Grandfathers-Rapists, or the Myth of the “Liberator Warriors.” A Typical Russian Imperial Character

Author: Oleksandr Prokopiv
Designer: Viktoriia Farbota
Published: 8 May 2025

“Grandfathers-Rapists, or the Myth of the ‘Liberator Warriors.’ A Typical Russian Imperial Character.”

1. Let us begin with the well-known diary of Vladimir Gelfand

He spent his entire life in the USSR and later helped defend these women. Soviet soldiers were forbidden to keep diaries, but Vladimir Gelfand kept notes from 1941 until the end of the war. This is what the author wrote on 25 April 1945:

“They stuck it in here,” the pretty German woman explained, lifting her skirt, “all night, and there were so many of them. I was a virgin,” she sighed and burst into tears. “They ruined my youth. There were old men among them, pockmarked men, and everyone climbed onto me, everyone stuck it in. There were at least twenty of them, yes, yes,” and she dissolved into tears.

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

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

2. Mikhail Koryakov

An officer who did not return to the USSR after the end of the Second World War but left behind an interesting autobiographical narrative. Below are excerpts from it (M. Koryakov, Liberated Souls):

On looting: “In one tank division the vehicles were inspected: the tanks turned out to be so crammed with looted junk that there was no room to turn around inside them — in the event of a sudden attack, the crews would not have been able to fight.”

Mikhail then writes about the Soviet army’s “valor”: in the Red Army in the spring of 1945 there was a joke — watches for the first echelon, girls for the second, junk for the third.

“Upstairs, above the ceiling, women’s screams and children’s crying rang out. Agitated, I began getting dressed. The girl and the elderly Wünschs begged me not to go up there: they would kill me! The previous night an officer of the city commandant’s office had been killed when he tried to stop the violence. All night long we listened in fear to the screams of the unfortunate women, the crying of children, and the pounding, pounding of heavy soldiers’ boots over our heads.

“(...) I learned something terrible: over three weeks she had ultimately been raped by no fewer than 250 people! Frau Wünsch had also been raped, even in front of her husband. Two soldiers raped the half-blind, dried-up Frau Simon.”

For the sake of fairness, it should be said that Soviet soldiers were not the only ones who looted and raped; the Allies were not entirely uninvolved either. But, according to the article, it was the Soviet army that made violence against and killing of civilians mass phenomena.

Foreigners also described the looting

For example, British historian Antony Beevor, in his book The Fall of Berlin 1945, describes the treatment of the population of occupied Germany: columns of refugees were crushed by tanks and fired upon from the air, while women and girls were raped and left to die. Antony Beevor states that about 1.4 million women were raped in Pomerania, East Prussia and Silesia.

The recollections quoted above are, unfortunately, only the beginning, the article says. A separate Viasat History film, Berlin 1945, was made on the basis of the diaries of Berlin women; it contains hundreds of such stories and, by other estimates, the number ran into the hundreds of thousands. The author argues that this proves the Red Army liberated no one in Europe and was an occupier just like the Third Reich.

Here is one German woman’s testimony about how Soviet soldiers “liberated” a twelve-year-old girl:

“In Legnica, a large city near Breslau, things were no better. There was weeping in my aunt’s house: her granddaughter was dying. On a sofa, in sheets, I saw a girl of about twelve, with a thin, transparent face and large gray eyes like Lenchen’s.

“The girl had been raped by a soldier of the second echelon, and a few days later soldiers of the third echelon burst into the apartment. Slipping out of their hands, the girl ran up the steep stairs, lost her footing and fell.”

Another testimony about the crimes of the “liberators” is found in Marta Hillers’s diary A Woman in Berlin, which the article also quotes.

On looting

“(...) several more heroes came into our cellar, looking not for women but for watches. Later I saw one Ivan with an entire watch collection on both wrists, five or six of them, which he constantly aligned, tightened and adjusted with a childlike thief’s delight.”

But the author’s account did not end there. The Bolsheviks, the article says, decided to rape her as well. The following is how the diary’s author described being “liberated”:

“One of them pulls me farther up by the wrist. Now another one pulls too, while placing his hand on my throat so that I can no longer scream, and I no longer want to scream for fear of being strangled. Both tear at everything on me; I am already lying on the ground. Something rattles in the pocket of my jacket. It must be the house keys, my bunch of keys. They have pressed my head against the lowest step of the cellar stairs; I feel cool wet streams running down my back.

“Above, in the crack of the door through which a little light falls, I see one of the men keeping watch while the other tears my underwear and forces his way in. With my left hand I grope around until at last I find the bunch of keys. I clutch it tightly with the fingers of my left hand.

“With my right I defend myself, but nothing helps; he simply tore the suspenders. When I try to rise, staggering, the second man pulls me toward him and with his fists forces me down onto my knees on the ground. Now the other keeps watch and whispers: ‘Quickly, quickly…’”

The article adds that this does not even address how the “liberators” raped Slavic women who had been taken to the Third Reich as Ostarbeiter, or crimes in the “liberated territories” of Ukraine and Poland. What was the leadership’s reaction? Stalin issued an order prohibiting looting and violence, but commanders concealed crimes committed by their subordinates and, the author says, even took part themselves. Historian Antony Beevor, who studied the crimes of the “liberators,” called the events in Germany “the greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history.”

The scale of the catastrophe

The figures considered most realistic are 100,000 women in Berlin and two million throughout Germany. These numbers come from medical records that survived only in very fragmentary form. A BBC report cites data on abortions in Berlin. Abortions were generally prohibited, but for a short period after the war they were permitted because of the mass rape of German women. From June 1945 through 1946, in one district of Berlin alone, 995 requests for abortion were approved. One girl, writing in a rounded childlike hand, stated that she had been raped at home in the living room in front of her parents.

According to some historians, German women raped by Soviet soldiers later gave birth to approximately 300,000 children.

Conclusions

The article argues that 8 May is not a victory but a terrible legacy for the world, one that must be remembered so that it is not repeated. Why speak about this now? The author’s answer is obvious: the Russian army, during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, behaves in the same way. Taking the mythical “denazification” as its central idea and pretext for war, it continues to loot and rape civilians. The victims of Russian servicemen are, the article says, not only women but also very young children and elderly people. Today the Security Service of Ukraine intercepts many conversations of occupying troops from which, the author argues, it can be understood that history is repeating itself.

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