Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Stalin's army of rapists

Via Ryan

 

See also from 2011 RAPE OF GERMAN WOMEN: After Germany lost the Second World War 

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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.

For Russia, the episode besmirches the fine name of the Red Army that had fought so hard and suffered so much in its four-year campaign against the Wehrmacht.

The courage and resilience of the ordinary Russian in what they called the Great Patriotic War is incontestable, and for every five German soldiers killed in action in the whole of World War II, four died on the Eastern Front.

Yet the knowledge that the victorious Red Army committed mass rape across Prussia and eastern Germany as they closed in on Berlin degrades its reputation, which is unacceptable to many Russians today.

When the historian Antony Beevor wrote about it in his book Berlin: The Downfall, the Russian ambassador to London, Grigory Karasin, accused him of 'an act of blasphemy', saying: 'It is a slander against the people who saved the world from Nazism.'

Similarly, living Germans do not want the events that humiliated and violated them, their mothers and grandmothers to be held up to public examination, as this movie promises to do.

For many German women, the memory was something they sublimated and never spoke about to their husbands returning from the front.

It was the great unmentionable fact of 1945, which is coming out not just in history books, but in front of a mass, international audience. Painful memories of gross sexual abuse are being dragged out and held up to the pitiless witness of the silver screen.

More @ Daily Mail

7 comments:

  1. Very tough to even comment on this fact of WWII. Another horror heaped upon all the other horrors of that war.... of all wars quite frankly. "Soldiers" of all armies throughout history have used rape as a weapon to humiliate, subjugate, and enslave the peoples of the defeated army/state. Also rape was a means to impregnate the victims, thus ensuring the further humiliation of the vanquished enemies by giving birth to the offspring of the victors!
    War can easily reduce a man/women to their base, to the animal in them. Of all the horrors of war, sadly rape of innic

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  2. (comments sent before completely finished)
    Of all the horrors of war, sadly rape of innocent women/children is almost always an afterthought.

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  3. Here's how the world works:
    don't start nothing, won't be nothing.

    If you (I am addressing my imaginary opponent) don't want your wife and daughter to be raped by soldiers from a foreign land, don't send your son to kill THEIR wifes and daughters in THEIR land.
    And don't tolerate your government sending troops and drones there.

    If you sit on your ass, instead of impeaching or overthrowing your murderous .GOV, then be ready to live (or die) with the consequences.

    It's called "Karma", and it's known to be a bitch.

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  4. Real history happens in a context, as opposed to a standalone event. The Russians butchered Germans in East Prussia during WWI, and then the Soviets (a disproportionate amount of them Jews) butchered Russian, Ukrainian and ethnic German Christians before WWII. Most people, who have a cartoon version of history at best, forget this.

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