Feature: Book on WW II rapes upsets Russia
By Peter Almond
LONDON, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- A forthcoming book about the Red Army's siege
of
Berlin in 1945 is causing outrage among senior Russian officials. It
claims
the extent of rape by Soviet soldiers against German women was much
greater
than previously realized, and included large numbers of Russian and
Polish
women who were raped even as they were being liberated from German
concentration camps.
The book, Berlin -- The Downfall 1945, to be published by Viking in
April, is
by the acclaimed military historian Anthony Beevor, author of the
best-selling and award-winning book Stalingrad. As with his research for
that
epic 1943 siege Beevor had access to detailed Red Army reports and other
documents of the period.
Responding to a full-page report on the book in Thursday's Daily
Telegraph,
however, Grigory Karasin, ambassador to the Russian Federation in
London,
called the allegations a disgrace and "a clear case of slander against
the
people who saved the world from Nazism."
"The article appeared on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, which
transforms
its publication into an act of blasphemy, not only against Russia and my
people, but also against all countries and the millions of people who
suffered from Nazism," Karasin wrote to the Telegraph.
Author Beevor replied Saturday by paying tribute to the "frequent acts
of
great kindness to German women and children," and to the "great
suffering,
courage and sacrifices of the Red Army in the Second World War." But
unfortunately, he said, "there is also a much darker side to the story."
Beevor's conclusions are that in response to the vast scale of
casualties
inflicted on them by the Germans the Soviets responded in kind, and that
included rape on a vast scale. It started as soon as the Red Army
entered
East Prussia and Silesia in 1944, and in many towns and villages every
female
aged from 10 to 80 was raped.
Rape was condoned or even justified by Stalin and his commanders, and
Beevor
cites the Soviet leader's retort to a protest from Yugoslav Community
Milovan
Dijilas about Soviet troops raping Romanian, Croatian and Hungarian
women:
"Can't he understand it if a soldier has crossed thousands of kilometres
through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some
trifle?"
Rape against the enemy's women has a long history as an act of war, but
in an
interview with Bookseller magazine earlier this month Beevor said he was
"shaken to the core" to discover that even their own Russian and Polish
women
and girls liberated from German concentration camps were also violated.
"That completely undermined the notion that the soldiers were using rape
as a
form of revenge against the Germans," he is quoted as saying. "By the
time
the Russians reached Berlin, soldiers were regarding women almost as
carnal
booty; they felt that because they were liberating Europe they could
behave
as they pleased.
"That is very frightening, because one starts to realize that
civilization is
terribly superficial and the fa�ade can be stripped away in a very short
time."
The details of the Soviet soldiers' behavior, he said, so shocked him
that
they had forced him to revise his view of human nature.
"Having always in the past slightly pooh-poohed the idea that most men
are
potential rapists (echoing the famous claim by the American feminist
Marilyn
French that 'in their relations with women all men are rapists, and
that's
all they are') I had to come to the conclusion that if there is a lack
of
army discipline, most men with a weapon, dehumanized by living through
two or
three years of war, do become potential rapists."
While the war in Europe ended in May, 1945, Beevor says that the ordeal
for
German women in Soviet occupied areas continued. A "high proportion" of
at
least 15 million women who lived in the Soviet zone or were expelled
from
Germany's eastern provinces were raped. About two million women had
illegal
abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.
One of the legacies of the Soviet occupation of Germany has been that,
at
least until very recently, East German women of the wartime generation
referred to the Red Army war memorial in Berlin as "the Tomb of the
Unknown
Rapist."
Serbian News Network - SNN
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.antic.org/
