I just finished reading a book about the Russian atrocities when they invaded Berlin. Despite how you feel about he Nazi's, these were just German civilians.
According to historian Norman Naimark, the propaganda of Soviet troop newspapers and the orders of Soviet high command were jointly responsible for the excesses of the Red Army. Propaganda proclaimed that the Red Army had entered Germany as an avenger to punish all Germans. Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg wrote on January 31, 1945:
"The Germans have been punished in Oppeln, in Königsberg and in Breslau. They have been punished, but yet not enough! Some have been punished, but not yet all of them; not yet their women and children."
There are cases where the orders of Soviet generals encouraged their soldiers to commit war crimes. On January 12, 1945, Red Army General Cherniakhovsky told his troops: "There shall be no mercy - for anyone, as there was no mercy for us... The land of the fascists must become a desert."
For the Germans, the organized evacuation of civilians before the advancing Red Army was delayed by the Nazi government, so as not to demoralize the troops, who were by now defending their own country. However, German civilians were well aware that the Red Army was conducting violence against non-combatants from reports by their friends and relatives who had served on the Eastern front. Furthermore, Nazi propaganda - originally meant to stiffen civil resistance by describing in graphic detail Red Army atrocities such as the Nemmersdorf massacre - often backfired and created panic.
Whenever possible, as soon as Nazi officials left, civilians began to flee westward on their own initiative.
Refugees in Eastern Germany 1945.
Fleeing before the advancing Red Army, more than two million inhabitants of the German provinces of East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania died, some from cold and starvation, during the expulsion and post-war ethnic cleansing, and some when they were killed during combat operations. The main death toll, however, occurred when the refugee columns were encountered by units of the Red Army. The civilians were overrun by tanks, shot or otherwise murdered. Women and young girls were raped and left to die (as is explored firsthand in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Prussian Nights). In addition, fighter bombers of the Soviet air force penetrated far behind the front lines and often attacked columns of refugees.
Those who did not flee suffered the Red Army's occupying policies: murder, rape, robbery, and finally expulsion. For example, in Königsberg, the East Prussian capital city, approximately 100,000 German civilians still lived there in August 1945. By the time they were finally expelled from the city in 1948, only about 20,000 of the Germans were still alive (see also expulsion of Germans after World War II).
The Red Army's violence against the local German population during the occupation of eastern Germany often led to incidents like Demmin, a small city conquered by the Soviets in the spring of 1945. Despite its unconditional surrender and without any prior fighting near the city, nearly 900 civilians people committed suicide after Soviet commanders had declared Demmin "open" for looting, pillaging and rape - which lasted for three consecutive days.
Although mass executions of civilians by the Red Army were seldom publicly reported, there is a known incident in Treuenbrietzen, where at least 88 male inhabitants were rounded up and shot on May 1, 1945. The incident took place after a Soviet victory celebration at which numerous girls from Treuenbrietzen were raped and a Red Army lieutenant-colonel was shot by an unknown assailant. Some sources claim as many as 1,000 civilians may have been executed during the incident.
TLTR Bulletpoints:
-There are accounts of Russian soldiers gang raping 60, 70, and 80 year year old women, as ordered by officers.
-One German man was forced to count aloud the rapes upon his 13 year old daughter and wife, 32 different men raped his daughter, 15 his wife. Both died.
-Russians in Treuenbrietzen rounded up German women to rape, and their husbands and brothers to kill.
-In one instance Russian solders captured a group of 12 German children, tied them in the snow, and made bets on which one would freeze to death last.
-The city of Demmin was declared open to rape and murder by all Russian officials. Nearly 900 Germans committed suicide, and a group of about 30 German men attempted to kill the German women (The women consented) off so they wouldn't have to face the Russian men.
Erzsébet: Frightening, definitely, for a few months. My father was already in the capital and my mother and four children stayed in Komárom.11 I well remember mother dressing me as an old lady, just to make sure that no one would attempt . . . to take advantage of me, although I was only nine years old. But with good reason, because my best friend, her mother didn't do it, and the child was grabbed and when she didn't let her go, they shot her in her mother's arms, because the Soviet army officer took a fancy to her . . . So these are dramatic experiences and very dramatic memories.
"Our soldiers' behavior towards Germans, particularly German women, is absolutely correct!" said a 21-year-old from Agranenko's reconnaissance detachment. A number seemed to find it amusing. Several German women recorded how Soviet servicewomen watched and laughed when they were raped. But some women were deeply shaken by what they witnessed in Germany. Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent. "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty," she recounted later. "It was an army of rapists."
Read this:
'They raped every German female from eight to 80'
