JoyReactor — “Atrocities by Soviet Soldiers During the Great Patriotic War”

Left: “Our sacred land”; “our glorious leader”; “our great faith”; “our noble people”; “our brave heroes.” Right: “Their barbaric wasteland”; “their treacherous tyrant”; “their primitive superstitions”; “their backward savages”; “their brutal invaders.” — Tom Gauld.

Colma1 · 11.05.2021

I am deliberately not posting photographs of atrocities from German archives. It is better to familiarize yourselves with the pattern of thinking of “vatniks” of any nationality.

This post was inspired by the mass explosion of JoyReactor “vatnik” outrage. Even a passing mention that mass atrocities during the Great Patriotic War were committed not by every army except the Soviet one, but by every army including the Soviet one, caused a sharp rise in temperature and pressure in the combustion chamber. When logic and a couple of quotations were added, there was a real fireworks display.

So, the format is: quotation / source reference. Information for people with brains is at the end of the post — you would do better to go there at once, otherwise the presentation may seem strange. Everyone else can already start burning, downvoting, and helping Roscosmos catch Voyager by means of rear-end thrust alone.

IMPORTANT!
Sensitive readers are advised not to continue. War without a propaganda filter is a disgusting sight.

“Up to 80 men surrendered and were shot.”

Operational report No. 11 of 13.07.1941, I. Kimbar, S. Khrapko.

On July 1, 1941, on the Klevan–Bronniki road, 180 German soldiers from the 35th Infantry Regiment, 119th Infantry Regiment, and 60th Artillery Regiment, most of them wounded, were taken prisoner by the Russians. According to a report by military jurist Wilhelm Heinrich of the 25th Infantry Division dated July 2, 1941, the bodies of 153 of them were found. Before questioning witnesses, Heinrich went to the site and conducted his own investigation. Lieutenant Franz Kröning identified the corpses and during a second search found another twelve bodies about two hundred meters away.

According to Alfred de Zayas, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau 1939–1945.

“A German soldier came over to our side today and reported that during the night the shattered 23rd Infantry Division was replaced by the 267th Division, and he also observed SS units there.”

“Do not put too much trust in prisoners of war; question him thoroughly and then shoot him.”

From correspondence between G. Zhukov and I. Stalin.

“We broke into the hospital, occupied all three floors, killed the Germans with knives, bayonets, and rifle butts, and threw them out of the windows into the street.”

From the memoirs of A. Kornienko, Yevpatoria.

“In Feodosia the Bolsheviks killed our wounded who were in the hospitals; some of those lying in plaster casts were dragged to the seashore, doused with water, and frozen in the icy wind.”

Erich von Manstein, Verlorene Siege.

“In the city of Kerch there are up to seven thousand corpses of civilians, including children, all shot by the fascist monsters. My blood freezes from rage and thirst for revenge. I order fascist prisoners finished off. And here it works well. With particular satisfaction [he] destroys the bandits.”

From a letter by L. Mekhlis to his son.

A driver from the headquarters of the 154th Rifle Division testified that in early August, after interrogation by the division commander and commissar, twenty-two German prisoners of war were killed by shots to the back of the head, after first being forced to dig their own grave.

According to Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RW 2/v. 153, 20.3.1942.

The circumstances of mass killings near Krasnoarmeysk were established, where from February 11 to 18, 1943, more than 600 servicemen of the Wehrmacht and allied armies, as well as members of accompanying units, including Red Cross nurses and female signal auxiliaries, were shot or brutally killed. In incomplete figures, individual identification was possible for 406 German, 89 Italian, 9 Romanian, 4 Hungarian, and 8 Ukrainian soldiers, 58 members of the Organisation Todt, 15 railway workers, and 7 German civilian workers. Investigation began when the area was retaken on February 18, 1943, by the German 7th Panzer Division. “All the corpses were naked,” a later military-court investigation record states, “almost all the bodies were mutilated... Many corpses had their noses and ears cut off. Other corpses had their genitals cut off and put in their mouths. An attempt had also been made to cut off the breasts of the Red Cross nurses.”

According to Joachim Hoffmann; Wikipedia; Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941–1945.

“At the estate we saw five children whose tongues had been nailed to a large table,” reported a witness from a village near Heydekrug in the Memelland, which soldiers of the 43rd Army of the 1st Baltic Front entered in October 1944. A little later he saw “five girls tied together with rope, almost completely stripped, with their backs badly torn. It looked as though the girls had been dragged a very long way.”

Michael Klonovsky, “Preußen zahlt die Zeche,” Focus, 14.07.2017.

“Red Army units entered the city on February 3. When Soviet soldiers came down into the cellar where local inhabitants were sheltering, they pointed their submachine guns at me and two other women and ordered us upstairs. There twelve soldiers raped me one after another. Other soldiers raped the other two women. At night another six drunken soldiers came down into the cellar and raped us in front of the other women. On February 5 three soldiers came, and on February 6 eight drunken soldiers came, who also raped and beat us.”

From the interrogation of Emma Kivor by NKVD investigators, Tkachenko to Beria // GARF, fond 9401, inventory 2, file 94, sheet 87.

“All of them lifted their skirts in front of us and lay down on the bed.”

From a 2001 interview with Maltsev, a former Komsomol organizer of a tank company.

Soviet soldiers forced a young SS man to play the piano. They made him understand that the moment he stopped, he would be shot. The soldier managed to play for sixteen hours until he collapsed with his head on the keyboard. The Soviet soldiers stood him up, dragged him aside, and shot him.

Forrester Larry, Fly for Your Life, London, 1956.

“I made my observations on February 27, 1945, when I came to Metgethen on official business. As I rode my motorcycle into the quarry directly in front of the railway crossing, I discovered the corpses of twelve women and six children. All were completely naked and piled together. The children’s skulls had been crushed with a blunt object; their tiny bodies were pierced by countless bayonet wounds. The women, mostly older, between forty and sixty, had also been killed with knives or bayonets. All of them clearly showed black-and-blue marks from beatings.”

Captain Hermann Sommer, in Spieler (ed.), Vertreibung und Vertreibungsverbrechen (1989), p. 147.

“They poked here,” the German woman explained, pointing under her skirt, “all night, and there were so many of them. I was a ‘Mädchen’ [girl],” she sighed and burst into tears. “They ruined my life. Some were old, pimply, and stinking, and they all climbed on me, all poked me. There were at least twenty, yes, yes,” and she dissolved into tears.

“They raped my daughter in front of me,” the unhappy mother added. “They may come again and rape my girl.” At this everyone was horrified again, and bitter sobbing passed from corner to corner, amplified by the emptiness of the cellar into which the owners had brought me.

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

Vladimir Gelfand’s diary, Berlin, Spree, 25.04.1945.

“Two hundred and fifty of our girls worked at the Focke-Wulf factory. The Germans brought them from Voroshilovgrad, Kharkiv, and Kyiv. According to the head of the army political directorate, these girls have no clothes, are infested with lice, and are swollen from hunger. And according to a man from the army newspaper, these girls were clean and well dressed until our soldiers came and robbed them. Liberated Soviet girls often complain that they are raped by our soldiers. One girl told me, crying: ‘He was an old man, older than my father.’”

From Vasily Grossman’s diary, A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941–1945.

“At last the two iron bolts opened. Everyone stared at me. My stockings were down, my hands held what was left of my belt. I began to scream: ‘You pigs! I was raped here twice in succession, and you leave me lying here like a piece of dirt!’”

From Martha Hillers’s diary, published in 1959.

In the end, the diary’s author comes to the conclusion that she needs to find one “wolf” to protect her from new gang rapes by “male beasts.” (...) Many of her neighbors made similar arrangements with the victors in defeated Berlin.

Lucy Ash on Martha Hillers, BBC, 2015.

From June 1945 through 1946, 995 requests for abortion were approved in this district of Berlin [Neukölln] alone. The files contain more than a thousand pages of different colors and sizes. One girl writes in rounded, childlike handwriting that she was raped at home, in the living room, in front of her parents.

From Lucy Ash’s conversation with archive employee Martin Luchterhand.

On the night of February 24, according to Tsygankov’s report, thirty-five Soviet soldiers led by their battalion commander appeared in the village of Grutenberg near Oels. They entered a bedroom where Soviet girls were staying and raped them.

Antony Beevor, citing RGVA (Russian State Military Archive), SA, fond 1382, inventory 1, file 62.

“A partisan, a small man, killed two Germans with a stake. He begged the guards of the column to hand these Germans over to him. He had convinced himself that they were the men who had killed his daughter Olya and his sons, his two boys. He broke all their bones, smashed their skulls, and while he beat them he wept and shouted: ‘That is for Olya! That is for Kolya!’ When they were dead, he propped up the bodies and continued beating them.”

From Vasily Grossman’s diary, A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941–1945.

Post Scriptum

The text above is not research, not popular science, and not even a lumpen-historical article for Zen. It is a quick quotation collection assembled over a couple of mugs of tea while “vatniks” were breaking their downvote machines under one very worthy post. If the subject does not interest you, simply ignore it. There is no scholarly apparatus here — only a set of starting points for people who are uncomfortable sitting in the swamp of concepts such as “the Nazis were murderers, but our grandfathers were not,” “Americans slaughtered Native Americans, but Russians did not slaughter Siberians,” “Catholics killed witches, but Orthodox Christians did not,” “everyone attacked Russia, but Russia attacked no one,” and so on. All — absolutely all — the materials available as of 05.2021 can be found online for independent, deeper, and more detailed study and evaluation. Languages used: Russian should be enough, but English and German are desirable; VPN and DuckDuckGo are mandatory, according to the author (Russian Google is only slightly less biased and censored than Yandex); if you failed to find something, then you searched incorrectly.

Excellent comment!

Speaking about the brutality of armies and the people in them, one does not have to look far: it is enough to see the ferocity with which the Russian National Guard, Belarusian OMON, or the Ukrainian Berkut “performs its duty” — and that in peacetime against its own people. In wartime there is even less to discuss, when there is a satisfactory justification in the form of: “They are not human”; “This is revenge”; “They owe us”; “Might makes right”; “All responsibility lies with commanders and leaders”...

And whatever the “vatniks” say, Russia had its own inquisition too, and people were burned quite effectively, only secretly; peoples were destroyed village by village. One need only recall the campaign against the Uniate Church, which Russian historians disguise as “liberation” — the standard propaganda of conquerors.

Also regarding the Second World War, search for May 8, 1943, the village of Naliboki...

People are the same everywhere; neither language nor faith matters. In some places people acknowledge their history, and in others they reproduce it...

Fray Shost
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