How many German woman were raped when the Soviets conquered Berlin?

[Lord Testicles]

Yeah i know, yet it was still more a crime of opportunity as happens in all war (drunk soldiers taking advantage of their position) and not wielded as a weapon of mass retalitation.

I think Allied soldiers didn't wield rape as a weapon of mass retaliation because they had comparatively little to retaliate to. I don't think the attitude of those in command towards the rapists in their ranks was substantially different on any side of the war, which is to say they all seemed to tolerate it.

Its like saying that some teachers rape kids too so the catholic priest rapes are not exceptional. Sure in all situations where people can take advantage of others and get away with it sexual abuse happens, but when its encouraged, facilitated, etc etc it becomes more than the "normal"

I'm not saying that, I'm just pointing out that the Allies were just as likely to turn a blind eye to it.

The idea that rape wasn't facilitated & encouraged by the allies would appear to be debatable.

Far removed from accounts of selfless derring-do, many US soldiers were viewed by the French as sex-obsessed thugs who had been promised an "erotic adventure" -- a mission that was fulfilled, much to the chagrin of locals.
[...]
Life magazine described France as "a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40 million hedonists,"

"According to one calculation the number of rapes and assaults on Japanese women amounted to around 40 daily while the R.A.A (Recreation and Amusement Association) was in operation, and then rose to an average of 330 a day after it was terminated in early 1946."

[TheCultofAbeLincoln]

From my understanding there were many more rapes committed by US sldiers in WWII after the war had actually ended, during the occupation of Japan. Okinawa, which still hosts a massive US military presence, has a child get raped, usually by US Marines (as opposed to US Navy or Air Force personnel), every few years it seems.

Not to sound apologetic of the practice, but in a total war of extermination I believe that raping an "enemy" woman could become common practice for the warring sides. I believe it was probably common practice for the soldiers to be allowed to relieve their stress on the enemy populace by design. Massacring cities have a bloody battle or engagement or partisan attack is another example.

Fighting in battles consuming tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lives in hand-to-hand combat would completely change you as a person. The propagandists might make them seem like heroes but I think it's entirely likely that many units passed around "enemy" women like a bottle of liquor. In light of the needs of the Army it may have been determined as a good way to give soldiers enough release so as to be able to go back to the front and fight well. In the Japanese military this practice was openly used by the military at the time (though is not in their contemporary history books...).

Quite a nasty thing war is.

[Invader Zim]

From my understanding there were many more rapes committed by US sldiers in WWII after the war had actually ended, during the occupation of Japan. Okinawa, which still hosts a massive US military presence, has a child get raped, usually by US Marines (as opposed to US Navy or Air Force personnel), every few years it seems.

Your understanding is wrong. While the victimisation of women by allied troops was shockingly high, it remained significantly lower than historians have come to believe occured on the Eastern Front.

[Dagoth Ur]

The eastern front saw more rapes for two reasons: 1. Penal brigades made up the front lines in many places and in the front it is hard to maintain any level of law especially with criminals being made to fight and 2. The Soviets had very recently been the victims of mass brutality at the hands of nazis including mass rape so there was a comeuppance aspect (legitimate or not this is War).

Let's be clear though that the soviets handled rapists quite severely compared to their western counterparts who most handed out slaps to the wrist. At least the soviets killed rapists operating under their banner.

[consuming negativity]

This entire argument is garbage, though. It's just a battle between the Americans and the Soviets over which one is better, but played out by irrelevant latter-day supporters on the internet. Rape is awful, but "which side raped more people" can not be extrapolated to decide which country was more just, or which overarching ideology is ultimately superior, which is really what these trollish dick-waving threads are about. What you can say is that this many people in X army were ignorant of others and/or were pushed beyond their limits and committed horrible crimes against humanity as a result. You can also hope like hell that nobody else who thinks like Hitler did ever comes to power anywhere else and decides that they want to start exterminating people. You know, in case you forgot that the German government was literally exterminating millions of people. And of course that can't be generalized to the population, but that's what I mean about the people involved being ignorant or just taking advantage of the situation to get what they want. World War II was some of humanity's darkest moments as an entire species in the modern world, altogether.

[Obrero]

There are statics about that? without information is stupid talk about it.
Of course rape is a crime, is not obviously?.

[Atsumari]

The eastern front saw more rapes for two reasons: 1. Penal brigades made up the front lines in many places and in the front it is hard to maintain any level of law especially with criminals being made to fight and 2. The Soviets had very recently been the victims of mass brutality at the hands of nazis including mass rape so there was a comeuppance aspect (legitimate or not this is War).

Let's be clear though that the soviets handled rapists quite severely compared to their western counterparts who most handed out slaps to the wrist. At least the soviets killed rapists operating under their banner.

If only that were true.

People really need to admit that sometimes, their heroes are capable of doing unbelievably fucked up things

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

I'm not trolling here, I was having a discussion with a (semi-communist) friend the other day. He defends the USSR and all their actions up to Khrushchev. He considers himself a 'humanist"', so I asked him how many women the Red Army raped when they conquered Berlin. He replied with "how many Native Americans did the Colonialists rape when they conquered America" etc etc.

I really had no answer for him. My only answer was the Americans did a whole lot less raping than the Soviets did. It didn't feel very adequate though.

Thomas Jefferson was a well known serial rapist. Also, the rape of Native American and African captive women has been well documented.

[liberlict]

Thanks for all the replies to this thread. I haven't spoken to him again yet. But I think my best response to him is "wow, so the guys you hate are as bad as you are?"

Thoughts?

[liberlict]

American colonialists have raped women, therefore we can just ignore the rape of German women by Red Army troops, because logic. This is a typical deflection by 'semi-communists' (Soviet apologists and whatnot).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you...nching_Negroes

Yeah it's crazy. I can relate to communism but anyone who defends the USSR and all it's casualties I really don't understand. I hate this amoral historical materialism idea that justifies anything that has been done because the ends will justify the means in the long run.

[liberlict]

What are you basing this on exactly? Americans have committed some stomach turning atrocities in their time.

[/I]

Yeah I was just talking about the battle for Berlin. I know Americans have committed some stomach turning atrocities in their time.

[#FF0000]

Thanks for all the replies to this thread. I haven't spoken to him again yet. But I think my best response to him is "wow, so the guys you hate are as bad as you are?"

Thoughts?

well it's a tu quoque argument to begin with, so uh, there's not much to say other than that.

Yeah it's crazy. I can relate to communism but anyone who defends the USSR and all it's casualties I really don't understand. I hate this amoral historical materialism idea that justifies anything that has been done because the ends will justify the means in the long run.

The ends only justify the means if the means work and I don't think a whole lot "worked" with the USSR

[Cerdic]

Short reply: Nobody knows.

Long reply: Undoubtedly a lot, but probably not 2 million. The 2m figure comes from a sample of abortions in one city, Berlin. A few of the abortions had the father listed as "Russian" and it was assumed women with those babies had been raped by Russian soldiers. They extrapolated the figure to all German women living in Soviet-invaded areas from age 8 to 80, and so the 2m figure was created.

Certainly the historical fact does not fit the "Asiatic hordes" of Russophobic imagination. I've seen no evidence to suggest the majority of Russian soldiers were involved in crimes against Germans. And while I do no defend the USSR generally, there's no evidence the Soviet higher-ups were directly involved in encouraging atrocities, although they did often allow soldiers to get away with it.

Comment at the Russophile website.

Rape is not a myth, mass rape is. The historical investigation of alleged “mass rapes” in East Germany has been so sloppy it borders on falsification (and probably is). The figure for 1-2 million (most commonly quoted as 2 million) is an extrapolation from a small sample of abortion statistics. Extrapolation itself is suspect because the samples used were not random, and therefore not representative. They were from urban areas with the highest concentration of population of all genders and nationalities, and therefore had the the highest per capita rate of random sexual intercourse. A more representative sample would’ve yielded a lower number of alleged rapes.

As for the incidence of alleged rape in the samples themselves, they are based on abortion statistics of German women where the father was specified as “Russian” multiplied by a certain rape to pregnancy ratio (i.e. probability of rape resulting in pregnancy). The ratio itself is pulled out of the author’s ass (sorry, I forgot that German lady’s name) and is too high. Second false, and the most ludicrous, assumption is that every aborted pregnancy was the result of rape rather than consensual intercourse. In reality, sexual intercourse between Soviet servicemen and German women was mostly consensual and was not far removed from prostitution (e.g. sex for food). Naturally, if any such woman got pregnant with the bastard child of a mongoloid Jew bolshevik barbarian, or whatever else they had been brainwashed to believe, she would seek an abortion. Finally, most crimes against German civilians were committed by DPs rather than serviceman and since, unlike in western occupation zone, both DPs and soldiers were Eastern Europeans, Germans didn’t care enough to start differentiating and called them all “Russians” and attributed all crimes to the Red Army.

If adjustments are made for all of these mistakes and falsifications, we can conclude the the number of rapes committed by the Red Army was at a minimum one order of magnitude lower than ascribed in modern propagandist sources.

This is as far as statistics go. Modern propaganda likes to dilute these with anecdotal evidence to cause an emotional response in the reader (in fact, quite standard for Ango-Saxon media since at least Napoleonic wars, as noted by the author of the well-known Horatio Hornblower series, whose name I unfortunately once again forgot). Much of it is based on graphical descriptions found in original documents from Dr. Goebbels’s department, and is quite suspect. For example, in the infamous Nemmersdorf affair, German investigattors on the scene found only two women they suspected had been raped, but each higher level document increased the number of victims, as well as specifically the number of rape victims, to make it seem worse than it really was. In fact, it is now well known that all photographs taken there were staged, with bodies artistically arranged for greater effect, and with female corpses’ skirts hiked up for obvious reasons (in contrast, when Soviet photographers took pictures of Nazi rape victims, they actually tried to cover them up beforehand — obviously, these primitive savages did not know the basics of modern propaganda). All this was done for propaganda purposes in order to rally the population. Post-war German literature on the subject is based on higher level propagandistic documents from Dr. Goebbels’s department rather than original investigations, and then embellished it even further by “eyewitness” accounts of people who weren’t actually there. All in the vein of the new German story of “we were victims too”.

As far as comparisons with the western zone of occupation go, as Robert has tried to (poorly) make them, I don’t think they are possible given lack of source data. While the incidence of rape in the East has been inflated beyond all recognition, the incidence of rape in the West has not been studied much at all. This is natural: same as East Germans did not engage in anti-Soviet propaganda, West Germans did not engage in anti-American or anti-British propaganda. Now that only West German narrative remains, the truth of the western zone of occupation will remain forever buried. Even raw abortion statistics from which to draw false conclusions are not available because in West Germany abortions were banned outright. If same statistics were available there, a properly inclined researcher could probably extrapolate them into ten gazillion rapes with no difficulty, which is of course much higher than 2 megarapes ascribed to Red Army servicemen. Without such statistics, historians go by the number of rape prosecutions, which are not complete at all. As Osmar White, a correpsondent in Germany, described the situation in the US army: “After the fighting moved on to German soil there was a good deal of rape by combat troops and those immediately following them. The incidence varied between unit and unit according to the attitude of the commanding officer. In some cases offenders were identified, tried by court martial, and punished. The army legal branch was reticent, but admitted that for brutal or perverted sexual offences against German women, some soldiers had been shot – particularly if they happened to be Negroes. Yet I know for a fact that many women were raped by white Americans. No action was taken against the culprits. In one sector a report went round that a certain very distinguished army commander had made the wisecrack: ‘Copulation without conversation does not constitute fraternization.’”

Another Robert’s assertion that I find quite bizarre is the fake outrage over the fact that East German police could not prosecute Soviet servicemen, and had to turn them over to Soviet military authorities. I wonder if there is any example in history where an occupied state could prosecute occupying soldiers? What was the situation in West Germany at the time? The allegation that Soviet prosecutions for sexual crimes were based only on STD considerations has no basis in fact and is pulled out of someone’s ass (either Robert’s or one of his sources).

As far as “modern legal theory” goes, Robert mistakenly believes that we are talking about some kind of a “hard life” defense here. That is not the case. This is not about “hard life” in general, but about specific crimes committed by Germans against specific Soviet soldiers and their families. For which they, quite naturally, were inclined to seek revenge, sometimes did seek revenge, and very often were prosecuted for it when caught. And I forgive them for it, especially if you consider that the scope of their revenge did not come to even 1% of the crimes that Germans committed on Soviet territory. Soviet policies themselves were not aimed at revenge against individual Germans, and many Soviet servicemen unfortunately paid for doing something that many would consider quite justified.

As for comparisons with western Allies, the scale of individual crimes is probably comparable, and the authorities’ response to them as well — prosecute if caught. What is incomparable, though, is the extent of war crimes authorized from above. Deliberate targetting of civilians coupled with war planning designed to maximize civilian casualties (yes, Dresden, Tokyo, and do I need to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki) is something that USSR never did. If you add the fact that the west did not suffer even 0.1% of the German crimes committed in the east, and thus doesn’t even have the justification of just retribution, this whole fake outrage in English language media becomes even more ludicrous.

[TheCultofAbeLincoln]

Your understanding is wrong. While the victimisation of women by allied troops was shockingly high, it remained significantly lower than historians have come to believe occured on the Eastern Front.

I apologize.

I meant there were more rapes committed by US soldiers during the occupation of Japan than by US soldiers during the war itself.

I phrased that horribly and I agree with your statement.

[Geiseric]

You're implying that there was a ratio of one rapist for every raped woman?

What im asking is who came up with the 2 million estimate, how did they end at that, and why is this so much different than the US army which has a longstanding rape culture which persists to this day?

[Lord Testicles]

What im asking is who came up with the 2 million estimate, how did they end at that, and why is this so much different than the US army which has a longstanding rape culture which persists to this day?

The sources are in the link if you would like to look further into it.

The majority of the assaults were committed in the Soviet occupation zone; estimates of the numbers of German women raped by Soviet soldiers ranged up to 2 million.[1][6][7][8][9] In many cases women were the victims of repeated rapes, some as many as 60 to 70 times.[10] At least 100,000 women are believed to have been raped in Berlin, based on surging abortion rates in the following months and contemporary hospital reports,[7] with an estimated 10,000 women dying in the aftermath.[11] Female deaths in connection with the rapes in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000.[3][12] Antony Beevor describes it as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history", and has concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.[13]

[Geiseric]

The sources are in the link if you would like to look further into it.

How does it go from 100,000 in Berlin, by itself more than the rest of the entire allied effort put together, to 1.4 million? Are these cases of women reporting "I was raped" to the authorities? From what I understand the way they gathered information wasnt done the way its done today, and the results surfaced nearly a decade after the supposed crime.

[consuming negativity]

well it's a tu quoque argument to begin with, so uh, there's not much to say other than that.

The ends only justify the means if the means work and I don't think a whole lot "worked" with the USSR

A lot of things worked well in the USSR. What "works" about capitalism other than its apparent longevity by comparison?

Also, the ends don't justify the means, the ends are created by the means. They are inseparable. You're an anarchist and that's Emma Goldman I'm paraphrasing there. Shame on you!

[Hatshepsut]

The discussion on this thread stems partly from media events beginning about 12 years ago. A National Public Radio item is representative of this:

Eric Westervelt on NPR, July 17, ‘09
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=106687768

The “breaking the silence” genre is a relatively recent development of political culture in the USA and Western Europe. People who lived through World War II tell the younger generations they simply have no clue. Ruth Schumacher told her story because she wanted it documented for posterity. I don’t really think she had the unrelated political agendas now attached to it in mind, but at least her story is written down—a thing I appreciate since I’m no longer young either.

The basic facts about it are documented in Soviet archives:

“British historian Antony Beevor (Berlin: The Downfall: 1945) buttresses personal accounts from survivors with material from long-sealed Soviet archives. Beevor dug out Soviet archives clearly demonstrating that Soviet commanders knew about the barbarism and rapes by their troops.”

Nora FitzGerald in Chicago Tribune, Sept. 24, 2002
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2...hives-red-army

There is a statement that Red Army officers put a stop to it:

“After three days of mass rape, looting and killings in Berlin--underscored by women jumping off balconies and Nazis killing their own families to prevent their capture--the city became oddly quiet on the fourth day, Frintrop recalls. The officers and commanders had reined in their troops.”

Nora FitzGerald in Chicago Tribune, Sept. 24, 2002
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2...hives-red-army

I’m not sure posting these is worth it. At least research is done today. A small question—the Soviets could have easily destroyed their archives before going out of style—why didn’t they do so, if all they wanted to do was lie to the rest of the world to the very end? It was kept secret up to the mid-1990s, as expected, but not shredded as is now coming into fashion in record-keeping practices.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

Let's be clear though that the soviets handled rapists quite severely compared to their western counterparts who most handed out slaps to the wrist. At least the soviets killed rapists operating under their banner.

Are we supposed to come away from this statement with the impression that killing rapists is more progressive than "slaps on the wrist"?