Mass rapes by Allied forces during World War II
The mass rapes by Allied forces during and after World War II is considered one of the worst war crimes of military history. As Allied troops invaded Europe in 1945 from the East, the West and the South during the latter part of World War II, mass rapes took place, both during the invasions and the subsequent occupation that was to last many years.
Contents
History
Russians
Most numerous and notorious were the rapes committed by Soviet forces. At least two million German women were said to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rapes including some who were literally raped to death.
- Between the months of January and August of 1945, Germany saw the largest incident of mass rape known in history, where an estimated two million German women were raped by the Soviet Red Army soldiers, as written by Walter Zapotoczny Jr. in his book, ‘Beyond Duty: The Reason Some Soldiers Commit Atrocities’. Between the months of April and May, the German capital Berlin saw more than 100,000 rape cases according to hospital reports, while East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia saw more than 1.4 million rape cases. Hospital reports also stated that abortion operations were being carried out daily across all German hospitals. Natalya Gesse, who was a Soviet war correspondent at the time, said that the Soviets didn’t care about the ages of their victims. “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists,” she said. This caused the deaths of no less than 200,000 girls and women due to the spread of diseases, especially that many eyewitnesses recounted victims being raped as much as 70 times in that period. Red Army soldiers would mass rape German women as a kind of revenge against their enemy: The German army. They felt that it was their earned right to do so as the German army had ‘violated’ their motherland by invading it. In addition to not being in contact with women for long periods causing their animal instinct to be heightened. “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.” In his book, Zapotoczny said that even female Russian soldiers did not disapprove of the rapes, some finding it amusing. In 1948, rape cases decreased vastly after Soviet troops were ordered back to their camps in Russia and left residential areas in Germany.[3]
Nemmersdorf, one of countless examples
- In August 1944, news got out that in the East Prussian villages of Nemmersdorf and Goldap, the Red Army had raped, tortured and murdered all of the inhabitants down to the last baby. In Nemmersdorf, reporters from Switzerland and Sweden were present when the grisly atrocities were uncovered. In barns, houses and sheds where the Red Army had discovered civilians hiding, they had not only machine gunned them but had thrown hand grenades into the groups. 95 German civilians were murdered in this bestial fashion in the Nemmersdorf area of Schulzenwalde, above. Below: Swiss journalists photographed bodies of two raped and murdered German women and three children also murdered by the Red Army in Metgethen, East Prussia, another place of slaughter. This scene soon played out in West Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, the Sudetenland and other areas of eastern Europe. The Red Army was cajoled to behave in Germany “as Mongolian hordes of old” by Stalin’s propagandists, among whom was the grand master of hate, Ilya Ehrenburg, who encouraged troops to injure, torture, rape and kill all German civilians. As the violence spread, the only option for the endangered East Prussians was to flee, and they would face uncounted scenes of terror. [...] In the winter of 1945, East Prussia was cut off from the west, the only escape route for many being from the small port of Pillau and over the Baltic Sea toward the west. Throngs of desperate Königsberg civilians had only one way out, a frigid walk over half frozen lagoons to Frische Nehrung, a narrow slice of land, from where they hoped to reach Danzig. Almost a million people are said to have tried this perilous crossing. Survivors later recounted the hopelessness and horror of making this deadly trek in the dark as whole families pulling carts and sleds filled with children and the elderly slid into holes in the ice and plunged into the unforgiving sea. In daylight, Soviet planes circled overhead and intentionally cut off large ice floes with artillery fire, sending them hopelessly adrift. Those who escaped on land joined an endless parade of stunned, bereaved people on overflowing roadways. They witnessed whole cartloads of people crushed and mowed over by advancing Russian tanks, with wailing children and frantic mothers stretched for mile after mile of human misery. Unprepared for the 60 degree below zero wind chill and deep snow, some turned back home in despair. Blazing farms lit up the horizon, burned by the Red Army or set on fire by hopeless owners who then committed suicide. This was the “orderly and humane expulsion” of Germans that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin shook hands to. More than 1.9 million of nearly 2.4 million East Prussians joined by Germans from central Poland fled westward under horrible conditions. 173,000 people could not or would not leave. Later, researchers of the Federal Archives counted 3,300 locations just in areas they had access to where at least 120,000 German civilians were either shot or beaten to death by the Red Army.[4]
Komm, Frau (statue)
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The statue in Danzig called "Komm, Frau" (come, woman or come here, woman) featuring a typical Soviet "liberating" soldier raping a pregnant woman. He is holding her hair in his left hand as he puts a pistol into her mouth with his right. It appeared on Gdansk's Avenue of Victory on 12 October 2013. The artist Jeremy Szumczyk was then 26-years-old and a student at Gdansk's Academy of Fine Arts. He said, he felt compelled to create the sculpture after reading about barbaric Red Army soldiers raping millions of women between 1944 and 1945.
- The fifth-year student at Gdansk's Academy of Fine Arts was so emotionally affected by what he read he felt compelled to express his feelings through art and created the sculpture. But the Polish artist's attempt to pay tribute to the victims was short lived and the statue was removed this morning. Police spokeswoman Aleksandra Siewert said: 'The artist was detained and released after questioning. 'The matter will now be taken up on Monday by the prosecutor's office.' Before Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Gdansk was a free city and more than 95 per cent of people living in Gdansk at the time were German. But millions of German women were raped by Red Army soldiers between 1944 and 1945 during the dying days of Nazis Germany. Polish women and even Russian women released from captivity were also raped with numbers reaching 100,000. [...] The rape began as soon as the Red Army entered East Prussia in 1944. In many towns, every female between 10 and 89 was attacked. Soviet soldiers often carried out the assaults in front of their husbands and family as an added humiliation. A Red Army War Memorial in Berlin became known as the 'tomb of the unknown rapist'. Stalin explicitly condoned rape as a method of rewarding the soldiers and terrorising German civilians. His Police chief Lavrenti Beria was himself a serial rapist, a number of testimonies exist detailing how women and girls were grabbed off the streets and bundled into his limousine. It is believed that more than 100 school-aged girls and young women were drugged and raped by Beria 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 particularly sickening and systematic manner. Women were dragged out of their homes and raped in the street in front of their husbands who were forced to watch. Then more often than not the men were shot. As well as the estimated two million rapes in Germany, there were between 70,000 and 100,000 in Vienna and anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 in Hungary, as well as thousands more in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. There are even accounts of women who had been liberated from concentration camps, emaciated and still wearing prison uniforms, being raped by Russian soldiers. Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, wrote a book on the topic in which he recounts the extreme violence of many of the encounters. He wrote: 'Rape was often accompanied by torture and mutilation and frequently ends in the victim being shot or bludgeoned to death. The raging violence was undiscriminating.'[5]
Police removed the sculpture -- but the brave deed had already been done. According to the English-language Moscow Times, Russia's ambassador in Warsaw, Alexander Alexeyev, said he was "deeply outraged" and that Szumczyk had "defiled by his pseudo-art the memory of 600,000 Soviet servicemen who gave their lives in the fight for the freedom and the independence of Poland ." Alexeyev also called for an "appropriate reaction" from Polish authorities. The incident has stirred up much controversy in the media and on Internet forums. One person wrote that the sculpture is not an insult to Russian soldiers, but a silent scream of the victim. A proper memorial should be established, some added, perhaps at the Museum of World War II in Gdansk. In Russia, discussing the atrocious crimes of the Red Army against German women during and after World War II has remained largely taboo.
French, Negroes and Americans
Mass rapes, kidnappings and murders occurred during the capture of Stuttgart, Pforzheim, Rottweil, Freiburg im Breisgau, Freudenstadt and many other cities and communities in southern Germany. In Freudenstadt, Württemberg, French-Moroccan occupation soldiers of the 3rd Moroccan Spahi Regiment under French Major (later General) Christian de Castries violated the town's German girls and women between the ages of 8 and 80 for days. The 3rd Algerian Infantry Division, reinforced with Moroccan troops, also belonged to the 2nd French Army Corps. Part of this was the Leblanc combat group with the 1st and 4th Moroccan regiments. The 1st Regiment advanced from Bad Liebenzell-Schellbronn-Steinegg via Weil der Stadt and Magstadt to Vaihingen, the 4th via Simmozheim and Schafhausen to Magstadt and from there on to Sindelfingen and Böblingen. This 4th regiment was up to mischief in Magstadt on April 20, 1945. When the “soldiers” of the 4th Moroccan Regiment stormed into Magstadt on the evening of 20 April 1945, they viewed women and girls as personal prey.
- “However, no pen can put to paper what happened that night. Above all, our women and girls had to go through a lot of suffering. The Moroccans, who had previously apparently overdone themselves in a schnapps distillery in Schafhausen, were sometimes worse than animals. Approximately 260 rapes – medically confirmed – from confirmation candidates to the oldest woman, will always make this day, along with everything else, the most terrible that the parishioners had to endure physically and mentally." — Pastor Richard Tramer in his diary
When the French troops invaded the Böblingen and Tübingen districts, they came as “liberators”. For many women and girls, however, the end of the war did not mean liberation, because they were fair game, and the Negroes from North Africa were “suitors” who ripped up the German girls and bloodied them. Mass rapes were just as commonplace during the invasion as looting. A woman who lived in a remote house near Rohrau was raped in front of her small children. Thousands more desecrations are known from Merklingen (over 200 cases), Gärtringen, Hildrizhausen, Holzgerlingen, Maichingen, Nufringen, Steinenbronn, Weil im Schönbuch and Malmsheim.
In Stuttgart, white French officers also had violent pleasure with German women for weeks until even the Americans considered this too much and their leadership intervened. It was primarily Charles de Gaulle's “black hordes”, i.e. soldiers of North and Black African origin, who were responsible for the riots. The dark-skinned men were uncivilized and unbridled savages who invaded the idyllic German towns, insatiable and unrelenting in their desire for physical satisfaction. A contemporary witness from Alt-Waldenbuch reported soberly:
- “On the outskirts of town, the French were happily greeted by an Alsatian woman married in Waldenbuch, who was raped for the first time as a thank you. Then the people knew what was in store for them. And so it continues. The white French officers gave their Moroccan gang a few days off to loot and rape. A flock of sheep also fell into the hands of the rabble and so a large fire was lit on the street and the sheep were roasted after they had been slaughtered. Weeks later, a cart full of girls and women rolled into Tübingen so that the rape victims could be operated on in hospital.”
But in addition to the usual physical torture, dishonorable rape also occurred among the US troops, especially against women who were being interrogated. Shortly after landing in France, the US units had acquired a bad reputation, especially in their behavior towards local women, that the French longed for the Germans to return. In Germany they showed even fewer inhibitions. An example is provided by Johann Heilmeyer's affidavit from an interrogation by US personnel who pounced on a young woman whose hands were tied in the interrogation room, in his presence, and threatened that if she did not say what they wanted, they would be one for the night group of black US soldiers.
Edelwild witternd
In her verses “Scenting Noble Game” (Edelwild witternd), Emilie Leber, a young girl from St. Georgen in the Black Forest, describes the collective fear of sexual attacks by the French occupiers, because rape was not only commonplace in the Red Army's territory. In southwest Germany, the violent excesses of Freudenstadt were particularly burned into the collective memory, where immediately after the invasion, individual perpetrators and groups raged against civilians day and night. But as with the advance of the Red Army, the situation here also changed within a few weeks: after this phase of blind rage, the perpetrators acted in a more planned and coordinated manner. They now made sure that their crimes remained hidden and usually lay in wait for their victims under the cover of darkness. Evidence of such targeted attacks can be found in almost all areas of today's federal states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. The annals of the parish offices, which often kept more detailed records of the events than the state and local authorities, give an impression of the extent of the rapes.
The GIs who raped France
- The GIs who raped France: We know about the mass rape of German women by Stalin's soldiers. Now a new book reveals American troops committed thousands of rapes on French women they were 'liberating' [...] Many thousands of German women and girls, for example, were raped by Russian troops in the battle for Berlin at the end of World War II. Until now, we in the former Allied Western nations tend to regard rape as something carried out by countries other than ourselves. Through films such as Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day, we are conditioned to think of the Allied troops as being above such behaviour. However, an explosive new book published by an American academic sensationally debunks that myth. In What Soldiers Do, Professor Mary Louise Roberts of the University of Wisconsin argues that American GIs committed rape thousands of times during the War. And, more surprisingly still, many of their victims were French. As Professor Roberts says: ‘My book seeks to debunk an old myth about the GI, thought of as a manly creature that always behaved well — the GIs were having sex anywhere and everywhere.’ In total, it is estimated that some 14,000 women were raped by American GIs in Western Europe from 1942 to 1945. In France, 152 American soldiers were tried for rape, of whom 29 were hanged. But the statistics do not reveal the full story. There were undoubtedly thousands of rapes in France, many of which went unreported by the victims who were keen to avoid the dreadfully unfair stigma that rape carried with it during those days. But why did the Americans rape their allies? For the average GI, France was as much an ‘erotic adventure’ as a military expedition, and the war was, in part, ‘sold’ to conscripted soldiers as an opportunity to meet attractive French women. Many of the soldiers’ fathers had been in France during World War I, and had come back with lurid tales of the supposed looseness of French women. Their sons, now off to fight in the same land, regarded France as essentially a giant brothel, with thousands of nubile French girls eager to be taken by manly GIs. As Professor Roberts rightly observes, the average GI ‘had no emotional attachment to the French people or the cause of their freedom’. Magazines aimed at the troops such as Stars And Stripes showed pictures of cheering women during liberation parades, accompanied by headlines such as ‘Here’s What We’re Fighting For’. The magazine even published ‘useful’ French phrases, such as the translations for ‘I am not married’ and ‘You have charming eyes’. It was almost as if the magazine was telling the GIs: come and get it, boys. And that’s exactly what they did. Throughout the summer of 1944, from the moment they had pushed back the Germans during the D-Day landings in June, the Americans unleashed throughout northern France, in the words of Professor Roberts, a ‘tsunami of male lust’. ‘Normandy women launched a wave of rape accusations against American soldiers,’ Roberts writes, ‘threatening to destroy the erotic fantasy at the heart of the operation. The spectre of rape transformed the GI from rescuer-warrior to violent intruder’. Particularly badly affected was the port of Le Havre. One citizen wrote to the town’s mayor, Pierre Voisin, complaining of ‘crimes of all kinds, committed day and night’. The writer said that the GIs ‘attacked, robbed . . . both on the street and in our houses’ and were essentially ‘a regime of terror, imposed by bandits in uniform’. But the biggest problem was sex. GIs were copulating with every French woman they could get their hands on, willingly or not, and worse still, they were doing it in public. [...] Although we like to think of the men who freed Europe as members of the ‘greatest generation’, and that the Allies had fought a ‘good war’, as Professor Roberts shows, the true story is a lot more complicated and disturbing. Even today, there will be elderly women sitting on the other side of the Channel who close their eyes when they hear the word ‘liberation’.[6]
See Also
Further reading
- Austin J. App: Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe, 1946
- Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, Prussian Nights, Collins & Harvill, London, English translation, 1977, ISBN: 0-00-262649-9
- Krockow, Count Christian von, Hour of the Women, Faber & Faber, London, English translation, 1991, ISBN: 0-571-14320-2
- Beevor, Antony, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Viking Books, London, 2002, ISBN: 0-670-88695-5
- Benton L. Bradberry: The Myth of German Villainy, AuthorHouse, 2012, ISBN 978-1477231838 [454 p.]
- Huber, Florian, Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself - The Downfall of Ordinary Germans 1945, Allen Lane, London, English translation 2019, ISBN: 978-0-241-39924-8
External links
- 'They raped every German female from eight to 80'
- The 'Holocaust' Put in Perspective
- Stalin's army of rapists: The brutal war crime that Russia and Germany tried to ignore
- German women break their silence on the rape of Berlin
- Polish town tears down statue marking the rape of millions of German women by Russian soldiers
- Rape During WW2
- A Memorial for the Millions of German Women and Girls Who Were Raped and Pillaged by the WWII Allied “liberators” (Archive)
- German Woman Writes Ground-Breaking Account of WW2 Rape, Spiegel, 26 February 2010
- Starved, raped and made to eat pictures of Hitler, Daily Mail, 11 October 2013
References
- ↑ Picture source: Yad Vashem Photo Archive
- ↑ Liebschaften deutscher Besatzer im Zweiten Weltkrieg (in German)
- ↑ How German women suffered largest mass rape in history by Soviets, Al Arabiya Network, 11 March 2018
- ↑ The Sad Story of East Prussia
- ↑ Polish town tears down statue marking the rape of millions of German women by Russian soldiers, Daily Mail, 14 October 2013
- ↑ The GIs who raped France: American troops committed thousands of rapes on French women they were 'liberating' at Daily Mail (Archive)
