Filios1: Another fact is that Russians did not rape, or murder while passing through Poland.
Stalin's army of rapists: The brutal war crime that Russia and Germany tried to ignore
By Andrew Roberts
When the historian Antony Beevor wrote about it in his book Berlin: The Downfall, the Russian ambassador to London, Grigory Karasin, accused him of 'an act of blasphemy', saying: 'It is a slander against the people who saved the world from Nazism.'
Similarly, living Germans do not want the events that humiliated and violated them, their mothers and grandmothers to be held up to public examination,
The Russian war correspondent Vassily Grossman was embedded with the elite front-line Eighth Guards Army which committed rape, as did at least one of his own war correspondent colleagues.
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 in Romania and Bulgaria, which had been pro-Nazi, but also in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which had not been.
Indeed, as Beevor points out, the Red Army even raped Russian women who had been liberated from concentration camps, emaciated and wearing their prison uniform.
In a recently published book by the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, Richard Evans, a young Russian officer is quoted recalling how when his unit overtook a column of fleeing German refugees: 'Women, mothers and their children lie to the right and left along the route, and in front of each of them stands a raucous armada of men with their trousers down.
The women, who are bleeding or losing consciousness, get shoved to one side, and our men shoot the ones who try to save their children.'
A group of 'grinning' officers ensured that 'every soldier without exception would take part'.
Evans records: '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.'
The insistence on the men watching the rapes was deliberate policy, intended 'to underline the humiliation'.
Underlying all this foul inhumanity was the way the German Army and its allies had behaved during its invasion of Russia.
That was clearly not the only explanation - it doesn't explain why the Red Army raped Poles, Czechs and Yugoslavs and even Russian women, for example - for that one has to delve deep into the darkest recesses of the male psyche.
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