Nick Pehar Weaponized Rape Berlin 1945

Nick Pehar·
April 17, 2019
What happened in Berlin immediately after its fall in WW2?

Rape. Weaponised rape. Rape of almost biblical proportions. Mass rape of German women by Red Army
soldiers. It was much feared of in anticipation and, in the event, their worst fears were realised.
“Frau, komm!”
'They raped every German female from eight to 80'
“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.”
“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 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.’
Red Army soldiers raped their allies too, as for example after the liberation of Belgrade in 1944. When the
Yugoslav government representative in Moscow, Marshal Tito's deputy Milovan Djilas, complained to
Stalin about it, Stalin told him that “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”.
In his book Conversations with Stalin, Djilas later wrote, “According to complaints filed by citizens, there
were 121 cases of rape, of which 111 involved rape with murder, and 1,204 cases of looting with assault—
figures that are hardly insignificant if it is borne in mind that the Red Army crossed only the north-eastern
corner of Yugoslavia. These figures show why the Yugoslav leaders had to consider these incidents as a
political problem, all the more serious because it had become an issue in the domestic struggle. The
Communists also regarded this problem as a moral one. Could this be the ideal and long-awaited Red
Army?”
Ilya Ehrenburg, a Soviet author and war journalist, was blamed by many for what took place. In 1942, in a
Red Star newspaper article headed “Kill”, he had written:
“The Germans are not human beings…”
“…there is nothing more amusing to us than German corpses.”
“As for the German women, they

evoke in us only one feeling:
disgust. We despise the German
women for what they are—
mothers, wives and sisters of the
executioners. We despise the
German women for what they
wrote to their sons, husbands and
brothers, 'Send your honey a
pretty fur coat.’ We despise the
German women for what they
are: thieves and prostitutes.”
The above passage was included

in his book Vojna (The war),
Moscow, 1942–43.
Still, having opened the

proverbial Pandora's Box,
Ehrenburg appears to have had
some second thoughts. In 1945,
after the war crimes and mass rapes in East Prussia became known back in Moscow, Ehrenburg made a trip
to the front. On return, he spoke at the Frunze Military Academy and criticised Red Army officers for poor
political and moral preparation of soldiers and for the lack of stringent measures against rapists and looters.
Either way, Ehrenburg soon fell into official disgrace and was criticised by Georgy Alexandrov in Pravda
on 14 April 1945 (“Comrade Ehrenburg oversimplifies") [5]
. He responded in a letter to Stalin on the next day that he never meant wiping out the German people as a
whole, but only German aggressors.
ADDENDUM
When I first wrote this answer, I inadvertently used a wrong photo from the Internet as illustration. When
told about it, I changed it. Secondly, I answered the question as asked. Everybody knows, or should know,
that the Red Army was not the only army guilty of raping civilians.

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Nick Pehar·

April 17, 2019

What happened in Berlin immediately after its fall in WW2?

'They raped every German female from eight to 80'

“The Germans are not human beings…”

“…there is nothing more amusing to us than German corpses.”

“As for the German women, they

The above passage was included

Still, having opened the

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