THE HUMAN PROBLEM: THE HIGH COST OF WAR PAID BY WOMEN
The Human Problem: The High Cost of War Paid by Women
Ilya Ehrenburg’s vicious propaganda machine had widely disseminated false reports of Nazi rape in Russia to ensure that the Red Army stormed into Germany with no pity. It worked. They committed the largest mass rape in history, with the girls and women of East Prussia bearing the first brunt of their brutality. Here, most females were gang raped and then murdered. “Tot den Deutschen Okkupaten!” (Death to the German Occupants) the victorious Soviet soldier cried, and regardless of age, German women and girls were taken without mercy. Thousands of women shuddered as the words “Frau komm!” grunted from the invading army, for it not only meant they were about to be violated, it might also mean torture or death of themselves, their mothers, grandmothers or daughters.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a young captain in the Red Army when it entered East Prussia in 1945. He wrote later in his book, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’: “All of us knew very well that if girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction.” He was arrested and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. Other Russian officers agreed with him and those who dared to report excesses of violence against civilians met a similar fate.
Scenes of sexual depravity and horror spread throughout the Eastern regions as rampantly as the diseases the criminals left behind. In Silesia, Red Army soldiers embarked upon another horrendous spree of rape so brutal that in one instance in Neisse, 182 Catholic nuns were raped by Red Army soldiers and in the diocese of Kattowitz, the soldiers left behind 66 pregnant nuns. In all German areas taken by the communists, civilians who were not exiled were subjected to brutality.
Master hate propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg told soldiers on January 31, 1945: “The Germans have been punished in Oppeln, in Königsberg and in Breslau. They have been punished, but yet not enough! Some have been punished, but not yet all of them.” In contrast to Ehrenberg’s rhetoric, rape was in truth a German military offense punishable by death. Rape by German troops was the smallest recorded in occupied territories and lower than that of US troops on US bases.
As the Red Army started its offensive toward Berlin during the spring of 1945, thousands of Germans from the east tried to cross the Oder River and flee westward, but there were too many, and many were trapped as they waited to be allowed to cross. As many as 20,000 girls and young women were stranded and at the mercy of the Red Army as they marched through in February.
Many were captured, lined up, with some singled out for immediate “pleasure,” then packed into trains headed for Siberia in April, 1945, some repeatedly raped while being transported and others dying along the way from lack of food and mistreatment. Once in Siberia, they were slave laborers forced to do heavy manual labor such road building, all the while enduring constant sexual abuse. Many of these women remained in Stalin’s work camps for up to five years, during which time two-thirds of them died. Some were sent to an infamous camp near Petrozavodsk in Karelia called Number 517. Once they arrived, they were paraded naked in front of the camp officials who would select favorites, promising lighter work in exchange for sex. “Stubborn prisoners” were subjected to solitary confinement, genital mutilation or murder. Of the 1,000 girls and women who were sent to that camp, over half, or 522 of them, died horrible deaths within six months.*
* In 1949, some surviving women, suffering from illness and severe emotional trauma, were transported back to eastern Germany but forbidden to talk about their experiences. Others waited 10 years for freedom. Once the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, some of former labor camp prisoners related their experiences only to find it was politically incorrect to “dwell” on such topics in modern Germany.
The Red Army entered Berlin first, seething with hatred and determined to exact vengeance, while the Americans and the British lagged behind to the west. They had two months to freely plunder and rape, and Berlin was a city virtually without men. The female population had swelled to 2,000,000 with thousands more refugee women who had fled there from the east. Up to a million females from ages 8 to 80 were believed to have been raped. Over 10,000 women and girls are recorded as having died as a result. There were so many rapes that doctors in the hospitals could not even treat them all.
On one occasion, when Stalin was told that Red Army soldiers sexually maltreated German refugees, he said: ‘We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have their initiative.’ In fact, Stalin’s police chief Lavrenti Beria was a serial rapist himself and he condoned rape as an instrument of state military policy.
Beria’s bodyguard, Russian actress Tatiana Okunevskaya, and an American diplomat all witnessed Beria grabbing German women off the street and shoving them into his limousine for his warped pleasure. It is claimed that this man who ran the NKVD, the feared forerunner to the KGB, drugged and raped more than 100 school-aged girls and young women.
In one notorious instance, Red Army soldiers entered the maternity hospital at Haus Dehlem and raped pregnant women, women who had just given birth, and women in the process of giving birth. The future Pope Paul VI lamented that in Berlin even nuns in habit were raped. Some women lived for weeks on rooftops trying to escape the violence. Thousands committed suicide as a result of sexual abuse, thousands of underage girls died as a result of violent injury and thousands of girls left pregnant would be left to virtually starve as the Allies blocked shipments of food from Berlin.
Heinz Voigtländer, a consulting surgeon at the hospital in Ludwigslust, said: “It was particularly dreadful... with the pregnancies that dated from the first half of 1945.... I remember a figure of 150 to 180 abortions that we had to carry out at that time. Frequently this was a matter of pregnancies in the fourth, fifth and even in the sixth month.... Sometimes, in the seventh or eighth month, this help no longer was possible. Then the nurses promised to look after the child after the birth. But once we observed that a woman left the hospital after the birth and drowned her child in the brook that flowed right by the hospital. We spoke as little as possible about these matters.”
As well as the astonishing estimate of well over a million Red Army rapes in Germany, there were between 70,000 and 100,000 in Vienna, anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 in Hungary, as well as thousands in Romania and Bulgaria, which had been pro-NS.
“In Berlin, in August 1945, out of 2,866 children born, 1148 died, and it was summer, and the food more plentiful than now. From Vienna, a reliable source reports that infant mortality is approaching 100 per cent.” US correspondent Dorothy Thompson
Rape was not the only violent abuse German women suffered. Throughout the regions of Germany given to the communists, women were treated with barbaric cruelty, and their suffering did not end in 1945.Those who could not or would not relinquish their homes to their new masters were persecuted.
To the surprise and horror of the trapped inhabitants, occupying Americans in war-torn east Germany proper “liberated” it just long enough to turn it all over to the Red Army for enslavement.
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