Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, began the most genocidal conflict in history. Perhaps 30 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union are now thought to have died during the war, including more than three million who were deliberately starved in German PoW camps.
The Germans, having shown no quarter, could expect none in return. Their casualties were also on a vast scale. In the Battle of Berlin alone more than a million German soldiers were killed or died later in captivity, plus at least 100,000 civilians.
The most striking and shameful thing about this invasion is that the Russian army used rape as a weapon against Germans. It is believed that as many as 2 million women were raped by Red army officers, many of them several times over.The rapes had begun as soon as the Red Army entered East Prussia and Silesia in 1944. In many towns and villages every female, aged from 10 to 80, was raped.
Soviet soldiers saw rape, often carried out in front of a woman's husband and family, as an appropriate way of humiliating the Germans, who had treated Slavs as an inferior race with whom sexual relations were discouraged.Against this horrific background, Stalin and his commanders condoned or even justified rape, not only against Germans but also their allies in Hungary, Romania and Croatia. When the Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas protested to Stalin, the dictator exploded: “Can't he 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?”
Stalin explicitly condoned rape as a method of rewarding the soldiers and terrorising German civilians.According to a book by the military historian Anthony Beevor by the time the Russians reached Berlin, soldiers were regarding women almost as carnal booty; they felt because they were liberating Europe they could behave as they pleased.
He stated in his book that Russian and Polish women and girls liberated from concentration camps were also violated.
Many had to have abortions or be treated for the syphilis they caught from being raped by different men.
Children born out of the abuses were called Russenbabies and most were abandoned and left to die.Women were dragged out of their homes and raped in the street .
Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, wrote a book on the topic in which he recounts the extreme violence of many of the encounters.
He wrote: ‘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.'However Russia don't accept all these claims. Critics argue that the numbers are based on faulty methodology and questionable sources.
It is argued that although there were cases of excesses and heavy-handed command, the Russian Army as a whole treated the population of the former Reich with respect.
Recently a statue in Gdansk, Poland representing a Russian Army soldier raping a pregnant woman has caught the attention of unhappy Polish and Russian authorities alike.The statue is erected by artist Jerzy Bohdan Szumczyk. On this controversy Szumczyk, told The Moscow Times he was "unable to cope" with the history of wartime rape by Russian soldiers, referring to accounts that estimate up to two million German and Polish women were attacked by men in the Russian Army during the last few months of World War II.
The 26-year-old artist has to face up to two years in prison for charges of inciting racial and national hatred for erecting this statue.
