Soviets murder 3.5 million German POWs & half a million ethnic German civilians in Gulags circa WW2

[LoneWolf79]

Full article....



Suppressed Colossal War Crime & Tragedy - Soviets murder 3.5 million German POWs & half a million ethnic German civilians in Gulags circa WW2
http://thy-weapon-of-war.blogspot.com/2 ... agedy.html






Excerpt:



Above 1953 article in the The Pittsburgh Press admits 2.8 million German POWs taken by the Soviet Union have died, and another 700,000 are still listed as "missing."

Only around 20,000 German POWs held in the Soviet Union would be repatriated to Germany after 1953.

The last surviving 10,000 German POWs were not released by the Soviets until 1955.

Thus, around 3.5 million German POWs perished while in Soviet captivity.

Source for above article
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=mX ... 5%2C188567







Knowledge is Power Forum:
http://newsfromatlantis.freeforums.org/index.php

[checkitb4uwreckit]

I've brought this up to people on many occasions and nobody I've talked to seems to have even the slightest sympathy for Germans. They've been so inoculated to hate Germans via Jewish Holohoax propaganda for so many years that nobody other than Jews matters to them. The Jewish Media Machine has turned Gentiles into rabid Zionists who want to bite your head off if you dare criticize the chosen ones or bring up the suffering of Gentile peoples at the hands of these bloodthirsty Jews. Makes me sick to my stomach!

[pas]

Checkitb4uwreckit wrote :

I've brought this up to people on many occasions and nobody I've talked to seems to have even the slightest sympathy for Germans

I have the same experiences in my country (Holland) and last week i found myself defending German WWII actions towards England  to a German guy who's granddad was an SS.
He said: ''Hitler shouldn't have given the orders to bomb England" i replied that England started with the bombing of German cities thus the German reply was definately called for in my opinion.

Thanks for posting the article, LoneWolf.This hidden part of history i find very interesting, exellent find.

[LoneWolf79]

It is more well known that the Western Allies also murdered around 1 to 1.5 million German POWs in POW camps where they left the Germans in open fields with no access to food, water, or shelter.

This was a deliberate genocide under the "Morgenthau Plan" (a plan to sterilize and kill the German population after the war as a "preventative measure" to the Germans "starting a new war in the future").  Henry Morgenthau was the (Jewish) US Treasury Secretary to (Jewish) President Franklin Roosevelt.   Jewish General Dwight Eisenhower implemented the plan, in which hundreds of thousands of Germans, including women and common citizens, were rounded up by the U.S. military and placed in open field camps without access to food, water, and shelter -- and left to die.

A Real "holocaust" of WWII - The post-war genocide of at least three million Germans by the Western Allies - Eisenhower's Death Camps
http://thy-weapon-of-war.blogspot.com/2 ... t-war.html





Also, at least 2 million ethnic Germans were killed in "ethnic cleansing" following the war, when millions of ethnic Germans were driven out of their ancestral homelands in Eastern Europe in places such as Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and land taken from Germany and now part of Poland and Czechoslovakia.

The Post-WWII Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950; Estimated 2 Million Ethnic Germans Die in Expulsions
http://thy-weapon-of-war.blogspot.com/2 ... -east.html





Of futher note is that the Allied fire-bombing of German cities was a monstrous war crime, deliberately designed to kill German civilians (men, women, and children) in mass as a "psychological weapon" in order to terrorize the German nation.  Historians now admit at least 600,000 Germans were killed in those raids -- including the bombing of cities such as Hamburg and Dresden.

Historian acknowledges Britain fire-bombed German cities in WWII for purpose of mass civilian deaths and terror, killing at least 600,000
http://thy-weapon-of-war.blogspot.com/2 ... ombed.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

From what I've found so far in researching my German side post-1850... a few of my distant German "cousins" were killed in Russia... thanks to the the Jews...

and don't forget this aspect as well...  --CSR

Friday, November 7, 2008
Unspeakable Atrocities - New German film on the greatest mass rape in history - 2 million German women raped by the Judeo-Bolsheviks from 1945-49





    "Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil! Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army."

    —Jewish Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg, in a leaflet distributed to Soviet soldiers upon entering Germany in 1945









    Stalin's army of rapists: The brutal war crime that Russia and Germany tried to ignore

    By Andrew Roberts
    Daily Mail
    24th October 2008

    Relations between Russia and Germany have not been good since Vladimir Putin's nationalist sabre-rattling this summer, but they are about to get a whole lot worse.

    A new film about to be released in Germany will force both countries to re-examine part of their recent history that each would much prefer to forget. Yet it is right that the ghastly truth should finally be acknowledged.

    The movie, A Woman In Berlin, is based on the diary of the German journalist Marta Hillers and depicts the horror of the Red Army's capture of the capital of the Third Reich in April and May 1945.

    Marta was one of two million German women who were raped by soldiers of the Red Army - in her case, as in so many others, several times over.

    It was a feature of Russia's 'liberation' and occupation of eastern Germany at the end of World War II that is familiar enough to historians, but which neither country cares to acknowledge took place on anything like the scale it did.

    [...]

    In his fine new book, World War Two: Behind Closed Doors, the historian Laurence Rees points out that although rape was officially a crime in the Red Army, in fact, Stalin explicitly condoned it as a method of rewarding the soldiers and terrorising German civilians.

    Stalin said people should ' understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle'.

    On another occasion, when told that Red Army soldiers sexually maltreated German refugees, he said: 'We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have their initiative.'

    While Stalin condoned rape as an instrument of state military policy, his police chief Lavrenti Beria was a serial rapist.

    An American diplomat, Beria's bodyguard and the Russian actress Tatiana Okunevskaya all bore witness of his methods of grabbing women off the street and shoving them into his limousine and then his bed.

    'You are a long way from anywhere, so whether you scream or not does not matter,' Beria would tell the women when he got them back to his dacha. 'You are in my power now. So think about that and behave accordingly.'

    More than 100 school-aged girls and young women were drugged and raped by the man who ran the NKVD, the feared forerunner to the KGB.

    [...]

    The Red Army's atrocities against women in Dresden in the spring of 1945, a city that had already suffered heavily from Allied bombing, were carried out in a sickeningly systematic manner.

    'In the house next to ours, Soviet troops went in and pulled the women on to the street, had their mattresses pulled out and raped the women,' recalled one inhabitant, John Noble.

    'The men had to watch, and then the men were shot. Right at the end of the street, a woman was tied to a wagon wheel and terribly misused.

    'Of course, you had the feeling that you wanted to stop it, but there was no possibility to do that.' Women going to and from work past Red Army pickets were routinely raped.

    The historian Chris Bellamy believes that although there are no surviving written records to prove it, 'the hideous spectre of multiple rape was not only condoned, but, we can be pretty sure, legally sanctioned by the political officers speaking for the Soviet government'.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... nore.html#

 
Over 2 million German Women Raped...

App's "Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe"

Kevin Alfred Strom

K.A. StromOne of this century's greatest crimes, and probably one of the greatest crimes against women in history, was the mass rape of the conquered women of Europe after the Judeo-Communist victory there in 1945. The rapists were mainly Red Army soldiers, some of them non-White troops from the Far East and Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union. But I am sorry to say that many of the rapists were men of our own race, and some were Americans. They were brutes no doubt, but they were permitted and encouraged to indulge their lower than bestial urges by official "Allied" policies which incited hatred particularly against the Germans, but also against those of other European nationalities which were then allied with Germany in an anti-Communist bloc. One cannot contemplate this great mass orgy of rape, gang rape, and sexual slavery of innocent women and little girls without revulsion. It would be easy for you to toss this newsletter aside and pickup more pleasant or amusing reading. But if you want to know the truth about one of the darkest secrets of our present establishment, a horrible crime against women about which the Politically Correct feminists are strangely silent, then I urge you to read on.

I claim no originality for the documentation or recounting of this ghastly crime perpetrated mainly by what Franklin Roosevelt called "our noble Soviet ally." We are indebted to Dr. Austin J. App, a professor and scholar of English literature at Catholic University, the University of Scranton, and LaSalle College, among others, who risked career and livelihood to bring these truths to light. In April, 1946, when he published the work upon which this article is based, entitled Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe, he was a lone voice crying out for justice in an America still high on war propaganda and on a "victory" that in the later Cold War years and after would be seen clearly as a defeat for America and the West as much as it was for Germany.

As the Red Army advanced toward her in 1945, the city of Berlin had become a city virtually without men. Out of a civilian population of 2,700,000, 2,000,000 were women. It is small wonder that the fear of sexual attack raced through the city like a plague. Doctors were besieged by patients seeking information on the quickest way to commit suicide, and poison was in great demand.

In Berlin stood a charity institution, the Haus Dehlem, an orphanage, maternity hospital, and foundling home. Soviet soldiers entered the home, and repeatedly raped pregnant women and women who had just given birth. This was not an isolated incident. No one will ever know how many women were raped, but doctors' estimates run as high as 100,000 for the city of Berlin alone, their ages ranging from 10 to 70.

On March 24, 1945, our "noble Soviet allies" entered Danzig. A 50-year-old Danzig teacher reported that her niece, 15, was raped seven times, and her other niece, 22, was raped fifteen times. A Soviet officer told a group of women to seek safety in the Cathedral. Once they were securely locked inside, the beasts of Bolshevism entered, and ringing the bells and playing the organ, "celebrated" a foul orgy through the night, raping all the women, some more than thirty times. A Catholic pastor in Danzig declared, "They violated even eight-year-old girls and shot boys who tried to shield their mothers."

The Most Reverend Bernard Griffin, British Archbishop, made a tour of Europe to study conditions there, and reported, "In Vienna alone they raped 100,000 women, not once but many times, including girls not yet in their teens, and aged women."

A Lutheran pastor in Germany, in a letter of August 7, 1945, to the Bishop of Chichester, England, describes how a fellow pastor's "two daughters and a grandchild (ten years of age) suffer from gonorrhea, [as a] result of rape" and how "Mrs. N. was killed when she resisted an attempt to rape her," while her daughter was "raped and deported, allegedly to Omsk, Siberia, for indoctrination."

The day after our noble Soviet allies conquered Neisse, Silesia, 182 Catholic nuns were raped. In the diocese of Kattowitz 66 pregnant nuns were counted. In one convent when the Mother Superior and her assistant tried to protect the younger nuns with outstretched arms, they were shot down. A priest reported in Nord Amerika magazine for November 1, 1945, that he knew "several villages where all the women, even the aged and girls as young as twelve, were violated daily for weeks by the Russians."

Sylvester Michelfelder, a Lutheran pastor, wrote in the Christian Century: "Bands of irresponsible bandits in Russian or American uniforms pillage and rob the trains. Women and girls are violated in sight of everyone. They are stripped of their clothes."

On April 27, 1946 Vatican Radio charged that in the Russian occupation zone of Eastern Germany cries of help are going up "from girls and women who are being brutally raped and whose bodily and spiritual health is completely shaken."

The rapists did not all wear a red star. John Dos Passos, writing in Life magazine for January 7, 1946, quotes a "red-faced major" as saying that "Lust, liquor and loot are the soldier's pay." A serviceman wrote to Time magazine for November 12, 1945 "Many a sane American family would recoil in horror if they knew how 'Our Boys' conduct themselves, with such complete callousness in human relationships over here." An army sergeant wrote "Our own Army and the British Army ... have done their share of looting and raping ... This offensive attitude among our troops is not at all general, but the percentage is large enough to have given our Army a pretty black name, and we too are considered an army of rapists."

An Italian survivor of American bombing states that Black American troops, stationed in Naples, were allowed by their superiors free access to poor, hungry, and humiliated Italian women. The result of this interracial rape and sexual slavery was the production of a generation of pitiable mixed-race children, a legacy of the brutal conqueror.

According to an AP dispatch of September 12, 1945, entitled "German- American Marriages Forbidden", the Franklin Roosevelt government instructed its soldiers that marriage with the inferior Germans was absolutely forbidden, but those having illegitimate children by German women, whose husbands and boyfriends were conveniently dead or held as prisoners or slave laborers, could count on allowance money. And, according to Time magazine of September 17, 1945, the government provided these soldiers with an estimated 50 million condoms per month, and graphically instructed them as to their use. For all practical purposes, our soldiers were being told: "Teach these Germans a lesson -- and have a wonderful time!" Such were the great crusaders who brought "democracy" to Europe.

For the Americans and British, open rape was not as common as among the Soviet troops. The Soviets simply raped any female from eight years up and if a German man or woman killed a Russian soldier for anything, including rape, 50 Germans were killed for each incident, as reported in Time magazine, June 11, 1945. But for most of our boys, having that "wonderful time" depended a great deal on the "cooperation" of the German and Austrian women. From the starving and the homeless, of course, sexual "cooperation" could be bought for a few pennies or a mouthful of food. I don't think we ought to dignify this arrangement with any other than its true name of sexual slavery.

The Christian Century for December 5, 1945 reported "the American provost marshal, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald F. Beane, said that rape presents no problem for the military police because a bit of food, a bar of chocolate, or a bar of soap seem to make rape unnecessary. Think that over, if you want to understand the situation in Germany." The Weekly Review of London, for October 25, 1945, described it thus: "Young girls, unattached, wander about and freely offer themselves for food or bed ... very simply, they have one thing left to sell, and they sell it ... as a way of dying it may be worse than starvation, but it will put off dying for months -- or even years."

Dr. George N. Shuster, president of Hunter College, wrote in the Catholic Digest of December 1945 after a visit to the American Zone of occupation, "You have said it all when you say that Europe is now a place where woman has lost her perennial fight for decency because the indecent alone live." By official policy, the Allies created conditions in which the only German mothers who could keep their young children alive were those who themselves or whose sisters became mistresses of the occupying troops. Our own officials admittedly brought the Germans down to a total daily food intake less than that of an American breakfast, a level which leads to slow but sure death unless relieved.

According to testimony given in the United States Senate on July 17, 1945, when the colonial French troops under Eisenhower's command, presumably mostly Africans, entered the German city of Stuttgart, they herded German women into the subways and raped some two thousand of them. In Stuttgart alone, troops under Eisenhower's command raped more women in one week than troops under German command raped in all of France for four entire years. In fact, of all the major belligerents in World War II, the German troops had by far the smallest record of rape and looting. The German army's incidence of rape in all of Germany's occupied territories was even lower than that of American troops stationed on American soil!

According to the International News Service in London, January 31, 1946, when American soldier's wives were brought to Germany, they were given special authorization to wear military uniforms because "the GIs did not want their wives mistaken for Fraeuleins by other occupation troops." A writer for the New York World Telegram January 21, 1945 stated "Americans look on the German women as loot, just like cameras and Lugers." Dr. G. Stewart, in a health statement submitted to General Eisenhower, reported that in the first six months of American occupation, venereal disease jumped to twenty times its former level in Germany.

I want you imagine an orgy of rape like this happening in your country, in your neighborhood, to your family, to your wife, your sister, your daughter. I want you to imagine what it would feel like to be totally powerless to stop it from happening, completely unable to bring the criminals to justice. And I want to ask you, were there ever any "war crimes" or "hate crimes" trials of these butchers and rapists and inciters to butchery and rape? We in America are very good at raining "smart bombs" on our adversaries, and in violently enforcing the dictates of the United Nations on faraway peoples that our press have vilified. But we have really been very insulated from the horrors of mass warfare on our own territory.

MorgenthauFew today remember that in the 1940s, the Allies, who even then were calling their world-government-in-the-making the "United Nations," were pursuing a policy of unconditional surrender, which meant that the Germans would be obligated to accept an occupation government whose announced intentions, the infamous and genocidal Morgenthau Plan, would have reduced Germany to medieval conditions and cut her population by enforced starvation. Go to a large library and check out Secretary Morgenthau's book, Germany Is Our Problem, Harper and Brothers, 1945. You will note the use of the term "United Nations" on the front flyleaf and in the foreword by Franklin D. Roosevelt. A prominent Jewish writer in America, Theodore Kaufman, had in 1941 written a book entitled Germany Must Perish, which advocated the extermination of all Germans by sterilization. Kaufman's book received favorable reviews in major American magazines and newspapers. Other books, such as Louis Nizer's What To Do With Germany, also contributed to this atmosphere of strident anti-German hatred. War propaganda and official policy combined to create an image of the German as sub-human and deserving of almost infinite punishment if not annihilation. [Image: Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR's Jewish Secretary of State.]

Churchill said to the Germans in January, 1945, "We Allies are no monsters. This, at least, I can say, on behalf of the United Nations, to Germany ... Peace, though based on unconditional surrender, will bring to Germany and Japan immense and immediate alleviation of suffering and agony."

Against that false claim the late Dr. Austin App proclaimed the truth: Those Allies who were "no monsters" literally raped more European women than had ever before been raped in the history of the world. They put Germany on a starvation-level diet. Under direct orders from Dwight Eisenhower, they killed more than a million German POWs. They looted 12 million people of their homes, goods, food, and even clothes and drove them from their homelands. They took one-fourth of their farmland, they took their ships and their factories and their farm implements and then told them to live by farming. They abused and starved to death more German babies than there ever were Jews in Germany. They raped and debauched hundreds of thousands of German, Austrian, and Hungarian girls and women from eight to eighty. They brought to their death five times as many Germans in one year of peace as died during five years of war. Yes, yes, of course, these men of the United Nations, these men of the New World Order are no monsters.

Quite apart from any ethnic or ideological considerations, World War II was a war between, on the one side, the elitists who created Communism as a way-station on the road to their New World Order; and on the other, those who opposed that New World Order. It is a tragedy of millennial proportions that America and Britain were induced to fight on the side of Communism and Communism's masters.

Free Speech -- April 1994.

http://www.library.flawlesslogic.com/massrape.htm

[Anonymous]

CrackSmokeRepublican, that is pretty normal in war, the victors usually go into a place they conquered and rape the women and kill the men left over. It is natural selection and is how man evolved. My issue with it is all the lying after the war and these things not brought to light. All I can say is if you lose a war, it is hell and the germans are lucky they weren't all executed.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

CrackSmokeRepublican, that is pretty normal in war, the victors usually go into a place they conquered and rape the women and kill the men left over. It is natural selection and is how man evolved. My issue with it is all the lying after the war and these things not brought to light. All I can say is if you lose a war, it is hell and the germans are lucky they weren't all executed.

Germany, Iraq, Lebanon, Armenia, ad naseum... it's Jew Deception at the root of it all... pure evil as far as I'm concerned. Germany had "Civilization" and that is paramount, and far above all Jewish instigated bestiality in Europe... and a sword of Honor must touch the stone of Truth.. does it not?  --CSR

-----

They raped every German female from eight to 80'

Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed new book about the fall of Berlin, on a massive war crime committed by the victorious Red Army.  

    The Guardian, Tuesday 30 April 2002
    Article history

"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women," wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis."

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".

Marshal Rokossovsky issued order No 006 in an attempt to direct "the feelings of hatred at fighting the enemy on the battlefield." It appears to have had little effect. There were also a few arbitrary attempts to exert authority. The commander of one rifle division is said to have "personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up a group of his men before a German woman spreadeagled on the ground". But either officers were involved themselves, or the lack of discipline made it too dangerous to restore order over drunken soldiers armed with submachine guns.

Calls to avenge the Motherland, violated by the Wehrmacht's invasion, had given the idea that almost any cruelty would be allowed. Even many young women soldiers and medical staff in the Red Army did not appear to disapprove. "Our soldiers' behaviour towards Germans, particularly German women, is absolutely correct!" said a 21-year-old from Agranenko's reconnaissance detachment. A number seemed to find it amusing. Several German women recorded how Soviet servicewomen watched and laughed when they were raped. But some women were deeply shaken by what they witnessed in Germany. Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent. "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty," she recounted later. "It was an army of rapists."

Drink of every variety, including dangerous chemicals seized from laboratories and workshops, was a major factor in the violence. It seems as if Soviet soldiers needed alcoholic courage to attack a woman. But then, all too often, they drank too much and, unable to complete the act, used the bottle instead with appalling effect. A number of victims were mutilated obscenely.

The subject of the Red Army's mass rapes in Germany has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened. The handful prepared to speak openly, however, are totally unrepentant. "They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed," said the leader of one tank company. He even went on to boast that "two million of our children were born" in Germany.

The capacity of Soviet officers to convince themselves that most of the victims were either happy with their fate, or at least accepted that it was their turn to suffer after what the Wehrmacht had done in Russia, is striking. "Our fellows were so sex-starved," a Soviet major told a British journalist at the time, "that they often raped old women of sixty, seventy or even eighty - much to these grandmothers' surprise, if not downright delight."

One can only scratch at the surface of the psychological contradictions. When gang-raped women in Königsberg begged their attackers afterwards to put them out of their misery, the Red Army men appear to have felt insulted. "Russian soldiers do not shoot women," they replied. "Only German soldiers do that." The Red Army had managed to convince itself that because it had assumed the moral mission to liberate Europe from fascism it could behave entirely as it liked, both personally and politically.

Domination and humiliation permeated most soldiers' treatment of women in East Prussia. The victims not only bore the brunt of revenge for Wehrmacht crimes, they also represented an atavistic target as old as war itself. Rape is the act of a conqueror, the feminist historian Susan Brownmiller observed, aimed at the "bodies of the defeated enemy's women" to emphasise his victory. Yet after the initial fury of January 1945 dissipated, the sadism became less marked. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin three months later, its soldiers tended to regard German women more as a casual right of conquest. The sense of domination certainly continued, but this was perhaps partly an indirect product of the humiliations which they themselves had suffered at the hands of their commanders and the Soviet authorities as a whole.

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. Freud's work was banned, divorce and adultery were matters for strong party disapproval. Criminal sanctions against homosexuality were reintroduced. The new doctrine extended even to the complete suppression of sex education. In graphic art, the clothed outline of a woman's breasts was regarded as dangerously erotic. They had to be disguised under boiler suits. The regime clearly wanted any form of desire to be converted into love for the party and above all for Comrade Stalin.

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". All this was combined with the dehumanising influence of modern propaganda and the atavistic, warring impulses of men marked by fear and suffering.

The novelist Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent attached to the invading Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did young Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women who had been sent back to Germany by the Wehrmacht for slave labour. "Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them," he noted. "One girl said to me in tears: 'He was an old man, older than my father'."

The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian attempts to justify Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union. On March 29 1945 the central committee of the Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Soviet Union) informed Stalin's associate Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. "On the night of 24 February," General Tsygankov recorded in the first of many examples, "a group of 35 provisional lieutenants on a course and their battalion commander entered the women's dormitory in the village of Grutenberg and raped them."

In Berlin, many women were simply not prepared for the shock of Russian revenge, however much horror propaganda they had heard from Goebbels. Many reassured themselves that, although the danger must be great out in the countryside, mass rapes could hardly take place in the city in front of everybody.

In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. The officers and their men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on behind. Their prediction proved entirely accurate. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity.

Yet within a couple of days, a pattern emerged of soldiers flashing torches in the faces of women huddled in the bunkers to choose their victims. This process of selection, as opposed to the indiscriminate violence shown earlier, indicates a definite change. By this stage Soviet soldiers started to treat German women more as sexual spoils of war than as substitutes for the Wehrmacht on which to vent their rage.

Rape has often been defined by writers on the subject as an act of violence which has little to do with sex. But that is a definition from the victim's perspective. To understand the crime, one needs to see things from the perpetrator's point of view, especially in the later stages when unaggravated rape had succeeded the extreme onslaught of January and February.

Many women found themselves forced to "concede" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, was dragged from a cupboard in her apartment just off the Kurfürstendamm. A very young soldier from central Asia hauled her out. He was so excited at the prospect of a beautiful young blonde that he ejaculated prematurely. By sign language, she offered herself to him as a girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers, but he went off to boast to his comrades and another soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda's, was also raped. When other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, they received the retort: "Frau ist Frau."

Women soon learned to disappear during the "hunting hours" of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night. It was impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in.

Estimates of rape victims from the city's two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.

If anyone attempted to defend a woman against a Soviet attacker it was either a father trying to defend a daughter or a young son trying to protect his mother. "The 13-year old Dieter Sahl," neighbours wrote in a letter shortly after the event, "threw himself with flailing fists at a Russian who was raping his mother in front of him. He did not succeed in anything except getting himself shot."

After the second stage of women offering themselves to one soldier to save themselves from others, came the post-battle need to survive starvation. Susan Brownmiller noted "the murky line that divides wartime rape from wartime prostitution". Soon after the surrender in Berlin, Ursula von Kardorff found all sorts of women prostituting themselves for food or the alternative currency of cigarettes. Helke Sander, a German film-maker who researched the subject in great detail, wrote of "the grey area of direct force, blackmail, calculation and real affection".

The fourth stage was a strange form of cohabitation in which Red Army officers settled in with German "occupation wives". The Soviet authorities were appalled and enraged when a number of Red Army officers, intent on staying with their German lovers, deserted when it was time to return to the Motherland.

Even if the feminist definition of rape purely as an act of violence proves to be simplistic, there is no justification for male complacency. If anything, the events of 1945 reveal how thin the veneer of civilisation can be when there is little fear of retribution. It also suggests a much darker side to male sexuality than we might care to admit.

© Antony Beevor.
http://www.antonybeevor.com

· Berlin: The Downfall 1945 is published by Viking Penguin.The BBC Timewatch film about researching the book will be shown on BBC2 at 9pm on May 10.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/ma ... features11