What the USSR troops did to the people of Berlin, rubble and all, when the Soviets took the city, was brutal. Lots of elderly, children, women-oh, the women.
It was blood lust and revenge-but on largely the wrong people. One Soviet soldier raped a daughter, mother, and grandmother, in front of one of the boys-who was shot in mid-rape when he tried to intervene.
“During that first year of Soviet occupation in 1945, more than 100,000 women in Berlin were (apparently +/-50 percent). Combined with the German women caught in Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia during the mass exodus, the number of rape victims soars to roughly 2 million. Many of them subsequently committed suicide.”
Afterwards, people were marched off to the East or to the Gulags. Some Soviet army men were proud of “2 million of their children born in Germany.”
See: https://www.hoover.org/research/contest-brutality
And read some of the comments at the article, one from a student of child escapee who became one of his teachers.
If you can find images or footage of those who survived Berlin, you’ll see what I mean. Almost zombies.
Those poor German women.
Never mind those millions of Russian women, the deserved it!