Warsaw, 1945. Forgive me if I don't shed any tears.
Posted on 01/18/2018 1:30:31 PM PST by GoldenState_Rose
The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts. The variety of character among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behaviour.
Beria and Stalin, back in Moscow, knew perfectly well what was going on from a number of detailed reports. One stated that "many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers". Numerous examples of gang rape were given - "girls under 18 and old women included".
Calls to avenge the Motherland, violated by the Wehrmacht's invasion, had given the idea that almost any cruelty would be allowed.
A number of other forces or influences were at work. Sexual freedom had been a subject for lively debate within Communist party circles during the 1920s, but during the following decade, Stalin ensured that Soviet society depicted itself as virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with genuine puritanism: it was because love and sex did not fit in with dogma designed to "deindividualise" the individual. Human urges and emotions had to be suppressed...
Most ill-educated Red Army soldiers suffered from sexual ignorance and utterly unenlightened attitudes towards women. So the Soviet state's attempts to suppress the libido of its people created what one Russian writer described as a sort of "barracks eroticism" which was far more primitive and violent than "the most sordid foreign pornography".
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
I know he’s not.
But when you start wars, these things can happen if it all goes badly.
I once met a lady who escaped Poland. She was the only female in her family not raped by soviets. One day, her parents pointed her east and said “go”.
She escaped by running past Soviet tanks. An American GI ran out and grabbed her to safety.
They could have been more like the Czechs, they didn’t bother with the raping, they just flat out murdered any Germans they found.
The Sudetenland won’t be giving them any problems anytime soon.
I read the same rumors over the years. Damn Ike held him and the Mighty 3rd Army in check due to politics. If Patton had his way, he would have beat the Russkies.
I read in one of his biographies that he was halted East of the Rhine. He was moving at the time.
We could have taken Berlin with minimal casualties.
But it was decided that the Russkies were to take it. They lost 100,000 men in the Battle of Berlin alone, when the war was pretty much over.
If it was the US Army, we could have pretty much taken it without a shot, or with minimal resistance. They would have been falling all over themselves to surrender to us.
Germans love to tell the story of WWII. One day, for reasons they never fully understood, the Soviets invaded and raped everybody.
It’s especially amazing considering how the krauts treated Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Latvian, Estonian, women. Basically for krauts it was sexual open season on everyone east of the Reich.
Anyway, lamenting their own suffering is a part of the German national sickness. If it isn’t the “Sorrows of you Werther”, it’s a dueling scar to show their suffering. Incredibly, the exterminating squads during the war were told that the reich knew their mass murdering duty was very heavy indeed, but that future generations would revere them for enduring this duty.
Germans love to suffer. So it’s best to ignore them when they whine.
And many innocent German women suffered for for it. It's easy to say "they deserved it", but it wasn't the SS getting raped.
His Army conquered and re-took more occupied lands than any army in history. His army was moving so fast that when they ran out of gas, he had “steal” gas for his tanks and trucks.
“Patton was right all along.”
It sounds like you may not have been a US infantryman in 1945, if you think a new war on the eastern front with us playing the role of the recently crushed Germans was a bright idea.
Exactly. They’re in a current war with the rags, Im sure this time they’re going for losing a third after starting 2 world wars.
We beat the Russians, it just took 45 years to do it.
Yes, you’re repeating progressive propaganda from the Guardian and liberals tend to do. I, on the other hand, have read about this issue extensively both from scholars and from first-hand accounts and most of the rapes were committed not by frontline troops, but by units of Communist Political commissars and Mongols who never seemed to show up until the fighting was done. Which leads me and others to believe that it was an organized system of political mass rape rather than the BS the Guardian put out.
Actually, the History Channel ran a British series about Churchill's relation with Stalin a few days ago, and the topic did come up. Stalin made public statements at a state dinner defending by minimizing the Russian behavior. He made a show of kissing his wife, and said he hoped he would not be accused of rape. Russian behavior was an open secret in 1945.
One interesting statistic: prior to and through the War suicide was almost unheard of among the largely Lutheran young women, 18-25 in East Prussia. In 1947, 10,000 women in this cohort group succumbed. It did not occur to the Russians how revealing this statistic would be.
The behavior of the Russian troops was anomalously grotesque in modern times.
And LIBERATED more people than any other civilization in history (just his Army alone).
The "western press" were communist. Walter Duranty and the New York Times were given a Pulitzer Prize for his pro-Stalin propaganda in 1931. OF COURSE the western press didn't report on Soviet communist atrocities. They had a long history of covering up Soviet communist atrocities. And as communists themselves, they had a vested interest in NOT doing anything to discredit communism.
The Russians were the biggest victims of Stalin JohnyBoy, not the Germans.
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