enemy, the Red Army crossed the state border of the USSR. From that moment its victorious advance began through the countries of Europe—those that had languished under fascist occupation for six years, those that had fought in the war as allies of the Third Reich, and the territory of Hitler’s Germany itself. During this movement westward and the inevitable, varied contacts with the local population, Soviet servicemen, many of whom had never previously been outside their own country, acquired numerous new and highly contradictory impressions of representatives of other peoples and cultures. These impressions later contributed to ethnopsychological stereotypes through which Europeans were perceived. The image of European women occupied a particularly important place among them. References to them, and sometimes detailed stories, appear in letters and diaries and on the pages of many war memoirs, where lyrical and cynical judgments and tones often alternate.

Residents of Bucharest welcome Soviet soldiers. The inscription on the large banner reads “TRĂIASCĂ MARELE STALIN — GENIAL COMANDANT AL ARMATEI ROŞII,” which may be translated as “Long live the great Stalin—the brilliant commander of the Red Army.”

The first European country entered by the Red Army, in August 1944, was Romania. In the Notes on the War by frontline poet Boris Slutsky we find very candid lines:

“Suddenly Constanța opens before us, almost colliding with the sea. It almost coincides with the average dream of happiness and of ‘after the war.’ Restaurants. Bathtubs. Beds with clean linen. Shops with servile salesmen. And—women, smartly dressed urban women—the girls of Europe—the first tribute taken by us from the defeated…”¹

He then describes his first impressions of “abroad”: “European barbershops, where they wash with their fingers and do not use brushes; the absence of bathhouses; washing from basins—‘where first the dirt from the hands remains, and then one washes one’s face’; feather beds instead of blankets—disgust with everyday life immediately produced generalizations… In Constanța we encountered brothels for the first time… The initial delight at the existence of free love quickly passed. Not only fear of infection and expense made themselves felt, but also contempt for the very possibility of buying a person… Many took pride in cases when, for example, a Romanian husband complained to the commandant’s office that one of our officers had not paid his wife the agreed fifteen hundred lei. Everyone had a clear conviction: ‘With us this is impossible’… Our soldiers will probably remember Romania as a country of syphilitics…”²

In conclusion he says that it was precisely in Romania, this European backwater, that “our soldier most strongly felt his superiority over Europe.”³

A column of Soviet troops on a street in central Bucharest.

Another Soviet officer, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Fyodor Smolnikov, recorded his impressions of Bucharest in his diary on 17 September 1944:

“Hotel Ambasador, restaurant, lower floor. I see how the idle public spends its time—it has nothing to do; it waits. They look at me as though I were a curiosity: ‘A Russian officer!!!’ I am dressed very modestly—even too modestly. So be it. We shall be in Budapest anyway; that is as certain as the fact that I am in Bucharest now. A first-class restaurant. The public has dressed itself up; the most beautiful Romanian women literally bore into me with their eyes.⁴ We spend the night in a first-class hotel. Outside is the bustle of a capital. There is no music; the public is waiting. Damn it, a real capital! But I shall not be taken in by the advertising…”⁴

A Romanian peasant woman offers milk to a Soviet soldier.

In Hungary the Soviet army encountered not only organized armed resistance but also treacherous attacks by civilians: “drunken and straggling solitary soldiers were killed on farmsteads,” “they were drowned in silage pits.” Women, however, according to eyewitnesses, “were not as depraved as Romanian women, yet yielded with shameful ease… A little love, a little licentiousness, but above all, of course, fear helped.”⁵ Quoting one Hungarian lawyer—“It is very good that the Russians love children so much. It is very bad that they love women so much”—Boris Slutsky remarks: “He did not take into account that Hungarian women also loved Russians; that alongside the dark fear which parted the knees of matrons and mothers of families there existed the tenderness of girls and the desperate affection of soldiers’ wives who gave themselves to the killers of their husbands.”⁶

A Jewish family liberated from the Budapest ghetto. Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei © Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS).

Grigory Chukhray describes in his memoirs a characteristic episode that occurred in Hungary. His unit was quartered in a small town. During a meal, the owners of the house where he and his men were staying, “relaxed under the influence of Russian vodka,” admitted that they were hiding their daughter in the attic. The Soviet officers reacted indignantly: “Who do you take us for? We are not fascists!” The hosts became embarrassed, and soon a thin girl named Marika appeared at the table and hungrily began to eat. Gradually becoming at ease, she started flirting and joining the conversation. By the end of dinner the atmosphere had become friendly, and those present drank to “barátság” (friendship). Marika, however, took the gesture too literally. When everyone had gone to their rooms, she appeared before Chukhray wearing only a slip.

“As a Soviet officer I immediately understood that a provocation was being prepared. They expect me to succumb to Marika’s charms and then they will raise a scandal. But I shall not allow myself to be drawn in,” he recalled. In addition, he did not find the girl attractive. He pointed her to the door.

The next morning the hostess, while laying the table, noisily banged the dishes. “She is nervous. The provocation failed,” he thought, and shared the idea with the Hungarian interpreter. The interpreter laughed:

“‘It was no provocation at all. They showed you friendly goodwill and you rejected it. Now they do not regard you as a man in this house. You will have to move to another apartment.’

“‘But why, then, did they hide their daughter in the attic?’

“‘They were afraid of violence. With us it is customary that, with her parents’ consent, a girl may become intimate with several men before marriage. We have a saying: “you do not buy a cat in a tied sack.”’”⁷

A column of Soviet soldiers in the streets of Budapest.

Young, physically healthy men naturally felt a pull toward women. Yet the ease of European morals corrupted some Soviet soldiers, while convincing others, on the contrary, that relations should not be reduced to simple physiology. Sergeant Alexander Rodin recorded his impressions of visiting—out of curiosity!—a brothel in Budapest, where his unit was stationed for some time after the war ended: “…After leaving I felt a disgusting, shameful sense of lies and falseness; I could not get out of my head the picture of the woman’s obvious, frank pretense… Interestingly, such an unpleasant aftertaste from visiting a brothel remained not only with me, a youngster raised, moreover, on principles such as ‘do not give a kiss without love,’ but also with most of our soldiers with whom I happened to speak… Around those same days I had a conversation with a pretty Magyar girl (somehow she knew Russian). When she asked whether I liked Budapest, I answered that I did, except that the brothels bothered me. ‘But why?’ the girl asked. Because it is unnatural, savage, I explained: a woman takes money and immediately after that begins to ‘love!’ The girl thought for a while, then nodded in agreement and said: ‘You are right: it is not nice to take the money in advance’…”⁸

Poland left different impressions. According to the poet David Samoilov, “…in Poland we were kept under strict discipline. It was difficult to slip away from one’s unit. And mischief was punished severely.”⁹

He describes a country in which the beauty of Polish women was almost the only positive feature: “I cannot say that we liked Poland very much,” he wrote. “At that time I encountered nothing noble or chivalrous in it. On the contrary, everything was petty-bourgeois, provincial—both ideas and interests. And in eastern Poland they looked at us warily and half-hostilely, trying to fleece the liberators for everything they could. Still, the women were consolingly beautiful and coquettish; they captivated us by their manners and their cooing speech, in which everything suddenly became understandable, and they in turn were sometimes captivated by rough masculine strength or a soldier’s uniform. And their pale, emaciated former admirers, gnashing their teeth, withdrew into the shadows for the time being…”¹⁰

Troops of the 10th Tank Corps of the 5th Guards Tank Army of the 2nd Belorussian Front occupy the town of Mühlhausen (now the Polish town of Młynary) during the Mława–Elbing operation. Mühlhausen was liberated from Hitler’s troops on 24 January 1945.

Not all assessments of Polish women were so romantic. On 22 October 1944 Junior Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand wrote in his diary: “In the distance loomed the town I had left behind, with its Polish name [Władów], and beautiful Polish women, proud to the point of disgust. …I was told about Polish women: they lured our soldiers and officers into their embraces and, when it came to bed, cut off their genitals with a razor, strangled them with their hands around the throat, scratched out their eyes. Mad, savage, ugly females! One must be careful with them and not become carried away by their beauty. And the Polish women are beautiful, the wretches.”¹¹ Yet other moods also appear in his notes. On 24 October he records the following encounter: “Today my companions on the road to one of the villages were beautiful Polish girls. They complained about the absence of young men in Poland. They too called me ‘pan,’ but they remained untouchable. I gently patted one of them on the shoulder in response to her remark about men and comforted her with the thought that the road to Russia was open to her—there were plenty of men there. She hurried to step aside and answered that men could be found for her here as well. We said goodbye with a handshake. So we never reached agreement, but they were fine girls, though Polish.”¹²

A month later, on 22 November, he recorded his impressions of the first large Polish town he had encountered, Mińsk Mazowiecki. Amid his descriptions of its architectural beauty and the astonishing number of bicycles used by all categories of inhabitants, he gives special attention to the townswomen: “A noisy idle crowd; the women, almost every one of them, in special white hats, apparently worn against the wind, which make them look like magpies and surprise by their novelty. The men in triangular caps, in hats—fat, neat, empty. How many of them! …Painted lips, penciled eyebrows, affectation, excessive delicacy. How unlike natural human life all this is. It seems that the people themselves live and move only so that others may look at them, and that all will disappear when the last spectator leaves the town…”¹³

A Soviet poster on the border between Poland and Germany.

Not only Polish townswomen but also peasant women made a strong, though contradictory, impression. “The love of life of the Poles, who had endured the horrors of war and German occupation, was striking,” Alexander Rodin recalled. “Sunday in a Polish village. Beautiful, elegant Polish women in silk dresses and stockings, who on weekdays are ordinary peasant women, barefoot, raking manure and tirelessly doing housework. Older women also look fresh and young. Though some have black circles around their eyes…”¹⁴ He then quotes his diary entry of 5 November 1944: “Sunday; all the inhabitants are dressed up. They gather to visit one another. Men in felt hats, ties, sweaters. Women in silk dresses, bright, unworn stockings. Rosy-cheeked girls—the ‘panienki.’ Beautifully curled blond hairstyles… The soldiers in the corner of the cottage are lively too. But anyone sensitive will notice that it is a painful liveliness. Everyone laughs excessively loudly to show that it means nothing to them, does not touch them at all, that they are not envious. Are we any worse than they? The devil knows what happiness peaceful life is! I had practically never seen it in civilian life!”¹⁵ His fellow soldier Sergeant Nikolai Nesterov wrote in his diary that same day: “Today is a day off; the Poles, beautifully dressed, gather in one cottage and sit in couples. It even makes one feel uncomfortable. Could I not sit like that too?..”¹⁶

Serviceman Galina Yartseva was far more merciless in her assessment of “European morals,” which reminded her of “a feast in time of plague.” On 24 February 1945 she wrote to a friend from the front: “…If there were an opportunity, one could send wonderful parcels of trophy things. There is quite a bit. If only it were for our barefoot and poorly clothed people. What cities I have seen, what men and women. And looking at them, such anger, such hatred takes possession of you! They walk about, love, live, while you go and liberate them. And they laugh at the Russians—‘Schwein!’ Yes, yes! Scoundrels… I love no one except the USSR, except the peoples who live with us. I believe in no friendship with Poles and other Lithuanians…”¹⁷

Soviet soldiers in the streets of Vienna.

In Austria, which Soviet troops entered in the spring of 1945, they encountered “wholesale capitulation”: “Entire villages were headed by white rags. Elderly women raised their hands when meeting a man in a Red Army uniform.”¹⁸ It was here, according to B. Slutsky, that the soldiers “finally got at the fair-haired women.” At the same time, “Austrian women did not prove excessively unyielding. The overwhelming majority of peasant girls married ‘spoiled.’ Soldiers on leave felt completely at ease. In Vienna our guide, a bank clerk, was surprised at the Russians’ insistence and impatience. He believed that gallantry was enough to obtain from a Viennese woman everything one wanted.”¹⁹ Thus the matter was not only fear, but also certain features of national mentality and traditional behavior.

A Nazi, before the arrival of Soviet troops, shot his family and killed himself in a Vienna street.

And then, finally, Germany. And the women of the enemy—the mothers, wives, daughters and sisters of those who from 1941 to 1944 had abused civilians in the occupied territory of the USSR. What did Soviet servicemen see when they met them? Vladimir Bogomolov described the appearance of German women moving in a crowd of refugees in his diary: “The women—old and young—wear hats, scarves wound like turbans or simply draped like our peasant women’s, smart coats with fur collars, and worn clothing of an incomprehensible cut. Many women wear dark glasses so as not to squint in the bright May sun and thereby protect their faces from wrinkles…”²⁰

Lev Kopelev recalled meeting evacuated Berlin women in Allenstein: “Two women on the sidewalk. Elaborate hats, one even with a veil. Good-quality coats, and they themselves smooth and well-groomed.”²¹ He also quoted soldiers’ comments about them: “hens,” “turkeys,” “wouldn’t mind one that smooth…”

How did German women behave when meeting Soviet troops? A report by Shikin, deputy head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, to G. F. Alexandrov of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), dated 30 April 1945, on the attitude of Berlin’s civilian population toward Red Army personnel stated: “As soon as our units occupy one district of the city or another, residents gradually begin to come out into the streets; almost all of them have white armbands. When they meet our servicemen many women raise their hands, cry and shake with fear, but as soon as they become convinced that Red Army soldiers and officers are not at all what fascist propaganda portrayed them to be, this fear quickly passes; more and more of the population comes out into the streets and offers its services, trying in every way to emphasize its loyal attitude toward the Red Army.”²²

The victors were most impressed by the submissiveness and calculation of German women. In this connection it is worth citing the account of mortar man N. A. Orlov, who was shocked by the behavior of German women in 1945: “No one in the mortar battalion killed German civilians. Our special-department officer was a ‘Germanophile.’ Had anything like that happened, the punitive authorities’ reaction to such an excess would have been swift. As for violence against German women, it seems to me that some people, when speaking of such a phenomenon, somewhat ‘lay it on thick.’ I remember an example of another kind.

“We entered some German town and quartered ourselves in houses. A ‘Frau’ of about forty-five appeared and asked for the ‘Herr Kommandant.’ They brought her to Marchenko. She said that she was responsible for the neighborhood and had gathered twenty German women for the sexual (!!!) servicing of Russian soldiers. Marchenko understood German, and I translated what the woman had said for Deputy Political Commander Dolgoborodov, who was standing next to me. The reaction of our officers was angry and profane. The German woman was driven away together with her ‘detachment,’ ready to provide its services. In general, German submissiveness stunned us. We had expected partisan warfare and sabotage from the Germans. But for this nation order—‘Ordnung’—is above all. If you are the victor, they are ‘on their hind legs’ before you, consciously and without coercion. Such is the psychology…”²³

David Samoilov gives a similar episode in his wartime notes: “At Arendsfelde, where we had just settled in, a small crowd of women with children appeared. They were led by an enormous mustachioed German woman of about fifty—Frau Friedrich. She declared that she was a representative of the civilian population and asked us to register the remaining residents. We replied that this could be done as soon as the commandant’s office appeared.

“‘That is impossible,’ said Frau Friedrich. ‘There are women and children here. They must be registered.’

“The civilian population confirmed her words with cries and tears.

“Not knowing what to do, I suggested that they occupy the basement of the house in which we were quartered. Reassured, they went down into the basement and began settling there while waiting for the authorities.

“‘Herr Kommissar,’ Frau Friedrich said to me good-naturedly (I wore a leather jacket), ‘we understand that soldiers have little needs. They are prepared,’ Frau Friedrich continued, ‘to set aside several younger women for them, for…’

“I did not continue the conversation with Frau Friedrich.”²⁴

Residents of the city queue for water during the Second World War. Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei © Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS).

After speaking with women in Berlin on 2 May 1945, Vladimir Bogomolov wrote in his diary: “We enter one of the surviving houses. Everything is quiet, dead. We knock and ask them to open. We can hear whispering in the corridor, muffled, agitated voices. At last the door opens. Women of indeterminate age, huddled in a tight group, bow fearfully, low and obsequiously. German women are afraid of us; they had been told that Soviet soldiers, especially Asians, would rape and kill them… Fear and hatred are on their faces. But sometimes it seems that they like being defeated—their behavior is so attentive, their smiles so ingratiating, their words so sweet. These days a story is making the rounds about one of our soldiers entering a German apartment and asking for a drink, and the German woman, the moment she saw him, lying down on the sofa and taking off her panties.”²⁵

“All German women are depraved. They have nothing against sleeping with them.”²⁶ Such an opinion circulated among Soviet troops and was reinforced not only by many visible examples but also by their unpleasant consequences, which military doctors soon discovered.

Directive No. 00343/Sh of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front, dated 15 April 1945, stated: “During the troops’ stay on enemy territory, cases of venereal disease among servicemen have risen sharply. Study of the reasons for this situation shows that venereal diseases are widespread among the Germans. Before retreating, and also now in the territory occupied by us, the Germans have taken the path of artificially infecting German women with syphilis and gonorrhea in order to create major centers for the spread of venereal disease among Red Army servicemen.”²⁷

On 26 April 1945 the Military Council of the 47th Army reported that “…in March the number of venereal diseases among servicemen increased fourfold compared with February of this year. …The female population of Germany in the districts examined is infected at a rate of 8–15%. There are cases in which the enemy deliberately leaves German women suffering from venereal diseases in order to infect servicemen.”²⁸

To implement Resolution No. 056 of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front of 18 April 1945 on the prevention of venereal disease, the troops of the 33rd Army issued a leaflet reading as follows:

“Comrade servicemen!

“German women are tempting you—women whose husbands visited all the brothels of Europe, became infected themselves, and infected their German women.

“Before you are also those German women whom the enemy has deliberately left behind to spread venereal disease and thereby put Red Army soldiers out of action.

“You must understand that our victory over the enemy is near and that soon you will have the opportunity to return to your families.

“With what eyes will a man look his loved ones in the eye if he brings home an infectious disease?

“Can we, soldiers of the heroic Red Army, be a source of infectious diseases in our country? NO! For the moral character of a Red Army soldier must be as pure as the image of his Motherland and family!”²⁹

Practical Germans were most concerned about food supplies, and for them they were allegedly prepared to do literally anything. Thus a certain physician, Dr. Kalisturkh, discussing the Red Army’s attitude toward the German population with colleagues, stated: “It cannot be concealed that I personally saw bad treatment of our women by individual Russian soldiers, but I said that the war was to blame for this, and, most importantly, that our soldiers and especially the SS men had behaved much worse toward Russian women.” And then, without transition, he added: “I was very worried about the food question…”³⁰

Even in the memoirs of Lev Kopelev, who angrily describes violence and looting by Soviet servicemen in East Prussia, one finds lines reflecting another side of “relations” with the local population: “They told stories about the submissiveness, servility and ingratiation of the Germans: there, they said, that is what they are like—they sell their wives and daughters for a loaf of bread.”³¹ The disgusted tone in which Kopelev relays these “stories” implies that he considered them unreliable. Yet they are corroborated by many sources.

Berlin, summer 1945.

Vladimir Gelfand described in his diary his courtship of a German girl (the entry was made six months after the end of the war, on 26 October 1945, but is nevertheless highly characteristic): “I wanted to enjoy to the full the caresses of pretty Margot—kisses and embraces alone were not enough. I expected more but did not dare demand or insist. The girl’s mother was pleased with me. Of course! On the altar of her relatives’ trust and goodwill I had offered sweets and butter, sausage, and expensive German cigarettes. Even half of these products is enough today to give one the fullest grounds and right to do whatever one wishes with the daughter before her mother’s eyes, and the mother will say nothing against it. For foodstuffs today are dearer even than life—even the life of such a young and sweet sensual creature as the gentle beauty Margot.”³²

Australian war correspondent Osmar White, who in 1944–1945 was in Europe with the U.S. Third Army under George Patton, left interesting diary entries. This is what he recorded in Berlin in May 1945, literally only a few days after the end of the assault: “I made a tour of the night cabarets, starting with the ‘Femina’ near Potsdamer Platz. It was a warm, humid evening. The air smelled of sewage and rotting corpses. The façade of the ‘Femina’ was covered with futuristic pictures of nudes and notices in four languages. The dance hall and restaurant were filled with Russian, British, and American officers accompanied by women (or hunting for them). A bottle of wine cost 25 dollars, a horsemeat-and-potato hamburger 10 dollars, and a packet of American cigarettes an astonishing 20 dollars. The cheeks of Berlin women were rouged and their lips painted as though Hitler had won the war. Many women wore silk stockings. The mistress of ceremonies opened the concert in German, Russian, English, and French. This provoked a jibe from a Russian artillery captain sitting beside me. He leaned toward me and said in decent English: ‘Such a rapid transition from the national to the international! RAF bombs are excellent professors, are they not?’”³³

Women partisans of the 1st Proletarian Brigade of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. The village of Žarkovo near Belgrade on the eve of the fighting for the city.

The overall impression of European women formed among Soviet servicemen was of women who were well-groomed and smartly dressed (compared with their compatriots exhausted by the war in the half-starved rear, on territories liberated from occupation, and even with their frontline female comrades dressed in washed-out tunics), readily available, self-interested, promiscuous, or timidly submissive. Yugoslav and Bulgarian women were exceptions. The stern and ascetic Yugoslav women partisans were regarded as comrades-in-arms and considered untouchable. Given the strict morals of the Yugoslav army, “the partisan girls probably looked upon the PPZh [‘field wives’] as creatures of a special, nasty kind.”³⁴ Boris Slutsky recalled Bulgarian women this way: “…After Ukrainian good nature, after Romanian debauchery, the stern inaccessibility of Bulgarian women astonished our men. Almost no one boasted of conquests. It was the only country where officers out for a stroll were very often accompanied by men and almost never by women. Later the Bulgarians were proud when told that Russians intended to return to Bulgaria for brides—the only ones in the world who had remained pure and untouched.”³⁵

Residents of a Bulgarian town celebrate liberation. Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei © Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS).

The beautiful Czech women who joyfully welcomed Soviet liberating soldiers left a pleasant impression. Embarrassed tank men on combat vehicles coated in oil and dust and decorated with wreaths and flowers said among themselves: “…As if a tank were a bride, to be decorated. But their girls keep hanging things on it. Good people. Haven’t seen such warmhearted people for a long time…” The friendliness and hospitality of the Czechs was sincere. “…‘If it were possible, I would kiss every soldier and officer of the Red Army for liberating my Prague,’ …a Prague tram worker said to general, friendly, approving laughter.”³⁶ Boris Polevoy thus described the atmosphere in the liberated Czech capital and the mood of local residents on 11 May 1945.

But in the other countries through which the victorious army passed, the female part of the population did not inspire respect. “In Europe the women surrendered, defected before everyone else…” B. Slutsky wrote. “I was always astonished, thrown off balance, disoriented by the ease, the shameful ease, of amorous relations. Respectable women, unquestionably disinterested, resembled prostitutes in their hasty availability, their wish to bypass the intermediate stages, their lack of interest in the motives that pushed a man toward intimacy with them. Like people who had learned three obscene words from the entire vocabulary of love poetry, they reduced the whole affair to a few bodily movements, provoking hurt and contempt even among the greenest of our officers… The restraining motives were not ethics at all, but fear of infection, fear of publicity, fear of pregnancy.”³⁷ He added that under conditions of conquest “universal corruption covered over and concealed specifically female corruption, made it invisible and unashamed.”³⁸

Among the motives that contributed to the spread of “international love,” despite all the bans and severe orders of the Soviet command, there were several others: women’s curiosity about “exotic” lovers and the Russians’ unprecedented generosity toward the objects of their affection, which distinguished them favorably from parsimonious European men.

Northern Fleet divers with Norwegian children, 1944.

Junior Lieutenant Daniil Zlatkin found himself in Denmark, on the island of Bornholm, at the very end of the war. In an interview he said that the interest of Russian men and European women in one another was mutual: “We had not seen women, and we needed to… And when we arrived in Denmark… it was free, please. They wanted to check, test, try a Russian man—what is he, what is it like—and it seemed to work out better than with the Danes. Why? We were selfless and kind… I would give a box of chocolates half the size of a table; I gave one hundred roses to a woman I did not know … for her birthday…”³⁹

At the same time few contemplated serious relationships or marriage, because the Soviet leadership had clearly stated its position on the matter. A Resolution of the Military Council of the 4th Ukrainian Front dated 12 April 1945 read: “1. Explain to all officers and all personnel of the Front that marriage to foreign women is illegal and categorically prohibited. 2. All cases of servicemen entering into marriage with foreign women, as well as connections between our people and hostile elements of foreign states, are to be reported immediately through the chain of command so that the guilty parties may be held accountable for loss of vigilance and violation of Soviet laws.”⁴⁰ A directive of the head of the Political Directorate of the 1st Belorussian Front dated 14 April 1945 stated: “According to the head of the Main Personnel Directorate of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, the Center continues to receive applications from officers of the active army requesting authorization for marriages with women of foreign states (Polish, Bulgarian, Czech women, etc.). Such facts should be regarded as a dulling of vigilance and patriotic feeling. Therefore political-educational work must pay attention to a thorough explanation of the inadmissibility of such acts on the part of Red Army officers. Explain to all officers who do not understand the lack of prospects for such marriages the inadvisability of marrying foreign women, up to and including direct prohibition, and permit not a single case.”⁴¹

Nor did the women harbor illusions about the intentions of their suitors. “At the beginning of 1945 even the stupidest Hungarian peasant girls no longer believed our promises. European women already knew that we were forbidden to marry foreigners and suspected that there was a similar order against appearing together in restaurants, cinemas, and the like. This did not prevent them from loving our womanizers, but it gave that love a strictly ‘ouaidum’ [carnal] character,”⁴² B. Slutsky wrote.

Overall, it must be acknowledged that the image of European women formed among Red Army soldiers in 1944–1945, with rare exceptions, proved very far removed from the suffering figure with shackled hands who gazed hopefully from the Soviet poster “Europe Will Be Free!”

Notes

1. Slutsky, B. Notes on the War. Poems and Ballads. St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 174.
2. Ibid., pp. 46–48.
3. Ibid., pp. 46–48.
4. Smolnikov, F. M. We Are Fighting! A Frontline Soldier’s Diary. Letters from the Front. Moscow, 2000, pp. 228–229.
5. Slutsky, B., op. cit., pp. 110, 107.
6. Ibid., p. 177.
7. Chukhray, G. My War. Moscow: Algoritm, 2001, pp. 258–259.
8. Rodin, A. Three Thousand Kilometers in the Saddle. Diaries. Moscow, 2000, p. 127.
9. Samoilov, D. “People of One Variant. From Wartime Notes,” Avrora, 1990, no. 2, p. 67.
10. Ibid., pp. 70–71.
11. Gelfand, V. N. Diaries 1941–1946. http://militera.lib.ru/db/gelfand_vn/05.html
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Rodin, A. Three Thousand Kilometers in the Saddle. Diaries. Moscow, 2000, p. 110.
15. Ibid., pp. 122–123.
16. Ibid., p. 123.
17. Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, fond 372, opis 6570, file 76, fol. 86.
18. Slutsky, B., op. cit., p. 125.
19. Ibid., pp. 127–128.
20. Bogomolov, V. O. “Germany, Berlin. Spring 1945,” in My Life, or Did I Dream You?.. Moscow: Nash Sovremennik, nos. 10–12, 2005; no. 1, 2006. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/03.html
21. Kopelev, L. To Be Preserved Forever, 2 vols., vol. 1, parts 1–4. Moscow: Terra, 2004, ch. 11. http://lib.rus.ec/b/137774/read#t15
22. Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), fond 17, opis 125, file 321, fols. 10–12.
23. From an interview with N. A. Orlov on the “I Remember” website. http://www.iremember.ru/minometchiki/orlov-naum-aronovich/stranitsa-6.html
24. Samoilov, D., op. cit., p. 88.
25. Bogomolov, V. O. My Life, or Did I Dream You?.., Nash Sovremennik, 2005, nos. 10–12; 2006, no. 1. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/03.html
26. From a political report on communicating Comrade Stalin’s Directive No. 11072 of 20 April 1945 to personnel of the 185th Rifle Division, 26 April 1945. Cited in Bogomolov, V. O., op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/02.html
27. Cited in Bogomolov, V. O., op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/02.html
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. State Archive of the Russian Federation, fond r-9401, opis 2, file 96, fol. 203.
31. Kopelev, L., op. cit., ch. 12. http://lib.rus.ec/b/137774/read#t15
32. Gelfand, V. N., op. cit.
33. White, Osmar. Conquerors’ Road: An Eyewitness Account of Germany 1945. Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1996], XVII, 221 pp. http://www.argo.net.au/andre/osmarwhite.html
34. Slutsky, B., op. cit., p. 99.
35. Ibid., p. 71.
36. Polevoy, B. “The Liberation of Prague,” in From the Soviet Information Bureau… Journalism and Essays of the War Years, 1941–1945, vol. 2, 1943–1945. Moscow: APN Publishing House, 1982, p. 439.
37. Ibid., pp. 177–178.
38. Ibid., p. 180.
39. From an interview with D. F. Zlatkin, 16 June 1997, private archive.
40. Cited in Bogomolov, V. O., op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/04.html
41. Ibid.
42. Slutsky, B., op. cit., pp. 180–181.

The article was prepared with financial support from the Russian Foundation for the Humanities, project No. 11-01-00363a. The layout used the 1944 Soviet poster “Europe Will Be Free!” by artist V. Koretsky.

Violence and Atrocities in the Occupied German Territories

HOW THE FASCISTS ABUSED CHILDREN IN THE SALASPILS CONCENTRATION CAMP. MONSTROUS HISTORICAL FACTS ABOUT CONCENTRATION CAMPS

March 29th, 2015

I suggest familiarizing yourself with documents and carefully selected materials about the “atrocities of the liberators.”

We have no moral right to honour an army that, according to the material presented here, completely disgraced itself through widespread rape of children in front of their parents, mass killings and torture of innocent civilians, robbery and legalized looting.

The “liberators” were already committing atrocities against the population (rape and torture followed by the killing of civilians) in Crimea. Thus the commander of the 4th Ukrainian Front, Army General Petrov, in Order No. 074 of June 8, 1944, condemned the “outrageous misconduct” of servicemen of his front on Soviet territory in Crimea, “reaching even to armed robberies and murders of local residents.”

In Western Belarus and Western Ukraine the atrocities of the “liberators” increased, and still more so in the Baltic countries, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia, where acts of violence against the local population assumed horrifying proportions. But full terror came on Polish territory. There began mass rapes of Polish women and girls, while the military leadership, which had a negative attitude toward Poles, turned a blind eye to it.

Therefore these atrocities absolutely cannot be explained as “revenge against the Germans for the occupation.” The Poles had not participated in that occupation, yet they were raped almost to the same extent as Germans. The explanation must therefore be sought elsewhere.

Not only soldiers and officers but also the senior command of the Soviet Army — its generals — stained themselves with sexual crimes (not only in Germany, but earlier in Poland too). Many Soviet “liberator” generals raped local girls. A typical example given here is Major General Berestov, commander of the 331st Rifle Division, who on February 2, 1945, at Petershagen near Preussisch Eylau, together with one of the officers accompanying him, raped the daughter of a local peasant woman whom he had forced to serve him, as well as a Polish girl (p. 349 of the cited book).

In general, the text alleges that almost the entire Soviet general staff in eastern Germany was implicated in particularly grave sexual crimes: the rape of children, rape accompanied by violence and mutilation (cutting off breasts, torturing female genitals with various objects, gouging out eyes, cutting out tongues, nailing victims down, etc.), followed by the murder of the victims. On the basis of documents, Joachim Hoffmann names the principal figures whom he considers guilty of or involved in such crimes: Marshal Zhukov and Generals Telegin, Kazakov, Rudenko, Malin, Chernyakhovsky, Khokhlov, Razbiytsev, Glagolev, Karpenkov, Lakhtarin, Ryapasov, Andreyev, Yastrebov, Tymchik, Okorokov, Berestov, Papchenko, Zaretsky, and others.

It states that all of them either personally raped German and Polish women or were accomplices by permitting and encouraging it in their instructions to the troops and by covering up these sexual crimes, conduct which under the Criminal Code of the USSR was itself punishable by death.

According to what the text calls the lowest estimates in present-day German research, in the winter of 1944 and spring of 1945 Soviet soldiers and officers killed 120,000 civilians in the territory they occupied (often, it says, in connection with the rape and torture of women and children; these were not people killed in combat). Another 200,000 innocent civilians are said to have died in Soviet camps, while more than 250,000 died during deportations to Soviet forced labour that began on February 3, 1945. In addition, it claims that countless people died as a result of an occupation policy of “blockade as revenge for the siege of Leningrad” (in Königsberg alone, it says, 90,000 people died of hunger and inhuman conditions during six months of an “artificial blockade” under occupation).

The text recalls that from October 1944 Stalin allowed servicemen to send home parcels of trophies (generals — 16 kg, officers — 10 kg, sergeants and privates — 5 kg). It argues that letters from the front show this was interpreted as meaning that “looting had been unambiguously authorized by the highest leadership.”

At the same time, the text alleges, the leadership allowed soldiers to rape women. It cites a statement attributed to Yeliseyev, commander of the 153rd Rifle Division, addressed to troops in early October 1944:

“We are going into East Prussia. Red Army men and officers are granted the following rights: 1) To destroy any German. 2) To seize property. 3) To rape women. 4) To rob. 5) ROA soldiers are not to be taken prisoner. Not a single bullet should be wasted on them. They are beaten to death or trampled underfoot.”

(BA-MA, RH 2/2684, 18.11.1944)

The main looter in the Soviet Army, the article says, was Marshal G. K. Zhukov, who accepted the capitulation of the German Wehrmacht. When he fell out of favour with Stalin and was transferred to command the troops of the Odessa Military District, Deputy Minister of Defence Bulganin wrote to Stalin in August 1946 that customs authorities had detained seven railway wagons “containing a total of 85 crates of furniture from the firm Albin May from Germany,” intended for transport to Odessa for Zhukov's personal use. In another report to Stalin, dated January 1948, Colonel General of State Security Abakumov said that a “secret search” of Zhukov's Moscow apartment and dacha had uncovered a large quantity of looted property. Among other things, the list specifically included 24 gold watches, 15 gold necklaces with pendants, gold rings and other jewellery, 4,000 metres of woollen and silk fabrics, more than 300 sable, fox and astrakhan skins, 44 valuable carpets and tapestries, some from Potsdam and other palaces, 55 expensive paintings, crates of porcelain, two crates of silver tableware, and 20 hunting guns.

On January 12, 1948, Zhukov acknowledged this looting in a letter to Politburo member Zhdanov, but for some reason forgot to mention it in his memoirs *Reminiscences and Reflections*.

Sometimes, the article says, the sadism of the “liberators” seems almost impossible to comprehend. It gives the following as only one of the episodes listed later. As soon as Soviet units entered German territory on October 26, 1944, incomprehensible atrocities allegedly began. Soldiers and officers of the 93rd Rifle Corps of the 43rd Army of the 1st Baltic Front, at one estate, allegedly nailed five children by their tongues to a large table and left them there to die. Why? Which of the “liberators” conceived such a sadistic execution of children? And were these “liberators” psychologically normal at all, rather than sadistic psychopaths?

Excerpt from Joachim Hoffmann's book *Stalin's War of Extermination* (Moscow: AST, 2006, pp. 321–347).

Incited by Soviet military propaganda and the Red Army command structure, soldiers of the 16th Guards Rifle Division of the 2nd Guards Tank Corps of the 11th Guards Army, in the last ten days of October 1944, began, according to this account, to massacre the peasant population in the salient south of Gumbinnen. In this area the Germans, after recapturing it, were exceptionally able to conduct more detailed investigations. In Nemmersdorf alone at least 72 men, women and children were killed; women and even girls were allegedly raped beforehand, and several women were nailed to the doors of a barn. Nearby, a large number of Germans and French prisoners of war, who until then had remained in German captivity, were killed by Soviet troops. In surrounding settlements bodies of brutally murdered residents were reportedly found everywhere — in Bahnfeld, the Teichhof estate, Alt Wusterwitz (where remains of several people allegedly burned alive were also found in a cowshed), and other places. “Corpses of civilians lay in masses beside the road and in the courtyards of houses...” Oberleutnant Dr. Amberger reported, “in particular I saw many women who... had been raped and then killed by shots to the back of the head; in some cases children who had also been killed lay beside them.”

Artilleryman Erich Czerkus of the 121st Artillery Regiment gave the following statement at a military judicial interrogation concerning his observations at Schillmeischen near Heydekrug in the Memel region, which units of the 93rd Rifle Corps of the 43rd Army of the 1st Baltic Front entered on October 26, 1944:

“Near the barn I found my father lying face down with a bullet hole in the back of his head... In one room lay a man and a woman, their hands tied behind their backs and both bound to one another with a single cord... At another farmstead we saw five children whose tongues had been nailed to a large table. Despite intensive searching I found no trace of my mother... Along the road we saw five girls tied with a single cord, their clothes almost completely removed, their backs badly torn open. It looked as though the girls had been dragged a considerable distance along the ground. In addition, beside the road we saw several wagon columns that had been completely crushed.”

It is impossible to attempt to reproduce every horrifying detail or, still less, to present a complete picture of what happened.

The following selected examples are intended to give an impression of Red Army actions in the eastern provinces after the offensive resumed in January 1945. In its report of May 28, 1974, on “expulsion and crimes committed during expulsion,” the Federal Archives published precise data from so-called summary sheets concerning atrocities in two selected districts: the East Prussian border district of Johannisburg and the Silesian border district of Oppeln [now Opole, Poland]. According to these official investigations, in the Johannisburg district, in the sector of the 50th Army of the 2nd Belorussian Front, among numerous other killings, particular attention was given to the killing on January 24, 1945, of 120 civilians (97 according to other data), as well as several German soldiers and French prisoners of war, from a refugee column on the Nickelsberg–Herzogsdorf road south of Arys [now Orzysz, Poland]. Thirty-two refugees were shot on the Stollendorf–Arys road, while on the Arys–Drigelsdorf road near Schlagakrug, on February 1, about 50 people, mostly children and young people torn away from their parents and relatives in refugee wagons, were shot on the order of a Soviet officer. Near Gross Rosen (Gross Rosensko), the Soviets allegedly burned about 30 people alive in a field barn at the end of January 1945. One witness saw “one corpse after another” lying beside the road to Arys. In Arys itself a “large number of shootings” were reportedly carried out, apparently at an assembly point, while in an NKVD torture cellar there were “tortures of the most severe kind,” including torture to death.

In the Silesian district of Oppeln, servicemen of the 32nd and 34th Guards Rifle Corps of the 5th Guards Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front killed, according to the cited investigation, at least 1,264 German civilians by the end of January 1945. Some Russian Ostarbeiter, most of whom had been forcibly deported to work in Germany, and Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity also did not escape this fate. In Oppeln they were driven together in a public place and, after a short propaganda speech, killed. A similar event is reported from the Ostarbeiter camp at Kruppamühle on the Malapane [Mała Panew] River in Upper Silesia. On January 20, 1945, after Soviet tanks reached the camp, several hundred Russian men, women, and children were assembled and, as “traitors” and “accomplices of the fascists,” shot with machine guns or crushed under tank tracks. In Gottesdorf Soviet soldiers reportedly shot about 270 inhabitants on January 23, including small children and 20–40 members of the Marian Brotherhood. In Karlsruhe [now Pokój, Poland], 110 residents were shot, including inhabitants of the Annen shelter; in Kupp, 60–70 inhabitants, among them residents of an old people's home and a priest who wanted to protect women from rape; and similar incidents are said to have occurred elsewhere. Johannisburg and Oppeln, however, were only two of many districts in the eastern provinces of the German Reich occupied by Red Army units in 1945.

On the basis of reports from field command services, the “Foreign Armies East” department of the Army General Staff compiled several lists “of violations of international law and atrocities committed by the Red Army in occupied German territories.” Although these also do not provide an overall picture, they documented many alleged Soviet crimes while the events were still fresh and with a certain degree of reliability. Thus Army Group A reported on January 20, 1945, that all residents of the settlements of Reichthal [Rychtal] and Glausche near Namslau [now Namysłów, Poland], recaptured during the night, had been shot by Soviet soldiers of the 9th Mechanized Corps of the 3rd Guards Tank Army. On January 22, 1945, according to a report by Army Group Centre, near Grünhain in the Wehlau district [now Znamensk, Russia], tanks of the 2nd Guards Tank Corps “caught up with and fired tank shells and machine-gun bursts” at a four-kilometre-long refugee column, “mostly women and children,” and “those remaining were finished off by submachine gunners.” A similar event reportedly occurred the same day nearby, near Gertlauken, where Soviet soldiers killed 50 people from a refugee column, some by shots to the back of the head.

In West Prussia, at an unspecified settlement, a long refugee convoy was likewise overtaken by advanced Soviet tank detachments at the end of January. According to several surviving women, tank crews of the 5th Guards Tank Army poured petrol over the horses and wagons and set them on fire: “Some of the civilians, mostly women and children, jumped from the wagons and tried to save themselves, some already resembling living torches. The Bolsheviks then opened fire. Only a few managed to escape.” The same is said to have happened in Plönen at the end of January 1945, where tanks of the 5th Guards Tank Army attacked a refugee column and shot it down. Red Army men allegedly subjected all women aged 13 to 60 in this settlement near Elbing [now Elbląg, Poland] to repeated rape “in the most brutal manner.” German soldiers of a tank reconnaissance company reportedly found one woman whose lower abdomen had been ripped open with a bayonet, and another young woman on a wooden bunk with her face smashed. Destroyed and looted refugee convoys on both sides of the road, and the corpses of passengers lying beside them in the roadside ditch, were also reportedly found at Maislatein near Elbing.

Reports of refugee convoys, which stretched everywhere along the roads and were clearly recognizable as such, being deliberately crushed under tracks or fired upon came from throughout the eastern provinces, including the operational area of the Soviet 2nd Guards Tank Army. In the Waldrode district on January 18 and 19, 1945, such columns were reportedly stopped, attacked, and partly destroyed in several places; “fallen women and children were shot or crushed,” or, as another report put it, “most of the women and children were killed.” Near Waldrode, Soviet tanks fired cannon and machine guns at a German hospital transport; “of 1,000 wounded, only 80 could be saved.” There are also reports of Soviet tank attacks on refugee columns from Schauerkirch, Gombin — where “about 800 women and children” are said to have been killed — Dietfurt-Filene, and other settlements. Several such convoys were reportedly overtaken on January 19, 1945, near Brest south of Thorn [now Brześć Kujawski and Toruń, Poland], in the then Warthegau, and their passengers, mostly women and children, were shot. According to a report dated February 1, 1945, in that area over three days “of about 8,000 persons, approximately 4,500 women and children were killed; the rest were completely scattered, and it may be assumed that most of them were destroyed in a similar manner.”

SILESIA

Near the Reich border, west of Wieluń, Soviet soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian Front allegedly poured petrol over the wagons of a refugee convoy and burned them together with their passengers. Countless bodies of German men, women and children reportedly lay along the roads, some mutilated — with throats cut, tongues severed, stomachs ripped open. Also west of Wieluń, 25 employees (front-line workers) of Organisation Todt were shot by tank crews of the 3rd Guards Tank Army. All men were reportedly shot in Heinersdorf, while women were raped by Soviet soldiers; near Kunzendorf, 25–30 Volkssturm men were shot in the back of the head. In the same way, at Glausche near Namslau, 18 people, “including Volkssturm men and nurses,” were killed by servicemen of the 59th Army. At Beatenhof near Ohlau [now Oława, Poland], after the locality was reoccupied, all men were reportedly found killed by shots to the back of the head. The perpetrators are identified as servicemen of the 5th Guards Army.

In Grünberg [now Zielona Góra, Poland], eight families were allegedly killed by servicemen of the 9th Guards Tank Corps. The Tannenfeld estate near Grottkau [now Grodków, Poland] is described as the scene of horrifying crimes. There Red Army men of the 229th Rifle Division allegedly raped two girls and then killed them after abusing them. One man had his eyes gouged out and his tongue cut off. The same is said to have happened to a 43-year-old Polish woman, who was then tortured to death.

At Alt-Grottkau, servicemen of the same division allegedly killed 14 prisoners of war, cut off their heads, gouged out their eyes, and crushed them with tanks. Red Army men of the same rifle division are also said to have been responsible for atrocities at Schwarzengrund near Grottkau. They allegedly raped women, including nuns, shot the peasant Kalert, ripped open his wife's abdomen and cut off her hands, shot the peasant Christoph and his son, and also a young girl. At the Eisdorf estate near Merzdorf, Soviet soldiers of the 5th Guards Army allegedly gouged out the eyes of an elderly man and an elderly woman, apparently a married couple, and cut off their noses and fingers. Nearby, 11 wounded Luftwaffe soldiers were reportedly found brutally murdered. Likewise at Güterstadt near Glogau [now Pęcław, Poland], 21 German prisoners of war were found dead, allegedly killed by Red Army soldiers of the 4th Tank Army. In the village of Häslicht near Striegau [now Strzegom, Poland], all women were reportedly “raped one after another” by Red Army men of the 9th Mechanized Corps.

Maria Heincke found her husband, still showing faint signs of life, dying in a Soviet guard room. A medical examination reportedly found that his eyes had been gouged out, his tongue cut off, his arm broken several times, and his skull crushed.

Servicemen of the 7th Guards Tank Corps at Ossig near Striegau allegedly raped women, killed six or seven girls, shot twelve peasants, and committed similar serious crimes at Hertwigswaldau near Jauer [now Jawor, Poland]. In Liegnitz [now Legnica, Poland], the bodies of numerous civilians reportedly shot by Soviet soldiers of the 6th Army were found. In the town of Kostenblut near Neumarkt [now Środa Śląska, Poland], captured by units of the 7th Guards Tank Corps, women and girls were allegedly raped, including the pregnant mother of eight children. Her brother, who tried to defend her, was shot. All foreign prisoners of war, as well as six men and three women, were shot. The nuns of a Catholic hospital also reportedly did not escape mass rape.

Pilgramsdorf near Goldberg [now Złotoryja, Poland] is described as the scene of numerous murders, rapes, and acts of arson by servicemen of the 23rd Guards Motor Rifle Brigade. In Beralsdorf, a suburb of Lauban [now Lubań, Poland], 39 women who had remained were allegedly violated “in the basest manner” by Soviet soldiers of the 7th Guards Tank Corps. One woman was shot in the lower jaw, locked in a cellar, and several days later, when she was seriously ill with fever, three Red Army men in succession “raped her at gunpoint in the most brutal manner.”

BRANDENBURG

(mainly the Neumark and Sternberg Land)

A general impression of the treatment of the population in the eastern parts of the Province of Brandenburg is given by a report from Russian agents Danilov and Chirshin, who were sent behind the lines by the 103rd front reconnaissance section from February 24 to March 1, 1945. According to that report, all Germans aged twelve and over were ruthlessly used to build fortifications, the part of the population not used for this work was sent east, and the elderly were left to starve. In Sorau [now Żary, Poland], Danilov and Chirshin saw “a mass of bodies of women and men... killed (stabbed) and shot (shots to the back of the head and to the heart), lying in streets, courtyards and houses.” According to one Soviet officer, who was himself outraged by the scale of the terror, “all women and girls, regardless of age, were mercilessly raped.” At Skampe near Züllichau [now Skąpe and Sulechów, Poland], Soviet soldiers of the 33rd Army are likewise described as having unleashed a “horrific bloody terror.” In almost every house lay “the strangled bodies of women, children, and old people.” Not far beyond Skampe, on the road to Bentschen [now Zbąszyń, Poland], the bodies of a man and a woman were reportedly found. The woman's abdomen had been ripped open, the fetus torn out, and the wound filled with filth and straw. Nearby lay the bodies of three hanged Volkssturm men.

At Kay near Züllichau, servicemen of the same army allegedly killed wounded people, women, and children from one convoy by shots to the back of the head. The town of Neu-Bentschen [now Zbąszynek, Poland] was looted by Red Army troops and then deliberately set on fire. On the Schwiebus [now Świebodzin, Poland]–Frankfurt road, Red Army soldiers of the 69th Army reportedly shot civilians, including women and children, so that the bodies lay “one on top of another.” At Alt-Drewitz near Kalenzer, servicemen of the 1st Guards Tank Army allegedly shot a medical major, another major, and medical-orderly soldiers, while at the same time opening fire on American prisoners of war being returned from the Alt-Drewitz base camp, wounding 20–30 of them and killing an unknown number. On the road before Gross-Blumberg (on the Oder), groups of five to ten bodies, about 40 German soldiers in all, were reportedly found; they had been shot in the head or back of the head and then robbed. At Reppen, all men in a passing refugee convoy were allegedly shot by Soviet soldiers of the 19th Army, while the women were raped. At Gassen near Sommerfeld [now Jasień and Lubsko, Poland], tanks of the 6th Guards Mechanized Corps opened indiscriminate fire on civilians. At Massin near Landsberg [now Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland], servicemen of the 5th Shock Army allegedly shot an unknown number of residents, raped women and minors, and carried off looted property. At an unidentified settlement near Landsberg, servicemen of the 331st Rifle Division allegedly shot eight male civilians after first robbing them.

When units of the Soviet 11th Tank Corps and 4th Guards Rifle Corps unexpectedly broke into the town of Lebus, west of the Oder, at the beginning of February, the robbery of residents reportedly began at once, during which a number of civilians were shot. Red Army men allegedly raped women and girls, two of whom were beaten to death with rifle butts. The unexpected Soviet breakthrough to the Oder and in places beyond it became a nightmare for countless civilians and German soldiers. At Gross Neuendorf on the Oder, ten German prisoners of war were reportedly locked in a barn and killed with submachine guns by Soviet soldiers, apparently of the 1st Guards Tank Army. At Reitwein and Trittin, servicemen, apparently of the 8th Guards Army, allegedly shot all German soldiers, police personnel and other “fascists,” as well as entire families in whose homes Wehrmacht personnel may have found shelter. At Wiesenau near Frankfurt, two women aged 65 and 55 were reportedly found dying after hours of rape. At Zehden [now Cedynia, Poland], a Soviet woman in an officer's uniform of the 5th Guards Tank Corps allegedly shot a merchant couple. At Genschmar, Soviet soldiers reportedly killed a landowner, an estate manager, and three workers.

A strike group of Vlasov's army under ROA Colonel Sakharov, supported by German forces, recaptured the settlements of Neulewin and Kerstenbruch in a bend of the Oder on February 9, 1945. According to a German report dated March 15, 1945, the population of both places had been “subjected to the most horrific outrages” and afterward remained “under the terrible impression of bloody Soviet terror.” In Neulewin the mayor and a Wehrmacht serviceman home on leave were found shot. In one barn lay the bodies of three violated and murdered women, two of them with their legs tied. One German woman lay shot at the door of her home. An elderly married couple had been strangled. Servicemen of the 9th Guards Tank Corps were identified as the perpetrators, as they were in the nearby village of Neubarnim. In Neubarnim 19 residents were found dead. The body of the innkeeper was mutilated, her legs bound with wire. Here, as in other settlements, women and girls were allegedly violated, and in Kerstenbruch even a 71-year-old woman with amputated legs. The picture of violent crimes by Soviet troops in these villages in the Oder bend, as elsewhere in the German eastern territories, is supplemented in the cited account by looting and deliberate destruction.

POMERANIA

Relatively few reports came from Pomerania for February 1945, since the breakthrough fighting there did not begin in earnest until the end of the month. But the report of Georgian Lieutenant Berakashvili, who had been sent by the Georgian liaison staff to the officer-cadet school in Posen [now Poznań, Poland], where he joined other officers of volunteer units in the defence of the fortress and then broke out toward Stettin [now Szczecin, Poland], nevertheless conveys some impressions of the territory southeast of Stettin. Roads were often lined with soldiers and civilians killed by shots to the back of the head, “always half-undressed and in any case without boots.” Lieutenant Berakashvili witnessed the brutal rape of a peasant's wife in the presence of screaming children near Schwarzenberg and found traces of looting and destruction everywhere. The town of Bahn [now Banie, Poland] was “horribly destroyed”; in its streets lay “many corpses of civilians,” who, Red Army men explained, had been killed by them “in retaliation.”

Conditions in settlements around Pyritz [now Pyrzyce, Poland] fully confirmed these observations, according to the source. In Billerbeck the owner of an estate and elderly and sick people were shot; women and girls from the age of ten were raped; apartments were looted; and remaining residents were driven away. At the Brederlow estate Red Army men allegedly violated women and girls, one of whom was then shot, as was the wife of a Wehrmacht serviceman who had fled while on leave. At Köselitz the district chief, a peasant, and a lieutenant home on leave were killed; at Eichelshagen, a local NSDAP leader and a peasant family of six. In all these cases the perpetrators are identified as servicemen of the 61st Army. Similar events are said to have occurred in villages around Greifenhagen [now Gryfino, Poland], south of Stettin. Thus at Jädersdorf, servicemen of the 2nd Guards Tank Army allegedly shot ten evacuated women and a 15-year-old boy, finished off victims who were still alive with bayonets and pistol shots, and “wiped out” entire families with small children.

At Rohrsdorf, Soviet soldiers allegedly shot many inhabitants, including a wounded serviceman home on leave. Women and girls were violated and some were subsequently killed. At Gross-Silber near Kallies, Red Army soldiers of the 7th Guards Cavalry Corps allegedly assaulted a young woman with a broom handle, cut off her left breast, and crushed her skull. At Preussisch-Friedland, Soviet soldiers of the 52nd Guards Rifle Division reportedly shot eight men and two women and raped 34 women and girls. The commander of a German engineer-tank battalion of the 7th Panzer Division reported another horrifying event. At the end of February 1945, Soviet officers of the 1st (or 160th) Rifle Division north of Konitz allegedly drove several children aged 10–12 onto a minefield for reconnaissance. German soldiers heard the “pitiful screams” of children badly wounded by exploding mines and “bleeding helplessly from their torn bodies.”

EAST PRUSSIA

In East Prussia too, where heavy fighting was taking place, the alleged atrocities continued unabated in February 1945. On a road near Landsberg, servicemen of the 1st Guards Tank Army reportedly killed German soldiers and civilians with bayonets, rifle butts and point-blank shots, in some cases cutting them down. In Landsberg, Soviet soldiers of the 331st Rifle Division allegedly drove the stunned population, including women and children, into cellars, set the houses on fire, and fired at people who ran out in panic. Many burned alive. In a village on the Landsberg–Heilsberg road, servicemen of the same rifle division reportedly kept 37 women and girls locked in a cellar for six days and nights, some chained there, and, with officers taking part, repeatedly raped them every day. Because of their desperate screams, two of those Soviet officers, in front of everyone, allegedly cut out the tongues of two women with a “semicircular knife.” The hands of two other women, placed one on top of another, were reportedly pinned to the floor with a bayonet. German tank soldiers were eventually able to free only a few of the victims; 20 women are said to have died from the abuse.

At Hanshagen near Preussisch Eylau [now Bagrationovsk, Russia], Red Army soldiers of the 331st Rifle Division allegedly shot two mothers who resisted the rape of their daughters, and a father whose daughter was at that moment dragged out of the kitchen and raped by a Soviet officer. The victims listed further include a married couple of teachers and their three children, an unidentified refugee girl, an innkeeper, and a farmer whose 21-year-old daughter was raped. At Petershagen near Preussisch Eylau, servicemen of the same division allegedly killed two men and a 16-year-old youth named Richard von Hoffmann, while subjecting women and girls to severe violence.

Today Tatyana Tolstaya (the mother of one blogger and apparently a writer) made the following patriotic remark:

“I am thinking: if Russian soldiers raped millions of German women, as we are told here, then these German women — well, perhaps not all of them, but half, say — must have given birth to children. So the population of Germany in the conquered territories is now Russian, not German?”

People have already expressed outrage at this, but it seems to me that Soviet veteran Leonid Rabichev provides the best answer to Tatyana. Below are excerpts from his memoir War Will Write Everything Off:

Women, mothers and their daughters, lie to the right and left along the highway, and before each of them stands a guffawing armada of men with their trousers down.

Those covered in blood and losing consciousness are dragged aside; children who rush to help them are shot. Guffaws, growls, laughter, screams and moans. And their commanders, their majors and colonels, stand on the highway — some snickering, some conducting; no, rather regulating. This is so that every one of their soldiers, without exception, takes part.

No, this hellish, deadly group sex is neither collective complicity nor revenge against the accursed occupiers.

It is permissiveness, impunity, depersonalization and the cruel logic of a maddened crowd.

Shocked, I sat in the cab of a one-and-a-half-ton truck; my driver Demidov stood in the queue, and I imagined Flaubert's Carthage, and I understood that the war would by no means write everything off. The colonel who had just been conducting cannot restrain himself and takes his place in the queue, while the major shoots the witnesses — hysterical children and old people.

Finish! Into the vehicles!

And behind us comes the next unit.

And another stop, and I cannot restrain my signalmen, who too are already joining new queues. Nausea rises to my throat.

To the horizon, between mountains of rags, overturned carts, lie the corpses of women, old people and children. The highway is cleared for traffic. It grows dark.

My command platoon and I are assigned a manor two kilometres from the highway.

In every room are the bodies of children and old people, and women who have been raped and shot.

We are so tired that, paying them no attention, we lie down on the floor among them and fall asleep.

In the morning we set up the radio and establish contact with the front by RSB. We receive orders to lay communication lines. The forward units have at last encountered German corps and divisions that have taken up defensive positions.

The Germans no longer retreat; they die but do not surrender. Their aircraft appear in the air. I am afraid of being mistaken, but it seems to me that in cruelty, uncompromising character and the number of losses on both sides, these battles can be compared with the fighting at Stalingrad. It is all around us and ahead.

I do not leave the telephones. I receive orders and give orders. Only during the day is there time to carry the bodies out into the yard.

I do not remember where we carried them.

Into the outbuildings? I cannot remember where. I know that we never buried them ourselves. There were burial details, I think, but they were far in the rear.

So I help carry out the bodies. I stop beside the wall of the house.

Spring. The first green grass on the ground, a bright hot sun. Our house has a steep roof, weather vanes, Gothic style, red tiles; it is probably two hundred years old. The courtyard is paved with stone slabs perhaps five hundred years old.

We are in Europe, in Europe!

I drift into dreams, and suddenly two sixteen-year-old German girls enter through the open gates. There is no fear in their eyes, but terrible anxiety.

They see me, run up and, interrupting one another, try to explain something to me in German. Although I do not know the language, I hear the words ‘Mutter,’ ‘Vater,’ ‘Bruder.’

I understand that in the panic of flight they have lost their family somewhere.

I feel terribly sorry for them. I understand that they must run from our headquarters yard as fast and as far as they can, and I tell them:

Mutter, Vater, Bruder — nicht! — and point toward the second, distant gate — that way. I push them gently.

They understand me, quickly leave, disappear from sight, and I sigh with relief — at least I have saved two girls — and go up to the second floor to my telephones, attentively following the movement of the units. But less than twenty minutes pass before I hear screams, shouts, laughter and swearing from the yard.

I rush to the window.

Major A. is standing on the steps of the house, and two sergeants have twisted the arms of those very two girls and bent them double; opposite them is the whole headquarters service staff — drivers, orderlies, clerks, messengers.

‘Nikolayev, Sidorov, Kharitonov, Pimenov...’ Major A. commands. ‘Take the girls by the arms and legs, skirts and blouses off! Form two lines! Unfasten belts, lower trousers and underwear! Right and left, one at a time, begin!’

A. commands, and my signalmen, my platoon, run down the stairs from the house and fall into the lines. The two girls I had ‘saved’ lie on the ancient stone slabs, their arms held in vises, mouths stuffed with kerchiefs, legs forced apart. They no longer try to struggle against the four sergeants holding them, while a fifth tears off and rips apart their blouses, bras, skirts and underwear.

My female telephone operators run out of the house — laughter and swearing.

The lines do not grow shorter: some men rise, others descend, and there are already pools of blood around the victims, while the lines, guffawing and swearing, do not end.

The girls are already unconscious, but the orgy continues.

Major A. commands proudly, hands on hips. At last the final man gets up, and the executioner-sergeants throw themselves on the two half-dead bodies.

Major A. pulls a revolver from his holster and shoots into the bloodied mouths of the victims. The sergeants drag their mutilated bodies into the pigsty, and the hungry pigs begin tearing off their ears, noses and breasts. Within a few minutes only two skulls, bones and vertebrae remain.

I am terrified and disgusted.

Suddenly nausea surges to my throat and I vomit.

Major A. — God, what a scoundrel!

I cannot work. I run out of the house, not knowing where I am going, wander somewhere, return. I cannot; I must look into the pigsty.

Before me are the bloodshot eyes of pigs, and among the straw and pig manure two skulls, a jaw, several vertebrae and bones, and two little gold crosses — the two girls I had ‘saved.’

The town commandant, a colonel senior in rank, tried to organize a perimeter defence, but half-drunk soldiers were dragging women and girls out of apartments. In the critical situation the commandant decided to forestall soldiers who had lost control of themselves. On his instructions a liaison officer passed to me the order to place a combat guard of eight of my submachine gunners around the church, while a specially formed detachment took away from the victorious soldiers the women they had seized.

Another detachment returned to their units soldiers and officers who had scattered through the town in search of “pleasures,” explaining to them that the town and district were surrounded. A perimeter defence was established with difficulty.

Meanwhile about 250 women and girls were driven into the church, but only forty minutes later several tanks arrived. The tank crews pushed my submachine gunners away from the entrance, burst into the church, knocked people down and began raping the women.

I could do nothing. A young German woman sought my protection; another went down on her knees.

Herr Lieutenant, Herr Lieutenant!

Hoping for something, they surrounded me. Everyone was saying something.

But the news was already spreading through the town; a queue had already formed, and again there was that accursed guffawing, the queue, and my soldiers.

Back, damn you! — I shouted, not knowing what to do with myself or how to protect those lying around my feet, while the tragedy grew rapidly.

There were the moans of dying women. Bloodied, half-naked, unconscious women were now being dragged upstairs (why? for what reason?) onto the landing and thrown through broken windows onto the stone paving slabs below.

They seized them, stripped them, killed them. No one remained around me. Neither I nor any of my soldiers had ever seen anything like it. A strange hour.

The tank men left. Silence. Night. A horrifying pile of bodies. Unable to remain, we left the church. Nor could we sleep.

So, the article says, Soviet veteran Leonid Nikolayevich Rabichev has in effect answered the writer Tatyana Tolstaya. German women did, of course, give birth — but only those who were not killed. The dead, Tanya, do not give birth.

Further Accounts and Interpretations of Violence in Germany

The town of Bahn [now Banie, Poland] was described as “terribly destroyed”; its streets were said to contain “many corpses of civilians” whom Red Army soldiers explained they had killed “in retaliation.”

Conditions in settlements around Pyritz [now Pyrzyce, Poland] fully confirmed these observations. At Billerbeck the owner of an estate, as well as elderly and sick people, were shot; women and girls from the age of ten were raped; apartments were looted; and the remaining residents were driven away. At the Brederlow estate Red Army men violated women and girls, one of whom was later shot, as was the wife of a Wehrmacht soldier on leave who had escaped. In Köselitz a district official, a peasant and a lieutenant on leave were killed; in Eichelshagen, a low-level NSDAP official and a peasant family of six. In all these cases the perpetrators were identified as servicemen of the 61st Army. Similar events were reported in villages around Greifenhagen [now Gryfino, Poland], south of Stettin. At Jädersdorf, for example, servicemen of the 2nd Guards Tank Army shot ten evacuated women and a fifteen-year-old boy, finished off victims who were still alive with bayonets and pistol shots, and reportedly killed entire families with small children.

In Rohrsdorf Soviet soldiers shot many residents, including a wounded serviceman on leave. Women and girls were violated and some were then killed. At Gross-Silber near Kallies, Red Army men of the 7th Guards Cavalry Corps sexually assaulted a young woman with a broom handle, cut off her left breast and crushed her skull. At Preussisch-Friedland, Soviet soldiers of the 52nd Guards Rifle Division shot eight men and two women and raped thirty-four women and girls. The commander of a German engineer-tank battalion of the 7th Panzer Division reported another horrifying incident: at the end of February 1945 Soviet officers of the 1st (or 160th) Rifle Division north of Konitz allegedly drove several children aged ten to twelve onto a minefield to reconnoitre it. German soldiers heard the “pitiful cries” of children badly wounded by exploding mines, “bleeding helplessly from torn bodies.”

EAST PRUSSIA

In East Prussia, where heavy fighting continued, alleged atrocities were reported unabated in February 1945. On a road near Landsberg, servicemen of the 1st Guards Tank Army reportedly killed German soldiers and civilians with bayonets, rifle butts and point-blank shots, in some cases cutting them down. In Landsberg, Soviet soldiers of the 331st Rifle Division allegedly drove the stunned population, including women and children, into cellars, set houses on fire and fired at people who fled in panic. Many burned alive. In a village on the Landsberg–Heilsberg road, servicemen of the same rifle division reportedly held thirty-seven women and girls locked in a cellar for six days and nights, some chained there, and, with officers taking part, repeatedly raped them every day. Because of the victims’ desperate screams, two Soviet officers allegedly cut out the tongues of two women with a “semicircular knife” in front of everyone. The hands of two other women, placed one on top of another, were reportedly pinned to the floor with a bayonet. German tank soldiers were ultimately able to free only a few of the victims; twenty women are said to have died from the abuse.

At Hanshagen near Preussisch-Eylau [now Bagrationovsk, Russia], Red Army men of the 331st Rifle Division reportedly shot two mothers who resisted the rape of their daughters, as well as a father whose daughter was at that moment dragged from the kitchen and raped by a Soviet officer. A married pair of teachers and their three children, an unidentified refugee girl, an innkeeper and a farmer were also reportedly killed; the farmer’s twenty-one-year-old daughter was raped. At Petershagen near Preussisch-Eylau, servicemen of the same division allegedly killed two men and a sixteen-year-old boy named Richard von Hoffmann while subjecting women and girls to brutal sexual violence.

The text argues that many Red Army soldiers, who often had little formal education, knew very little about sexuality and treated women crudely. “Red Army soldiers do not believe in ‘individual relations’ with German women,” playwright Zakhar Agranenko wrote in his wartime diary in East Prussia. “Nine, ten, twelve at once—they rape them collectively.”

The long columns of Soviet troops entering East Prussia in January 1945 are described as an unusual mixture of modernity and the Middle Ages: tank crews in black leather helmets; Cossacks on shaggy horses with looted property tied to their saddles; Dodge trucks and Studebakers supplied under Lend-Lease; and behind them a second echelon of horse-drawn carts. The diversity of equipment was matched by the variety of the soldiers themselves: some were outright criminals, drunkards and rapists, while others were communist idealists or members of the intelligentsia who were shocked by their comrades’ behaviour.

The text says that Beria and Stalin in Moscow were well aware of events from detailed reports, one of which stated: “many Germans believe that all German women who remained in East Prussia were raped by Red Army soldiers.” Numerous examples were cited of gang rape “of minors and old women alike.”

Marshal Rokossovsky issued Order No. 006 in an attempt to direct the “feeling of hatred toward the enemy onto the battlefield.” According to the account, it had little effect. There were several improvised attempts to restore order. One rifle-regiment commander was said to have “personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up his soldiers in front of a German woman lying on the ground.” But in many cases officers themselves took part in the abuses, or discipline among drunken soldiers armed with submachine guns was so poor that order could not be restored.

Calls to avenge the motherland attacked by the Wehrmacht were sometimes understood as permission for cruelty. Even some young women soldiers and medical personnel did not object. A twenty-one-year-old woman in Agranenko’s reconnaissance unit said: “Our soldiers behave toward Germans, especially German women, absolutely correctly.” Some reportedly treated what they saw as a curiosity. A number of German women later recalled Soviet women watching their rape and laughing. Others, however, were deeply shocked by what they saw in Germany. Natalya Gesse, later a close friend of scientist Andrei Sakharov and at the time a war correspondent, recalled: “Russian soldiers raped every German woman from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists.”

Alcohol, including dangerous chemicals stolen from laboratories, played a significant role in this violence. The account suggests that some soldiers drank for courage before attacking women, and that extreme drunkenness sometimes led to additional forms of sexual assault and mutilation.

For decades the subject of mass abuses by the Red Army in Germany was taboo in the Soviet Union and Russia. The text says that even later many veterans denied that they had occurred. A smaller number spoke openly and without remorse. One tank-unit commander recalled: “They all lifted their skirts and lay down on the bed.” He even boasted that “two million of our children were born in Germany.”

The text criticizes the ability of some Soviet officers to convince themselves that most victims were either willing or accepted such treatment as fair payment for German crimes in the Soviet Union. A Soviet major was quoted as telling a British journalist at the time: “Our comrades had become so starved for women’s affection that they often raped sixty-, seventy- and even eighty-year-olds, to their frank surprise, if not pleasure.”

The psychological contradictions were stark. When raped women in Königsberg begged their tormentors to kill them, Red Army soldiers reportedly took offence and replied: “Russian soldiers do not shoot women. Only Germans do that.” According to the article’s interpretation, the Red Army had convinced itself that because it had assumed the role of liberating Europe from fascism, its soldiers were entitled to behave as they wished.

A sense of superiority and humiliation is presented as characteristic of the behaviour of many soldiers toward women in East Prussia. The victims were not only made to pay for Wehrmacht crimes; they also became an atavistic object of aggression as old as war itself. Historian and feminist Susan Brownmiller is cited for the observation that rape, when treated as a conqueror’s right, is directed “against the enemy’s women” to underscore victory. After the initial fury of January 1945, however, the text says that sadism became less frequent. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin three months later, soldiers were more often viewing German women through the conventional “right of the victor.” The sense of superiority remained, but the author suggests it may also have been an indirect result of humiliations that soldiers themselves had endured from commanders and from the Soviet leadership.

Other factors also played a role.

Sexual freedom had been widely discussed within the Communist Party in the 1920s, but in the following decade Stalin did everything possible, the article argues, to make Soviet society effectively asexual. This was not presented as a product of puritanical popular views; rather, love and sex did not fit the concept of the “de-individualization” of the person. Natural desires were to be suppressed. Freud was banned; divorce and adultery were condemned by the Party; homosexuality became a criminal offence; and the new doctrine rejected sex education. In art, even the outline of a woman’s breast beneath clothing could be treated as the height of eroticism and was expected to be concealed by work overalls. The regime demanded that passion be sublimated into love for the Party and for Comrade Stalin personally.

The article again characterizes many Red Army soldiers as poorly educated, profoundly uninformed about sexuality and crude in their attitude toward women. It argues that the Soviet state’s attempts to suppress the libido produced what one Russian writer called “barracks eroticism,” more primitive and brutal than even extreme pornography. This was compounded, in the article’s interpretation, by dehumanizing wartime propaganda and by primitive impulses shaped by fear and suffering.

Writer Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent with the advancing Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not only Germans. They included Polish women as well as young Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian women who had been taken to Germany as forced labourers. He wrote: “Liberated Soviet women often complain that our soldiers rape them. One girl said to me in tears: ‘He was an old man, older than my father.’”

The rape of Soviet women undermines attempts to explain all Red Army sexual violence simply as revenge for German atrocities in the Soviet Union. On 29 March 1945 the Central Committee of the Komsomol informed Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. General Tsygankov wrote: “On the night of 24 February a group of thirty-five soldiers and their battalion commander entered a women’s hostel in the village of Grütenberg and raped everyone.”

In Berlin, despite Goebbels’s propaganda, many women were simply unprepared for the horrors of Russian revenge. Many tried to persuade themselves that although danger might be great in the countryside, mass rape could not take place in a city in full public view.

At Dahlem Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the superior of a convent that housed an orphanage and maternity home. The officers and soldiers behaved impeccably. They even warned that reinforcements were following behind them. Their prediction proved correct: according to the account, nuns, girls, elderly women, pregnant women and women who had just given birth were all raped without mercy.

Within several days soldiers had developed the practice of choosing victims by shining flashlights into their faces. The process of selection, replacing indiscriminate violence, is presented as evidence of a certain change: Soviet soldiers were beginning to view German women less as people responsible for Wehrmacht crimes and more as spoils of war.

Rape is often defined as violence only loosely related to sexual desire. The article argues that this definition reflects the victim’s perspective and that understanding the crime also requires examining the aggressor’s perspective, particularly during the later stages when “ordinary” rape replaced the unrestrained frenzy of January and February.

Many women were forced to attach themselves to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a twenty-four-year-old actress, tried to hide in a wardrobe but was pulled out by a young soldier from Central Asia. The account says he became so excited at the prospect of sex with a young blonde woman that he climaxed prematurely. Magda tried to explain that she would agree to be his girlfriend if he protected her from other Russian soldiers, but he told his comrades about her and another soldier raped her. Magda’s Jewish friend Ellen Goetz was also raped. When Germans tried to explain that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, the reply was: “Frau ist Frau” — “A woman is a woman.”

Women soon learned to hide during the evening “hunting hours.” Young daughters were concealed in attics for days. Mothers went out for water only early in the morning to avoid Soviet soldiers sleeping off drinking bouts. Sometimes the greatest danger came from neighbours who revealed where girls were hiding in an attempt to save their own daughters. Elderly Berliners still remembered the screams at night; with the windows shattered, they were impossible not to hear.

According to figures cited from two city hospitals, 95,000–130,000 women were victims of rape. One doctor estimated that of 100,000 raped women about 10,000 later died, mainly by suicide. The article states that mortality among an estimated 1.4 million victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia was even higher. It gives an estimate of at least two million German women raped, many—perhaps most—being victims of gang rape.

Those who attempted to protect women from Soviet attackers were often fathers defending daughters or sons defending mothers. “Thirteen-year-old Dieter Sahl,” neighbours wrote in a letter shortly after one such event, “attacked with his fists the Russian who was raping his mother in front of him. The only result was that he was shot.”

After the second stage, in which women offered themselves to one soldier in the hope of protection from the rest, came what the article calls a third stage: post-war hunger. Susan Brownmiller described “the thin line separating wartime rape from wartime prostitution.” Ursula von Kardorff noted that soon after Berlin’s surrender the city was full of women trading sex for food or for the alternative currency of cigarettes. German filmmaker Helke Sander, who studied the subject in detail, described “a mixture of direct violence, blackmail, calculation and genuine attachment.”

A fourth stage was a strange form of cohabitation between Red Army officers and German “occupation wives.” Soviet officials were reportedly furious when several officers deserted the army rather than return home, choosing instead to remain with German lovers.

Even if the feminist definition of rape as purely an act of violence may seem reductive, the article says, male complacency is indefensible. The events of 1945 show how thin the veneer of civilization can be when there is no fear of retaliation. They also recall what the author describes as a dark side of male sexuality that people prefer not to remember.

Special Archive, InoSMI.Ru
(The Daily Telegraph, United Kingdom)

InoSMI materials contain assessments made exclusively by foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial board.

The Great Patriotic War left an indelible mark on history and on people’s fates. Many lost loved ones who were killed or tortured. The next section considers fascist concentration camps and the atrocities committed within them.

CONCENTRATION CAMPS

WHAT IS A CONCENTRATION CAMP?

A concentration camp is a special place intended for the confinement of people in such categories as:

• political prisoners (opponents of a dictatorial regime);
• prisoners of war (captured soldiers and civilians).

Fascist concentration camps became notorious for inhuman cruelty toward prisoners and unbearable conditions of detention. Such places of confinement began to appear even before Hitler came to power, and even then they were divided into women’s, men’s and children’s camps. Those held there were mainly Jews and opponents of the Nazi regime.

LIFE IN THE CAMP

Humiliation and abuse of prisoners began from the moment of transport. People were carried in freight cars that did not even have running water or a screened-off toilet. Prisoners had to relieve themselves publicly into a container standing in the middle of the car.

But that was only the beginning. The fascist concentration camps prepared many forms of abuse and torment for people considered undesirable by the Nazi regime. Torture of women and children, medical experiments and purposeless, exhausting labour were only some of them.

Conditions can be judged from prisoners’ letters: “we lived in hellish conditions, in rags, barefoot and hungry... I was constantly and brutally beaten, deprived of food and water, and tortured...”; “They shot people, flogged them, set dogs on them, drowned them in water, beat them to death with sticks, starved them. They infected people with tuberculosis... suffocated them with Zyklon. Poisoned them with chlorine. Burned them...”

Skin was removed from corpses and hair was cut off; all of it was then used in Germany’s textile industry. The physician Mengele became notorious for horrifying experiments on prisoners, thousands of whom died at his hands. He studied mental and physical exhaustion of the human body. He conducted experiments on twins in which organs were transplanted from one twin to another and blood was transfused; sisters were forced to bear children by their own brothers. He performed sex-reassignment operations.

All the fascist concentration camps became notorious for such abuse. The names and conditions in the principal camps are considered below.

CAMP RATIONS

A typical daily camp ration was:

• bread — 130 g;
• fat — 20 g;
• meat — 30 g;
• grain — 120 g;
• sugar — 27 g.

Bread was issued directly to prisoners; the remaining products were used to prepare food consisting of soup (served once or twice a day) and porridge (150–200 g). It should be noted that such a ration was intended only for those who worked. Anyone who, for some reason, was not working received even less. Their ration usually consisted only of half a portion of bread.

LIST OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES

Fascist concentration camps were established in Germany, allied countries and occupied territories. The list was extensive; among the principal camps were:

• in Germany — Halle, Buchenwald, Cottbus, Düsseldorf, Schlieben, Ravensbrück, Essen, Spremberg;
• in Austria — Mauthausen, Amstetten;
• in France — Nancy, Reims, Mulhouse;
• in Poland — Majdanek, Kraśnik, Radom, Auschwitz, Przemyśl;
• in Lithuania — Dimitravas, Alytus, Kaunas;
• in Czechoslovakia — Kutná Hora, Nitra, Hlinsko;
• in Estonia — Pirkul, Pärnu, Klooga;
• in Belarus — Minsk, Baranovichi;
• in Latvia — Salaspils.

This is far from a complete list of all the concentration camps built by Nazi Germany before and during the war.

SALASPILS

Salaspils can be called one of the most terrible fascist concentration camps because, in addition to prisoners of war and Jews, children were held there. It was located in occupied Latvia and served as a central eastern camp. It stood not far from Riga and operated from September 1941 until the summer of 1944.

Children in this camp were not only held separately from adults and killed in large numbers; they were also used as blood donors for German soldiers. About half a litre of blood was taken from each child every day, which quickly caused the donors’ deaths.

Salaspils was unlike Auschwitz or Majdanek, extermination camps where people were driven into gas chambers and their bodies then burned. It was oriented toward medical experimentation, during which, according to the text, more than 100,000 people died. Salaspils was unlike other fascist concentration camps. Torture of children there was an ordinary, scheduled procedure whose results were carefully recorded.

EXPERIMENTS ON CHILDREN

Witness testimony and investigations identified the following methods by which people were killed at Salaspils: beatings, starvation, arsenic poisoning, injections of dangerous substances (most often into children), surgical operations without anaesthesia, removal of blood (from children only), shootings, torture, pointless heavy labour such as carrying stones from one place to another, gas chambers and burial alive. To conserve ammunition, camp rules reportedly prescribed that children be killed only with rifle butts. The atrocities committed in fascist concentration camps exceeded everything humanity had seen in modern times. Such treatment of people cannot be justified, because it violates every conceivable moral commandment.

Children did not remain with their mothers for long; they were usually taken away quickly and distributed. Children under six were placed in a special barrack, where they were infected with measles. They were not treated; instead the disease was aggravated, for example by bathing them, and the children died within three or four days. In this way, the text states, the Germans killed more than 3,000 people in one year. Some bodies were burned and others buried on the camp grounds.

The Nuremberg trial document “On the Extermination of Children” gave the following figures: excavation of only one fifth of the concentration-camp territory uncovered 633 children’s bodies, aged five to nine, arranged in layers. An area saturated with an oily substance was also found, containing remains of incompletely burned children’s bones—teeth, ribs, joints and so on.

Salaspils was indeed presented as one of the most terrible fascist concentration camps, because the atrocities described above were far from all the torments inflicted on prisoners. In winter, newly arrived children were reportedly driven barefoot and naked for half a kilometre to a barrack, where they had to wash in icy water. They were then driven in the same way to another building, where they were kept in the cold for five or six days. The oldest child was not even twelve. All who survived this procedure were also subjected to arsenic poisoning.

Infants were kept separately and given injections from which a child died in agony within several days. They were given coffee and poisoned porridge. About 150 children a day are said to have died from experiments. Their bodies were carried out in large baskets and burned, thrown into cesspits or buried near the camp.

RAVENSBRÜCK

If one begins listing fascist women’s concentration camps, Ravensbrück comes first. It was the only camp of this type in Germany. It was designed for thirty thousand prisoners, but by the end of the war it was overcrowded by another fifteen thousand. Most prisoners were Russian and Polish women; Jews made up about 15 percent. There were no written instructions governing torture and abuse; guards chose their own conduct.

Newly arriving women were stripped, shaved, washed, given camp clothing and assigned a number. Their racial classification was also marked on the clothing. Human beings were turned into anonymous livestock. About three hundred prisoners were held in small barracks (after the war two or three refugee families lived in the same buildings) and slept on three-tier bunks. When the camp became overcrowded, as many as a thousand people were crammed into these small spaces and seven people had to share a single bunk. There were several toilets and a washbasin in each barrack, but so few that after several days the floors were covered in excrement. According to the article, conditions of this kind existed in practically all fascist concentration camps; the photographs shown represent only a small fraction of the horror.

Not every woman who arrived was admitted to the camp without selection. The strong and hardy, who were fit for work, were kept; the rest were killed. Prisoners worked on construction sites and in sewing workshops.

Ravensbrück gradually acquired a crematorium, like the other fascist concentration camps. Gas chambers—called “death chambers” by prisoners—appeared only toward the end of the war. Ashes from the crematoria were sent to nearby fields as fertilizer.

Experiments were also conducted at Ravensbrück. In a special barrack called the “infirmary,” German scientists tested new medicines after first infecting or injuring the test subjects.

Few survived these experiments, and even those who did suffered from their effects for the rest of their lives. Experiments also included exposing women to X-rays, which caused hair loss, skin pigmentation and death. Genital organs were surgically removed; few survived, and those who did aged rapidly and by the age of eighteen looked like old women. The article presents such experiments, and the torture of women and children more generally, as among Nazi Germany’s principal crimes against humanity.

At the time the concentration camp was liberated by the Allies, five thousand women remained there; the others had been killed or transferred to other places of confinement. Soviet troops arriving in April 1945 adapted the camp barracks to house refugees. Ravensbrück later became a stationing point for Soviet military units.

FASCIST CONCENTRATION CAMPS: BUCHENWALD

Construction of the camp began in 1933 near the town of Weimar. Soviet prisoners of war later began to arrive and were among the prisoners who expanded the “hellish” concentration camp.

The layout of all the structures was carefully planned. Immediately behind the gate began the Appellplatz, the roll-call square designed specifically for assembling prisoners. It could hold twenty thousand people. Not far from the gate stood the punishment block used for interrogations, while opposite it was the office occupied by the camp leader and duty officer—the camp administration. Farther inside stood the prisoners’ barracks. All barracks were numbered; there were 52 in total. Forty-three were intended for accommodation, while the remaining buildings contained workshops.

The fascist concentration camps left behind a terrible memory, and their names still cause fear and shock in many people. The article calls the crematorium the most horrifying place in Buchenwald. People were summoned there under the pretext of a medical examination. Once a prisoner undressed, he was shot and his body sent to the furnace.

Only men were held at Buchenwald. On arrival each prisoner was assigned a number in German, which he had to memorize within the first day. Prisoners worked at the Gustloff armaments factory located several kilometres from the camp.

Continuing the description of Nazi concentration camps, the article turns to Buchenwald’s so-called “Little Camp.”

THE LITTLE CAMP OF BUCHENWALD

The “Little Camp” was the quarantine zone. Living conditions there were hellish even by comparison with the main camp. In 1944, when German forces began to retreat, prisoners from Auschwitz and the Compiègne camp were brought there, mainly Soviet citizens, Poles and Czechs, and later Jews as well. There was not enough room for everyone, so some prisoners—six thousand people—were housed in tents. As 1945 approached, the number of transferred prisoners kept growing. Meanwhile the “Little Camp” consisted of twelve barracks measuring 40 by 50 metres. Torture in the fascist concentration camps was not limited to acts deliberately planned or conducted for scientific purposes; life itself in such a place was torture. About 750 people lived in each barrack. Their daily ration consisted of a small piece of bread; those who did not work received nothing more.

Relations among prisoners were harsh. Cases of cannibalism and murder over another person’s bread ration were documented. It was common to keep the bodies of the dead in the barracks so that their rations could continue to be collected. A dead prisoner’s clothing was divided among cellmates, and fights over it were frequent. Because of these conditions infectious diseases were widespread. Vaccinations only aggravated the situation because injection syringes were not changed between patients.

Photographs cannot convey the full inhumanity and horror of fascist concentration camps, while witness accounts are not for the faint-hearted. Every camp, Buchenwald included, had medical teams of doctors who carried out experiments on prisoners. The article notes that the data obtained from them contributed to advances in German medicine because no other country had such a large number of human test subjects. It immediately raises the moral question of whether any such knowledge could justify the millions of tortured children and women and the inhuman suffering of innocent people.

Prisoners were irradiated; healthy limbs were amputated and organs removed; people were sterilized and castrated. Researchers tested how long a person could withstand extreme cold or heat. Prisoners were deliberately infected with diseases and given experimental medicines. A typhus vaccine, for example, was developed in Buchenwald. In addition to typhus, prisoners were infected with smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria and paratyphoid fever.

From 1939 the camp was run by Karl Koch. His wife, Ilse, was nicknamed the “Witch of Buchenwald” because of her sadism and inhuman abuse of prisoners. She was feared more than her husband and the Nazi doctors. She was later called “Frau Lampshade,” a nickname connected in the article with claims that she had decorative objects, including lampshades, made from the skin of murdered prisoners. The article says she particularly favoured the skin of Russian prisoners with tattoos on their backs and chests and the skin of Roma prisoners, considering objects made from it especially elegant.

Buchenwald was liberated on 11 April 1945 by the prisoners themselves. Learning that Allied troops were approaching, they disarmed the guards, captured the camp leadership and controlled the camp for two days until American soldiers arrived.

AUSCHWITZ (AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU)

No account of fascist concentration camps can omit Auschwitz. It was one of the largest concentration camps; the text gives estimates ranging from one and a half to four million deaths and notes that the exact number was never established. It states that a large share of the victims were Jewish prisoners who were killed in gas chambers immediately after arrival.

The concentration-camp complex was called Auschwitz-Birkenau and was located on the outskirts of the Polish town of Oświęcim, whose name became synonymous with the camp. The words “Arbeit macht frei”—“Work sets you free”—were inscribed above the camp gate.

This huge complex, built in 1940, consisted of three camps:

• Auschwitz I, the main camp, where the administration was located;
• Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, called the death camp;
• Auschwitz III, or Buna-Monowitz.

The camp was initially small and intended for political prisoners. Gradually more and more prisoners arrived, and the article says that 70 percent were killed immediately. Many methods of torture associated with fascist concentration camps were used at Auschwitz. The first gas chamber began operating in 1941. Zyklon B gas was used. The article states that this method was first tested on about nine hundred Soviet and Polish prisoners.

Auschwitz II began operating on 1 March 1942. Its territory included four crematoria and two gas chambers. In the same year medical experiments on the sterilization and castration of women and men began.

Small subcamps gradually formed around Birkenau for prisoners working at factories and mines. One of these expanded over time and became Auschwitz III, or Buna-Monowitz. About ten thousand prisoners were held there.

Like the other fascist concentration camps, Auschwitz was heavily guarded. Contact with the outside world was forbidden. The territory was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and guard posts were placed around the camp at a distance of about one kilometre.

Five crematoria operated continuously on the Auschwitz grounds. According to the figures cited in the article, specialists estimated their combined monthly capacity at roughly 270,000 bodies.

On 27 January 1945 Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. By then approximately seven thousand prisoners were still alive. The article explains the small number of survivors by the mass killings in gas chambers that had intensified roughly a year earlier.

Since 1947 a museum and memorial complex dedicated to all those who died at the hands of Nazi Germany has operated on the site of the former concentration camp.

CONCLUSION

According to the statistics cited in the article, approximately four and a half million Soviet citizens were taken prisoner during the war. Most were civilians from occupied territories. What these people endured is difficult even to imagine. The article adds that after liberation their suffering did not necessarily end: under Stalin, many who returned home were branded “traitors,” some were sent into the Gulag, and their families faced serious repression. One captivity was replaced by another. Fearing for their own lives and those of their loved ones, some changed their surnames and tried in every way to conceal what they had experienced.

Until relatively recently, information about the fate of former prisoners after liberation was not publicized and was often suppressed. But people who survived such experiences must not be forgotten. As a continuation of the subject and a supplement to Elena Senyavskaya’s article posted on the site on 10 May 2012, we offer readers another article by the same author, published in a journal.

OTHER WARTIME TORTURES DESCRIBED ON THE PAGE

CANNIBALISM

The text says this is extremely difficult to believe, but that written testimony and evidence exist. It claims that soldiers guarding prisoners were sometimes themselves starving and, because there was not enough food, ate the bodies of prisoners. It also states that there were cases in which body parts were cut for food not only from the dead but from living people.

EXPERIMENTS ON PREGNANT WOMEN

Unit 731 is described as especially notorious for horrific abuse. According to the text, military personnel were deliberately permitted to rape captive women so that they would become pregnant, after which various experiments were conducted on them. Women were intentionally infected with sexually transmitted, infectious and other diseases so researchers could observe effects on the woman and fetus. At times, early in pregnancy, women were cut open on an operating table without anaesthesia and the premature fetus removed to see how it responded to infection. The women and children died.

BRUTAL TORTURE

The text says there were many cases in which Japanese troops abused prisoners not to obtain information but for cruel entertainment. In one cited case, the genitals of a wounded captured marine were cut off and put into his mouth before he was released back to his own side. The article presents such acts as senseless brutality that repeatedly shocked Japan’s opponents.

SADISTIC CURIOSITY

Japanese military doctors are described as conducting experiments on prisoners not only for purported scientific purposes but sometimes simply out of curiosity. One example involved centrifuges. The article says doctors wanted to know what would happen if a human body were spun for hours at very high speed. Dozens or hundreds of prisoners are said to have died from internal bleeding, and in some cases bodies were torn apart.

AMPUTATIONS

The article says abuse was inflicted not only on prisoners of war but also on civilians and even Japanese citizens suspected of espionage. A common punishment for suspected spying was said to be removal of a body part, most often a leg, fingers or ears. Amputation was performed without anaesthesia, while efforts were made to keep the victim alive so that suffering would continue.

DROWNING

Holding an interrogated prisoner under water until suffocation is described as a familiar torture, but the article says Japanese interrogators also poured streams of water directly into a prisoner’s mouth and nostrils so that water entered the lungs. If the prisoner resisted for long enough, drowning could occur within minutes.

FIRE AND ICE

Experiments involving freezing are described as widespread in the Japanese military. Prisoners’ limbs were frozen solid, after which skin and muscle were cut from living people without anaesthesia to study the effect of cold on tissue. Burns were studied in a similar way: skin and muscle on arms and legs were burned with torches while changes in the tissue were observed.

RADIATION

At Unit 731, the text says, Chinese prisoners were placed in special chambers and exposed to very powerful X-rays so changes in their bodies could be observed. Procedures were repeated until the subject died.

BURIAL ALIVE

One of the cruel punishments described for American prisoners of war who rebelled or disobeyed was burial alive. A person was placed upright in a pit and covered with earth or stones, then left to suffocate. The article says Allied troops later found bodies of people killed this way.

BEHEADING

Beheading, common in earlier centuries, is described as having survived in Japan into the twentieth century and as having been used against prisoners during the Second World War. The text emphasizes that not all executioners were skilled: a soldier might fail to complete the stroke, or strike a shoulder instead of the neck, prolonging the victim’s suffering until the execution was completed.

DEATH IN THE WAVES

Another punishment described as deriving from older Japanese practice involved tying a condemned person to a post set in a tidal area. The rising water gradually covered the victim until, after prolonged suffering, the person drowned.

THE MOST PAINFUL EXECUTION

The article describes the alleged use of growing bamboo as an execution method. Bamboo can grow rapidly; a person was said to be fastened to the ground over new shoots, which over several days penetrated the body and caused extreme suffering. The text states that this method, despite its ancient origins, was also used on prisoners during the Second World War.

“BOILED FROM WITHIN”

Another category of Unit 731 experiments described on the page involved electricity. Prisoners were subjected to electric current through electrodes attached to the head or torso, either with a large voltage at once or with lower voltage over a prolonged period. The text says victims felt as if they were being roasted alive and claims that some internal organs were literally cooked by the exposure.

FORCED LABOUR AND DEATH MARCHES

Japanese prisoner-of-war camps are described as no better than Nazi death camps. Thousands of prisoners worked from dawn until dusk while receiving very little food and sometimes none for days. When labour was needed elsewhere, starving and exhausted prisoners could be marched on foot for very long distances under a burning sun. The article says few prisoners survived these conditions.

PRISONERS FORCED TO KILL THEIR FRIENDS

The text also describes psychological torture: prisoners were allegedly forced, under threat of death, to beat or even kill fellow prisoners, compatriots and friends. Whatever the immediate outcome, the article says, such experiences permanently broke a person’s will and spirit.

Women of Liberated Europe Through the Eyes of Soviet Soldiers and Officers (repeated material on the source page)

As a continuation of the subject and a supplement to Elena Senyavskaya’s article posted on the site on 10 May 2012, we offer readers another article by the same author, published in a journal.

At the final stage of the Great Patriotic War, after liberating Soviet territory occupied by Germany and its satellites and pursuing the retreating enemy, the Red Army crossed the state border of the USSR. From that moment its victorious advance began through the countries of Europe—those that had languished under fascist occupation for six years, those that had fought in the war as allies of the Third Reich, and the territory of Hitler’s Germany itself. During this movement westward and the inevitable, varied contacts with the local population, Soviet servicemen, many of whom had never previously been outside their own country, acquired numerous new and highly contradictory impressions of representatives of other peoples and cultures. These impressions later contributed to ethnopsychological stereotypes through which Europeans were perceived. The image of European women occupied a particularly important place among them. References to them, and sometimes detailed stories, appear in letters and diaries and on the pages of many war memoirs, where lyrical and cynical judgments and tones often alternate.

Residents of Bucharest welcome Soviet soldiers. The inscription on the large banner reads “TRĂIASCĂ MARELE STALIN — GENIAL COMANDANT AL ARMATEI ROŞII,” which may be translated as “Long live the great Stalin—the brilliant commander of the Red Army.”

The first European country entered by the Red Army, in August 1944, was Romania. In the Notes on the War by frontline poet Boris Slutsky we find very candid lines:

“Suddenly Constanța opens before us, almost colliding with the sea. It almost coincides with the average dream of happiness and of ‘after the war.’ Restaurants. Bathtubs. Beds with clean linen. Shops with servile salesmen. And—women, smartly dressed urban women—the girls of Europe—the first tribute taken by us from the defeated…”¹

He then describes his first impressions of “abroad”: “European barbershops, where they wash with their fingers and do not use brushes; the absence of bathhouses; washing from basins—‘where first the dirt from the hands remains, and then one washes one’s face’; feather beds instead of blankets—disgust with everyday life immediately produced generalizations… In Constanța we encountered brothels for the first time… The initial delight at the existence of free love quickly passed. Not only fear of infection and expense made themselves felt, but also contempt for the very possibility of buying a person… Many took pride in cases when, for example, a Romanian husband complained to the commandant’s office that one of our officers had not paid his wife the agreed fifteen hundred lei. Everyone had a clear conviction: ‘With us this is impossible’… Our soldiers will probably remember Romania as a country of syphilitics…”²

In conclusion he says that it was precisely in Romania, this European backwater, that “our soldier most strongly felt his superiority over Europe.”³

A column of Soviet troops on a street in central Bucharest.

Another Soviet officer, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Fyodor Smolnikov, recorded his impressions of Bucharest in his diary on 17 September 1944:

“Hotel Ambasador, restaurant, lower floor. I see how the idle public spends its time—it has nothing to do; it waits. They look at me as though I were a curiosity: ‘A Russian officer!!!’ I am dressed very modestly—even too modestly. So be it. We shall be in Budapest anyway; that is as certain as the fact that I am in Bucharest now. A first-class restaurant. The public has dressed itself up; the most beautiful Romanian women literally bore into me with their eyes.⁴ We spend the night in a first-class hotel. Outside is the bustle of a capital. There is no music; the public is waiting. Damn it, a real capital! But I shall not be taken in by the advertising…”⁴

A Romanian peasant woman offers milk to a Soviet soldier.

In Hungary the Soviet army encountered not only organized armed resistance but also treacherous attacks by civilians: “drunken and straggling solitary soldiers were killed on farmsteads,” “they were drowned in silage pits.” Women, however, according to eyewitnesses, “were not as depraved as Romanian women, yet yielded with shameful ease… A little love, a little licentiousness, but above all, of course, fear helped.”⁵ Quoting one Hungarian lawyer—“It is very good that the Russians love children so much. It is very bad that they love women so much”—Boris Slutsky remarks: “He did not take into account that Hungarian women also loved Russians; that alongside the dark fear which parted the knees of matrons and mothers of families there existed the tenderness of girls and the desperate affection of soldiers’ wives who gave themselves to the killers of their husbands.”⁶

A Jewish family liberated from the Budapest ghetto. Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei © Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS).

Grigory Chukhray describes in his memoirs a characteristic episode that occurred in Hungary. His unit was quartered in a small town. During a meal, the owners of the house where he and his men were staying, “relaxed under the influence of Russian vodka,” admitted that they were hiding their daughter in the attic. The Soviet officers reacted indignantly: “Who do you take us for? We are not fascists!” The hosts became embarrassed, and soon a thin girl named Marika appeared at the table and hungrily began to eat. Gradually becoming at ease, she started flirting and joining the conversation. By the end of dinner the atmosphere had become friendly, and those present drank to “barátság” (friendship). Marika, however, took the gesture too literally. When everyone had gone to their rooms, she appeared before Chukhray wearing only a slip.

“As a Soviet officer I immediately understood that a provocation was being prepared. They expect me to succumb to Marika’s charms and then they will raise a scandal. But I shall not allow myself to be drawn in,” he recalled. In addition, he did not find the girl attractive. He pointed her to the door.

The next morning the hostess, while laying the table, noisily banged the dishes. “She is nervous. The provocation failed,” he thought, and shared the idea with the Hungarian interpreter. The interpreter laughed:

“‘It was no provocation at all. They showed you friendly goodwill and you rejected it. Now they do not regard you as a man in this house. You will have to move to another apartment.’

“‘But why, then, did they hide their daughter in the attic?’

“‘They were afraid of violence. With us it is customary that, with her parents’ consent, a girl may become intimate with several men before marriage. We have a saying: “you do not buy a cat in a tied sack.”’”⁷

A column of Soviet soldiers in the streets of Budapest.

Young, physically healthy men naturally felt a pull toward women. Yet the ease of European morals corrupted some Soviet soldiers, while convincing others, on the contrary, that relations should not be reduced to simple physiology. Sergeant Alexander Rodin recorded his impressions of visiting—out of curiosity!—a brothel in Budapest, where his unit was stationed for some time after the war ended: “…After leaving I felt a disgusting, shameful sense of lies and falseness; I could not get out of my head the picture of the woman’s obvious, frank pretense… Interestingly, such an unpleasant aftertaste from visiting a brothel remained not only with me, a youngster raised, moreover, on principles such as ‘do not give a kiss without love,’ but also with most of our soldiers with whom I happened to speak… Around those same days I had a conversation with a pretty Magyar girl (somehow she knew Russian). When she asked whether I liked Budapest, I answered that I did, except that the brothels bothered me. ‘But why?’ the girl asked. Because it is unnatural, savage, I explained: a woman takes money and immediately after that begins to ‘love!’ The girl thought for a while, then nodded in agreement and said: ‘You are right: it is not nice to take the money in advance’…”⁸

Poland left different impressions. According to the poet David Samoilov, “…in Poland we were kept under strict discipline. It was difficult to slip away from one’s unit. And mischief was punished severely.”⁹

He describes a country in which the beauty of Polish women was almost the only positive feature: “I cannot say that we liked Poland very much,” he wrote. “At that time I encountered nothing noble or chivalrous in it. On the contrary, everything was petty-bourgeois, provincial—both ideas and interests. And in eastern Poland they looked at us warily and half-hostilely, trying to fleece the liberators for everything they could. Still, the women were consolingly beautiful and coquettish; they captivated us by their manners and their cooing speech, in which everything suddenly became understandable, and they in turn were sometimes captivated by rough masculine strength or a soldier’s uniform. And their pale, emaciated former admirers, gnashing their teeth, withdrew into the shadows for the time being…”¹⁰

Troops of the 10th Tank Corps of the 5th Guards Tank Army of the 2nd Belorussian Front occupy the town of Mühlhausen (now the Polish town of Młynary) during the Mława–Elbing operation. Mühlhausen was liberated from Hitler’s troops on 24 January 1945.

Not all assessments of Polish women were so romantic. On 22 October 1944 Junior Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand wrote in his diary: “In the distance loomed the town I had left behind, with its Polish name [Władów], and beautiful Polish women, proud to the point of disgust. …I was told about Polish women: they lured our soldiers and officers into their embraces and, when it came to bed, cut off their genitals with a razor, strangled them with their hands around the throat, scratched out their eyes. Mad, savage, ugly females! One must be careful with them and not become carried away by their beauty. And the Polish women are beautiful, the wretches.”¹¹ Yet other moods also appear in his notes. On 24 October he records the following encounter: “Today my companions on the road to one of the villages were beautiful Polish girls. They complained about the absence of young men in Poland. They too called me ‘pan,’ but they remained untouchable. I gently patted one of them on the shoulder in response to her remark about men and comforted her with the thought that the road to Russia was open to her—there were plenty of men there. She hurried to step aside and answered that men could be found for her here as well. We said goodbye with a handshake. So we never reached agreement, but they were fine girls, though Polish.”¹²

A month later, on 22 November, he recorded his impressions of the first large Polish town he had encountered, Mińsk Mazowiecki. Amid his descriptions of its architectural beauty and the astonishing number of bicycles used by all categories of inhabitants, he gives special attention to the townswomen: “A noisy idle crowd; the women, almost every one of them, in special white hats, apparently worn against the wind, which make them look like magpies and surprise by their novelty. The men in triangular caps, in hats—fat, neat, empty. How many of them! …Painted lips, penciled eyebrows, affectation, excessive delicacy. How unlike natural human life all this is. It seems that the people themselves live and move only so that others may look at them, and that all will disappear when the last spectator leaves the town…”¹³

A Soviet poster on the border between Poland and Germany.

Not only Polish townswomen but also peasant women made a strong, though contradictory, impression. “The love of life of the Poles, who had endured the horrors of war and German occupation, was striking,” Alexander Rodin recalled. “Sunday in a Polish village. Beautiful, elegant Polish women in silk dresses and stockings, who on weekdays are ordinary peasant women, barefoot, raking manure and tirelessly doing housework. Older women also look fresh and young. Though some have black circles around their eyes…”¹⁴ He then quotes his diary entry of 5 November 1944: “Sunday; all the inhabitants are dressed up. They gather to visit one another. Men in felt hats, ties, sweaters. Women in silk dresses, bright, unworn stockings. Rosy-cheeked girls—the ‘panienki.’ Beautifully curled blond hairstyles… The soldiers in the corner of the cottage are lively too. But anyone sensitive will notice that it is a painful liveliness. Everyone laughs excessively loudly to show that it means nothing to them, does not touch them at all, that they are not envious. Are we any worse than they? The devil knows what happiness peaceful life is! I had practically never seen it in civilian life!”¹⁵ His fellow soldier Sergeant Nikolai Nesterov wrote in his diary that same day: “Today is a day off; the Poles, beautifully dressed, gather in one cottage and sit in couples. It even makes one feel uncomfortable. Could I not sit like that too?..”¹⁶

Serviceman Galina Yartseva was far more merciless in her assessment of “European morals,” which reminded her of “a feast in time of plague.” On 24 February 1945 she wrote to a friend from the front: “…If there were an opportunity, one could send wonderful parcels of trophy things. There is quite a bit. If only it were for our barefoot and poorly clothed people. What cities I have seen, what men and women. And looking at them, such anger, such hatred takes possession of you! They walk about, love, live, while you go and liberate them. And they laugh at the Russians—‘Schwein!’ Yes, yes! Scoundrels… I love no one except the USSR, except the peoples who live with us. I believe in no friendship with Poles and other Lithuanians…”¹⁷

Soviet soldiers in the streets of Vienna.

In Austria, which Soviet troops entered in the spring of 1945, they encountered “wholesale capitulation”: “Entire villages were headed by white rags. Elderly women raised their hands when meeting a man in a Red Army uniform.”¹⁸ It was here, according to B. Slutsky, that the soldiers “finally got at the fair-haired women.” At the same time, “Austrian women did not prove excessively unyielding. The overwhelming majority of peasant girls married ‘spoiled.’ Soldiers on leave felt completely at ease. In Vienna our guide, a bank clerk, was surprised at the Russians’ insistence and impatience. He believed that gallantry was enough to obtain from a Viennese woman everything one wanted.”¹⁹ Thus the matter was not only fear, but also certain features of national mentality and traditional behavior.

A Nazi, before the arrival of Soviet troops, shot his family and killed himself in a Vienna street.

And then, finally, Germany. And the women of the enemy—the mothers, wives, daughters and sisters of those who from 1941 to 1944 had abused civilians in the occupied territory of the USSR. What did Soviet servicemen see when they met them? Vladimir Bogomolov described the appearance of German women moving in a crowd of refugees in his diary: “The women—old and young—wear hats, scarves wound like turbans or simply draped like our peasant women’s, smart coats with fur collars, and worn clothing of an incomprehensible cut. Many women wear dark glasses so as not to squint in the bright May sun and thereby protect their faces from wrinkles…”²⁰

Lev Kopelev recalled meeting evacuated Berlin women in Allenstein: “Two women on the sidewalk. Elaborate hats, one even with a veil. Good-quality coats, and they themselves smooth and well-groomed.”²¹ He also quoted soldiers’ comments about them: “hens,” “turkeys,” “wouldn’t mind one that smooth…”

How did German women behave when meeting Soviet troops? A report by Shikin, deputy head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, to G. F. Alexandrov of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), dated 30 April 1945, on the attitude of Berlin’s civilian population toward Red Army personnel stated: “As soon as our units occupy one district of the city or another, residents gradually begin to come out into the streets; almost all of them have white armbands. When they meet our servicemen many women raise their hands, cry and shake with fear, but as soon as they become convinced that Red Army soldiers and officers are not at all what fascist propaganda portrayed them to be, this fear quickly passes; more and more of the population comes out into the streets and offers its services, trying in every way to emphasize its loyal attitude toward the Red Army.”²²

The victors were most impressed by the submissiveness and calculation of German women. In this connection it is worth citing the account of mortar man N. A. Orlov, who was shocked by the behavior of German women in 1945: “No one in the mortar battalion killed German civilians. Our special-department officer was a ‘Germanophile.’ Had anything like that happened, the punitive authorities’ reaction to such an excess would have been swift. As for violence against German women, it seems to me that some people, when speaking of such a phenomenon, somewhat ‘lay it on thick.’ I remember an example of another kind.

“We entered some German town and quartered ourselves in houses. A ‘Frau’ of about forty-five appeared and asked for the ‘Herr Kommandant.’ They brought her to Marchenko. She said that she was responsible for the neighborhood and had gathered twenty German women for the sexual (!!!) servicing of Russian soldiers. Marchenko understood German, and I translated what the woman had said for Deputy Political Commander Dolgoborodov, who was standing next to me. The reaction of our officers was angry and profane. The German woman was driven away together with her ‘detachment,’ ready to provide its services. In general, German submissiveness stunned us. We had expected partisan warfare and sabotage from the Germans. But for this nation order—‘Ordnung’—is above all. If you are the victor, they are ‘on their hind legs’ before you, consciously and without coercion. Such is the psychology…”²³

David Samoilov gives a similar episode in his wartime notes: “At Arendsfelde, where we had just settled in, a small crowd of women with children appeared. They were led by an enormous mustachioed German woman of about fifty—Frau Friedrich. She declared that she was a representative of the civilian population and asked us to register the remaining residents. We replied that this could be done as soon as the commandant’s office appeared.

“‘That is impossible,’ said Frau Friedrich. ‘There are women and children here. They must be registered.’

“The civilian population confirmed her words with cries and tears.

“Not knowing what to do, I suggested that they occupy the basement of the house in which we were quartered. Reassured, they went down into the basement and began settling there while waiting for the authorities.

“‘Herr Kommissar,’ Frau Friedrich said to me good-naturedly (I wore a leather jacket), ‘we understand that soldiers have little needs. They are prepared,’ Frau Friedrich continued, ‘to set aside several younger women for them, for…’

“I did not continue the conversation with Frau Friedrich.”²⁴

Residents of the city queue for water during the Second World War. Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei © Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS).

After speaking with women in Berlin on 2 May 1945, Vladimir Bogomolov wrote in his diary: “We enter one of the surviving houses. Everything is quiet, dead. We knock and ask them to open. We can hear whispering in the corridor, muffled, agitated voices. At last the door opens. Women of indeterminate age, huddled in a tight group, bow fearfully, low and obsequiously. German women are afraid of us; they had been told that Soviet soldiers, especially Asians, would rape and kill them… Fear and hatred are on their faces. But sometimes it seems that they like being defeated—their behavior is so attentive, their smiles so ingratiating, their words so sweet. These days a story is making the rounds about one of our soldiers entering a German apartment and asking for a drink, and the German woman, the moment she saw him, lying down on the sofa and taking off her panties.”²⁵

“All German women are depraved. They have nothing against sleeping with them.”²⁶ Such an opinion circulated among Soviet troops and was reinforced not only by many visible examples but also by their unpleasant consequences, which military doctors soon discovered.

Directive No. 00343/Sh of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front, dated 15 April 1945, stated: “During the troops’ stay on enemy territory, cases of venereal disease among servicemen have risen sharply. Study of the reasons for this situation shows that venereal diseases are widespread among the Germans. Before retreating, and also now in the territory occupied by us, the Germans have taken the path of artificially infecting German women with syphilis and gonorrhea in order to create major centers for the spread of venereal disease among Red Army servicemen.”²⁷

On 26 April 1945 the Military Council of the 47th Army reported that “…in March the number of venereal diseases among servicemen increased fourfold compared with February of this year. …The female population of Germany in the districts examined is infected at a rate of 8–15%. There are cases in which the enemy deliberately leaves German women suffering from venereal diseases in order to infect servicemen.”²⁸

To implement Resolution No. 056 of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front of 18 April 1945 on the prevention of venereal disease, the troops of the 33rd Army issued a leaflet reading as follows:

“Comrade servicemen!

“German women are tempting you—women whose husbands visited all the brothels of Europe, became infected themselves, and infected their German women.

“Before you are also those German women whom the enemy has deliberately left behind to spread venereal disease and thereby put Red Army soldiers out of action.

“You must understand that our victory over the enemy is near and that soon you will have the opportunity to return to your families.

“With what eyes will a man look his loved ones in the eye if he brings home an infectious disease?

“Can we, soldiers of the heroic Red Army, be a source of infectious diseases in our country? NO! For the moral character of a Red Army soldier must be as pure as the image of his Motherland and family!”²⁹

Practical Germans were most concerned about food supplies, and for them they were allegedly prepared to do literally anything. Thus a certain physician, Dr. Kalisturkh, discussing the Red Army’s attitude toward the German population with colleagues, stated: “It cannot be concealed that I personally saw bad treatment of our women by individual Russian soldiers, but I said that the war was to blame for this, and, most importantly, that our soldiers and especially the SS men had behaved much worse toward Russian women.” And then, without transition, he added: “I was very worried about the food question…”³⁰

Even in the memoirs of Lev Kopelev, who angrily describes violence and looting by Soviet servicemen in East Prussia, one finds lines reflecting another side of “relations” with the local population: “They told stories about the submissiveness, servility and ingratiation of the Germans: there, they said, that is what they are like—they sell their wives and daughters for a loaf of bread.”³¹ The disgusted tone in which Kopelev relays these “stories” implies that he considered them unreliable. Yet they are corroborated by many sources.

Berlin, summer 1945.

Vladimir Gelfand described in his diary his courtship of a German girl (the entry was made six months after the end of the war, on 26 October 1945, but is nevertheless highly characteristic): “I wanted to enjoy to the full the caresses of pretty Margot—kisses and embraces alone were not enough. I expected more but did not dare demand or insist. The girl’s mother was pleased with me. Of course! On the altar of her relatives’ trust and goodwill I had offered sweets and butter, sausage, and expensive German cigarettes. Even half of these products is enough today to give one the fullest grounds and right to do whatever one wishes with the daughter before her mother’s eyes, and the mother will say nothing against it. For foodstuffs today are dearer even than life—even the life of such a young and sweet sensual creature as the gentle beauty Margot.”³²

Australian war correspondent Osmar White, who in 1944–1945 was in Europe with the U.S. Third Army under George Patton, left interesting diary entries. This is what he recorded in Berlin in May 1945, literally only a few days after the end of the assault: “I made a tour of the night cabarets, starting with the ‘Femina’ near Potsdamer Platz. It was a warm, humid evening. The air smelled of sewage and rotting corpses. The façade of the ‘Femina’ was covered with futuristic pictures of nudes and notices in four languages. The dance hall and restaurant were filled with Russian, British, and American officers accompanied by women (or hunting for them). A bottle of wine cost 25 dollars, a horsemeat-and-potato hamburger 10 dollars, and a packet of American cigarettes an astonishing 20 dollars. The cheeks of Berlin women were rouged and their lips painted as though Hitler had won the war. Many women wore silk stockings. The mistress of ceremonies opened the concert in German, Russian, English, and French. This provoked a jibe from a Russian artillery captain sitting beside me. He leaned toward me and said in decent English: ‘Such a rapid transition from the national to the international! RAF bombs are excellent professors, are they not?’”³³

Women partisans of the 1st Proletarian Brigade of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. The village of Žarkovo near Belgrade on the eve of the fighting for the city.

The overall impression of European women formed among Soviet servicemen was of women who were well-groomed and smartly dressed (compared with their compatriots exhausted by the war in the half-starved rear, on territories liberated from occupation, and even with their frontline female comrades dressed in washed-out tunics), readily available, self-interested, promiscuous, or timidly submissive. Yugoslav and Bulgarian women were exceptions. The stern and ascetic Yugoslav women partisans were regarded as comrades-in-arms and considered untouchable. Given the strict morals of the Yugoslav army, “the partisan girls probably looked upon the PPZh [‘field wives’] as creatures of a special, nasty kind.”³⁴ Boris Slutsky recalled Bulgarian women this way: “…After Ukrainian good nature, after Romanian debauchery, the stern inaccessibility of Bulgarian women astonished our men. Almost no one boasted of conquests. It was the only country where officers out for a stroll were very often accompanied by men and almost never by women. Later the Bulgarians were proud when told that Russians intended to return to Bulgaria for brides—the only ones in the world who had remained pure and untouched.”³⁵

Residents of a Bulgarian town celebrate liberation. Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei © Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS).

The beautiful Czech women who joyfully welcomed Soviet liberating soldiers left a pleasant impression. Embarrassed tank men on combat vehicles coated in oil and dust and decorated with wreaths and flowers said among themselves: “…As if a tank were a bride, to be decorated. But their girls keep hanging things on it. Good people. Haven’t seen such warmhearted people for a long time…” The friendliness and hospitality of the Czechs was sincere. “…‘If it were possible, I would kiss every soldier and officer of the Red Army for liberating my Prague,’ …a Prague tram worker said to general, friendly, approving laughter.”³⁶ Boris Polevoy thus described the atmosphere in the liberated Czech capital and the mood of local residents on 11 May 1945.

But in the other countries through which the victorious army passed, the female part of the population did not inspire respect. “In Europe the women surrendered, defected before everyone else…” B. Slutsky wrote. “I was always astonished, thrown off balance, disoriented by the ease, the shameful ease, of amorous relations. Respectable women, unquestionably disinterested, resembled prostitutes in their hasty availability, their wish to bypass the intermediate stages, their lack of interest in the motives that pushed a man toward intimacy with them. Like people who had learned three obscene words from the entire vocabulary of love poetry, they reduced the whole affair to a few bodily movements, provoking hurt and contempt even among the greenest of our officers… The restraining motives were not ethics at all, but fear of infection, fear of publicity, fear of pregnancy.”³⁷ He added that under conditions of conquest “universal corruption covered over and concealed specifically female corruption, made it invisible and unashamed.”³⁸

Among the motives that contributed to the spread of “international love,” despite all the bans and severe orders of the Soviet command, there were several others: women’s curiosity about “exotic” lovers and the Russians’ unprecedented generosity toward the objects of their affection, which distinguished them favorably from parsimonious European men.

Northern Fleet divers with Norwegian children, 1944.

Junior Lieutenant Daniil Zlatkin found himself in Denmark, on the island of Bornholm, at the very end of the war. In an interview he said that the interest of Russian men and European women in one another was mutual: “We had not seen women, and we needed to… And when we arrived in Denmark… it was free, please. They wanted to check, test, try a Russian man—what is he, what is it like—and it seemed to work out better than with the Danes. Why? We were selfless and kind… I would give a box of chocolates half the size of a table; I gave one hundred roses to a woman I did not know … for her birthday…”³⁹

At the same time few contemplated serious relationships or marriage, because the Soviet leadership had clearly stated its position on the matter. A Resolution of the Military Council of the 4th Ukrainian Front dated 12 April 1945 read: “1. Explain to all officers and all personnel of the Front that marriage to foreign women is illegal and categorically prohibited. 2. All cases of servicemen entering into marriage with foreign women, as well as connections between our people and hostile elements of foreign states, are to be reported immediately through the chain of command so that the guilty parties may be held accountable for loss of vigilance and violation of Soviet laws.”⁴⁰ A directive of the head of the Political Directorate of the 1st Belorussian Front dated 14 April 1945 stated: “According to the head of the Main Personnel Directorate of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, the Center continues to receive applications from officers of the active army requesting authorization for marriages with women of foreign states (Polish, Bulgarian, Czech women, etc.). Such facts should be regarded as a dulling of vigilance and patriotic feeling. Therefore political-educational work must pay attention to a thorough explanation of the inadmissibility of such acts on the part of Red Army officers. Explain to all officers who do not understand the lack of prospects for such marriages the inadvisability of marrying foreign women, up to and including direct prohibition, and permit not a single case.”⁴¹

Nor did the women harbor illusions about the intentions of their suitors. “At the beginning of 1945 even the stupidest Hungarian peasant girls no longer believed our promises. European women already knew that we were forbidden to marry foreigners and suspected that there was a similar order against appearing together in restaurants, cinemas, and the like. This did not prevent them from loving our womanizers, but it gave that love a strictly ‘ouaidum’ [carnal] character,”⁴² B. Slutsky wrote.

Overall, it must be acknowledged that the image of European women formed among Red Army soldiers in 1944–1945, with rare exceptions, proved very far removed from the suffering figure with shackled hands who gazed hopefully from the Soviet poster “Europe Will Be Free!”

Notes

1. Slutsky, B. Notes on the War. Poems and Ballads. St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 174.
2. Ibid., pp. 46–48.
3. Ibid., pp. 46–48.
4. Smolnikov, F. M. We Are Fighting! A Frontline Soldier’s Diary. Letters from the Front. Moscow, 2000, pp. 228–229.
5. Slutsky, B., op. cit., pp. 110, 107.
6. Ibid., p. 177.
7. Chukhray, G. My War. Moscow: Algoritm, 2001, pp. 258–259.
8. Rodin, A. Three Thousand Kilometers in the Saddle. Diaries. Moscow, 2000, p. 127.
9. Samoilov, D. “People of One Variant. From Wartime Notes,” Avrora, 1990, no. 2, p. 67.
10. Ibid., pp. 70–71.
11. Gelfand, V. N. Diaries 1941–1946. http://militera.lib.ru/db/gelfand_vn/05.html
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Rodin, A. Three Thousand Kilometers in the Saddle. Diaries. Moscow, 2000, p. 110.
15. Ibid., pp. 122–123.
16. Ibid., p. 123.
17. Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, fond 372, opis 6570, file 76, fol. 86.
18. Slutsky, B., op. cit., p. 125.
19. Ibid., pp. 127–128.
20. Bogomolov, V. O. “Germany, Berlin. Spring 1945,” in My Life, or Did I Dream You?.. Moscow: Nash Sovremennik, nos. 10–12, 2005; no. 1, 2006. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/03.html
21. Kopelev, L. To Be Preserved Forever, 2 vols., vol. 1, parts 1–4. Moscow: Terra, 2004, ch. 11. http://lib.rus.ec/b/137774/read#t15
22. Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), fond 17, opis 125, file 321, fols. 10–12.
23. From an interview with N. A. Orlov on the “I Remember” website. http://www.iremember.ru/minometchiki/orlov-naum-aronovich/stranitsa-6.html
24. Samoilov, D., op. cit., p. 88.
25. Bogomolov, V. O. My Life, or Did I Dream You?.., Nash Sovremennik, 2005, nos. 10–12; 2006, no. 1. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/03.html
26. From a political report on communicating Comrade Stalin’s Directive No. 11072 of 20 April 1945 to personnel of the 185th Rifle Division, 26 April 1945. Cited in Bogomolov, V. O., op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/02.html
27. Cited in Bogomolov, V. O., op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/02.html
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. State Archive of the Russian Federation, fond r-9401, opis 2, file 96, fol. 203.
31. Kopelev, L., op. cit., ch. 12. http://lib.rus.ec/b/137774/read#t15
32. Gelfand, V. N., op. cit.
33. White, Osmar. Conquerors’ Road: An Eyewitness Account of Germany 1945. Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1996], XVII, 221 pp. http://www.argo.net.au/andre/osmarwhite.html
34. Slutsky, B., op. cit., p. 99.
35. Ibid., p. 71.
36. Polevoy, B. “The Liberation of Prague,” in From the Soviet Information Bureau… Journalism and Essays of the War Years, 1941–1945, vol. 2, 1943–1945. Moscow: APN Publishing House, 1982, p. 439.
37. Ibid., pp. 177–178.
38. Ibid., p. 180.
39. From an interview with D. F. Zlatkin, 16 June 1997, private archive.
40. Cited in Bogomolov, V. O., op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/04.html
41. Ibid.
42. Slutsky, B., op. cit., pp. 180–181.

The article was prepared with financial support from the Russian Foundation for the Humanities, project No. 11-01-00363a. The layout used the 1944 Soviet poster “Europe Will Be Free!” by artist V. Koretsky.

(What actually happened is examined in the investigation below.)

The truth, as usual, is described here as lying somewhere in the middle. In abandoned German homes and shops Soviet soldiers took things they liked, but the text argues that brazen robbery of Germans was comparatively limited. Looting certainly occurred, but there were also cases in which offenders were tried publicly by military tribunals. A soldier who had survived the war had little desire, the article says, to lose his chance to return home as a victor and instead be sent to Siberia as a convicted man over some piece of property or another campaign concerning relations with the local population.

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