broken cogs
Anthony Beevor's latest work exposes another dark chapter of the Second World War.
The high cost of Soviet "liberation" is illuminated in Antony Beevor's latest work, "Berlin: The Downfall 1945." Beevor, a former army officer with Her Majesty's 11th Hussars, reports that "rape victims from [Berlin]'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."
The orgy of sexual violence committed by the Soviets in the closing hours of the war in Europe is one of the forgotten atrocities of Stalinism. Even today, veterans of the war refuse to acknowledge it happened - or are convinced that the Germans were willing partners. Beevor quotes one Soviet solider as bragging that "two million of our children were born [in Germany]."
Can this merely be explained away as blind acts of revenge against an enemy that four years before invaded Soviet lands, taking over four million prisoners of war? Evidence suggests otherwise. Not only German women, but Poles were attacked. Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian women captured by the Germans for slave labor were victimized as well.
Stalinist ideology suppressed any expression of individuality in order to create the Soviet New Man - homo sovieticus. A willing servant of the state, the New Man gained his esteem as a component of the great national machine, or so the theory went. In practice, clampdowns on free expression, newly strict sexual mores, and dehumanization of individual identity combined with an army whose foot soldiers were mostly comprised of uneducated draftees from Central Russia produced a wave of medieval carnage cynically justified as a moral crusade against fascism.
01.05.2002 © ljr