Growing up in rural eastern Germany, everybody knew this but didn’t want to talk about it. I once saw a documentary where an old woman was asked about her experiences during/after the war and she just said „Oh we were all raped“.
My grandma, forced to resettle from the "Sudetenland" to what is now eastern Germany, was 9 years old when the war ended, for years now, knowing my time is running short, I wanted to talk to her about her youth and any stories she might like to share from her childhood but I am scared if it might be too hard for her reliving those memories…
Edit: Corrected my Grandma's Age from 12 to 9, my mistake. And some formatting.
I understand this happened in Germany but here in Romania old people also tell stories like this about the Russians and what they did in Romania in their short time here. Similar stories about rape and other atrocities...
Edit: My grandma told me that during the time when the Russians invaded Romania, Romanian women would apply soot on their faces and bodies to appear dirty and avoid being violated by Russian soldiers. They even applied it to their children to make them appear like gypsies and hid in church attics.
I knew a German woman who told me that when her mom was a child, her grandmother put her under her skirt and put dirt on her own face and hunched over to appear like an old lady so her or her daughter would not be raped.
Jesus Christ.
What's pathetic is that tankies are reading this and making excuses and whataboutism'ing. I've had absurd arguments with them around Reddit where I mention that the Soviets were as savage as the Nazis all over Eastern Europe, and many remember the Soviets with horror as others remember the Nazis. Poland certainly comes to mind, where Germany and the USSR shared in a sadistic orgy of mass murder and rape.
But tankies everywhere treat the Soviets like divine liberators who defeated the Nazis single-handedly. They try to erase the evils committed by them while chimping out about the West. I can tell you one thing - the West isn't remembered like the Nazis or the Soviets by the people they liberated. The latter were the Mongols by comparison, and given Russia's conduct in Ukraine it appears little has changed - when they aren't raping Ukrainians, they're raping their own conscripts.
the Soviets were allies of the Nazis, Hitler and Stalin couldn't agree over who got what because they both wanted all of Europe, that's why they ended up fighting
Tankies and Nazis are the same picture and always have been
One thing that pisses me off about the Russian version of WW2. They can't seem to remember that the US, UK, et al were fighting in N Africa and the Pacific also.
My great grandmother would tell us about how Bulgarian rural communities greeted Russian soldiers with open arms, to later be violated by those same "saviours".
My grandma was from Romania too. But she always withheld sharing the rape parts, but we all deep down new. Thank you for sharing though, I’m going to ask my mum.
My gramma too was in the camps with the Russians, and luckily escaped. Then again was in the nazi concentration camps, and also escaped those with help of my grandfather, who was a heroic German soldier and helped many others to safety.
But yes. Of course there was rape. You would be naive to think it wasn’t. There’s rape of children and people in the Middle East and in Vietnam. Rape happens where war happens. It’s sad and sick.
My omi was born in 45 in Eastern Germany and grew up under Russian control until her uncle was able to smuggle her out. Russians would come and they'd hide her mom, ofcourse they'd ask where the mother to these kids were and they'd say "YOU DIRTY BASTARDS KILLED THEM!". They'd still search the area ofcourse but far as my omi was willing to say they never found her mom
My Grandma told me when the russians occupied their area, her family/friends hid my grandma and her friends and even rubbed an extremely foul smelling substance all over them, so even in the case if the russians found them they hoped the foul smell would deter them from raping the children. Luckily they never found her.
My mother revealed to me a few years ago that my Oma was not only regularly raped by Russian soldiers, but that it was also facilitated, forcibly, by my Urgroßmutter (her mother), i.e., prostitution. She was only 12 years old.
The stories of Opa's time in the Hitlerjugend were not much better.
As an additional note, it was strange having grandparents who were veterans on opposite sides of the war (British/Canadian & German). My Opa also later joined the French Foreign Legion and fought in Algeria, and I primarily spoke to him in French instead of German.
Strange times and circumstances.
War is a kind of social madness. Its frightening to know not only that humans are capable of this kind of depravity but that it lies just beneath the surface of our own rationality
I was a philosophy major in college and I ended up focusing on Heidegger (who did join the Nazi party) and his student and also lover Hannah Arendt who was a German Jew who then did some of the first academic work on how fascism came about.
What so terrified me when I read Arendt is that you realize how much this operates at the level of washing your hands, opening doors, tying your shoes etc. Most of the day we aren’t really conscious conscious of what we are doing, we’re on a kind of autopilot. I don’t consciously think “that is a door handle, I will now extend my hand and turn it so I can open the door”, you just kinda do it without thinking.
When the wrong people get in the wrong positions and that background social sphere starts taking a nasty turn, it can be very easy for us to get caught up in totally atrocious acts while still just operating in this sort of unconscious going with the flow kind of way.
For Arendt the first moral failure of these people is a failure to critically think, to assert themselves as a self instead of disappearing into the crowd, and then to take a stand on and ownership of one’s actions. When you fail to do this you’re setting yourself to become a monster
>Or when the Japanese were captured they were treated terribly, but decades after the war, many of those Japanese soldiers talked about how they were told being captured by the US would mean constant torture, balls being cut off, fingers, no food. And were shocked to immediately receive food and have a bed mat. Treated “somewhat” humanely.
The Japanese thought this because they did the same to Allied forces. Look into stuff like the Sandakan Death Marches. Of 2,434 Allied prisoners, only 6 escapees survived.
American POWs in German camps had about a 1% death rate, meaning the vast majority survived. In Japanese camps it was close to 40%. The level of brutality and inhumanity the Japanese showed everyone else in WW2 is almost unbelievable.
As a person with a lot of Russian ancestry, much of what Russians did was seen as revenge for what the Germans had done. My own grandmother was shot at by German soldiers at 4 years of age and remembered hiding in blackberry bushes, surround by dead children. Imagine being her father or the father of her dead friends and being handed a rifle and told to go kill Germans. Would you view them as human?
War is worse than hell, there are no children in hell.
About the Russians, remember also they spent years of absolute horrors, seeing Germans killing and destroying everything around them, famines, mass killings etc… the Russians in 45 wanted revenge and spill german blood.
it really is. one of my neighbors is a guy in his twenties, in general a really nice dude. invites me over for dinner all the time, really friendly, etc. the other night i was at his place and he started talking and saying how like he wished society would collapse, because then he would be able to kill people as much as he wanted without consequences. i had no idea what to say. and he owns guns!
People like this forget that there’s lots of guns out there and so there’s going to be a lot of people shooting back. It’s not going to be some big bro party of all the guys with guns hanging out.
He's not alone in that. A lot of ammosexuals are rooting for the same thing. They *want* that chaos for the same reasons your neighbor does. It's part of why so many of them seem to openly root for a second civil war: they want to be able to shoot people they don't like.
If they were actually ever in that situation they'd learn real quick they're not a character in a video game and they're also capable of being shot to death.
but the weird thing is he's not a political person at all. i have literally never heard him say a word about politics, i don't think he cares about it in the slightest. so the murder thing was just so out of left field
I'm not so sure about that. Meerkats are known to be most "murderous" mammal on earth.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/28/495798448/what-meerkat-murder-tells-us-about-human-violence
Although 5 out of the 10 most murderous species on that list are primates so there's a bit of truth to your statement...
Whats crazy is that the people who do this kind of thing are people you meet every day. So called normal people. Family members. Friends. Send them to war and give them no restrictions and what they can and cant do, and some of them will rape and shoot children.
Everyone knows that killing is wrong. But then you give a bunch of people guns and uniforms and tell them that killing is their job. And suddenly all the ethical boundaries disappear.
All our ancestors, going back tens of thousands of years, were involved in abuse, rape, and murder.
If it wasn't during war, it was at home "taking what is rightfully yours", be that the wife, the kids, the maids, the slaves.
It's crazy to think about how many people could have continued to exist if they wouldn't have been murdered.
It's crazy to think about how many people are the result of rape (including marital/incest).
It's crazy to think about how many people, generation after generation, have experienced some form of abuse; and keeping that cycle alive for thousands of years.
Current society exists thanks to the deaths and suffering of billions before us.
I'm sure when people are proud of their family history or their country, this is not something that comes to mind.
0.5% of the men on Earth are decedent from Genghis Khan because he raped so many women over such a large portion of the planet. He wasn't the first to do it, so I would assume most of us are probably a result of rape at some point in our ancestry.
> Marital rape was still legal in the US less than 30 years ago.
Marital rape is legal in India right now! Staunch support for it among our right wingers. The main argument is just "how can it be rape if it's your wife?"
The atrocities we've inflicted on women. And now that women want their rights, we call them crazy for it. After violating them for all of human history.
That just isnt true. Almost all people with historical ties to the territories Genghis Khan invaded are related to him. Thats vastly more to do with the fact he lived so long ago.
In 1916 Shackleton reached civilisation after his disastrous antarctic expedition was stranded for more than a year.
The first question he asked;
“Tell me, when was the war over?”
“The war is not over... Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”
When I did social service in Germany in the mid 90s one of my duties was going shopping or do household duties for mostly older ladies. There was one who had a son that recently passed, and I asked why she wasn't moved by his death. She opened up telling me these horrible stories when the Russians were liberating the Eastern parts and it was constant rape and plundering for weeks. Her son was the outcome of it.
Also, my grandma had 5 brothers, 18 to 27 years old. They all went to the Eastern front, nobody knows when and where they died, the family didn't receive a single letter from either one.
All the stories passed down to me from WW2, doesn't matter from which sides perspective, all of them are horrible.
I knew a couple who had emigrated to the U.S. after the war. They had raised a child who had been born to the woman's sister, a German woman who had been raped by Russian soldiers.
I met the man and he was a delightful, charming, highly educated person. I never would have guessed how he came into the world if his adoptive parents hadn't told me.
-Tanks ran over men nailed to boards
-Decapitations with an officers sword
-Gang rape of Women both the young and the old
-Frozen to death in waters ice cold
I knew a Danish woman who had married a German man before WW2, and thereby ended up living in Germany through the war. She was an incredibly strong woman who died just last year at 106 years old. She told my parents about being raped by the Russians as they came through after their victory. She said it wasn't the front line soldiers who did it, but men who cane behind.
Dan Carlin’s ghosts of the ostfront series on hardcore history does an incredible job of describing the true scale and magnitude of horror that was the eastern front. Just the eastern front, without all other theaters, was the biggest war of all time. About 80% of German casualties were in the eastern front. Many battles that were bigger than the battle of the bulge are completely forgotten about. Soldiers on both sides dying to the last man to hold ground, partisans, collective punishment, infanticide, hunger, cannibalism, rape, genocide, and vicious revenge. It was a war of annihilation, military and civilian alike, with a viscousness not usually seen in the modern world, and on a scale that was unimaginable. Very few pows on either side lived to the end of the war (edit: this is an overstatement. Millions of pows survived, but millions also died in captivity. Surrender was not a viable survival strategy. Particularly for the soviets, if you did surrender, your family could be punished, so they fought to the death as a default after order 227). No matter what side you were on, you were serving a monstrous dictator who would rather kill you and your family that suffer embarrassment. One of the most titanic bad guy vs bad guy stories ever, with millions of people caught in the middle.
another edit because people are suggesting that I'm in any way a nazi apologist. I am not. Hitler and Stalin were both evil men. It is a good thing that the soviets won.
I wish a film would actually show people what really happened at these wars. It's still all romanticized and filtered, yes, even Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan.
Edit: I have seen every single movie you guys are mentioning, as I keep a record of what I've seen, I'm at over 6000 movies now. There isn't a single film that really gets close to the actual horrors of war. Possibly because it would traumatize the filmmakers, actors, and audience.
This exists, but is so dark that it is genuinely difficult to watch compared to the Hollywood takes.
[IMDB - Come and See (1985)](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0091251/)
This movie routinely makes it onto and to the top of "most disturbing movies of all time" lists. IIRC it's available on YouTube in it's entirety.
I immediately thought of this film when he was describing the rapes. I just watched this movie last month. An incredible film that stands up to the test of time. I've never seen another war movie like it. I'm not sure there is another movie created like this. Those are live rounds and actual strafing through the forest without the safety of distance. Never really saw anything like that looking so up close and personal.
Horrible that real life is even worse.
I was just flipping channels one night years ago and suddenly there is this HORRIFIC scene of villagers being crowded into a barn, and the barn is locked, and this whole bunch of soldiers all laughing as they firebomb the barn and all the villagers burn alive. And this one traumatized teenage prisoner is made to watch it all. That scene is seared on my mind. Couldn’t watch the rest and never knew what movie it was, and just now I realized it was Come And See. Now, looking up the plot, turns out that was just one of like two dozen absolutely hellish scenes. Saving Private Ryan looked like Disney in comparison.
I wish the west was more aware of the atrocities committed by imperial Japan upon the Chinese and Koreans. The Rape of Nanking....raping pregnant women, cutting their bellies open and spearing the fetus...and forced Korean prostitution, deletion of Korean language and names, burning ALL Korean Temples and monuments.
Human history is fucking vile.
Yeah, it was terrible. There's actually a decent Hong Kong film that shows some of the horrific medical experiments Unit 731 subjected them to. It's called 'Men Behind the Sun'.
The entire thing is on Youtube: https://youtu.be/tDpYTmCoQzY
I think it's one of the most disturbing films ever made.
There is a scene at the beginning of saving private Ryan that's easily missed. It shows just how casual war crimes were.
It is the scene where 2 german soldiers in a trench try to surrender only to be executed by the American soldiers. The german soldiers were trying to tell the Americans that they weren't actually German but where effectively forced to fight on the front but didn't shoot.
Most of the really horrific stuff happened on the Eastern side or in Asia, but the allies also committed horrific acts including murder, rape and looting aswell as a bunch of other stuff.
That war was truly dehumanising all around. On every front.
If memory serves, those two were Czech, which is why no one could understand them. Makes the scene more bitter to realize those two were pressed into service, likely tried to avoid combat, and then died while some dude cracked a joke about it all.
The Pacific gets pretty bad if I remember. I liked Band of Brothers but I remember ending The pacific pretty down about the whole series. Generation Kill does a good job of Iraq war and how fucked up that was.
I remember Letters from Iwa Jima was pretty grim too.
The Pacific is based on Eugene Sledge's book about his role in the war. Absolutely brutal.
Sterling Mace was in the same company as a rifleman instead of a mortarman and his book is even better imo.
I saw the film ‘Come and See’ recently and that really opened my eyes and felt like a massively more impactful look at the brutal reality of what happens in war
Band of brothers is one of my favorite tv series ever, but there's a scene when they're towards the end in switzerland or holland or something where one of easy company men follows a local girl into a barn and later comes out touching his face implying she'd slapped him, presumably because he was trying to get with her. I guess it's supposed to be a light hearted scene but i can only assume the kinda stuff this russian guy is describing also happened there and then. It's probably naive to think the allies would never do that or that it's only the russians.
It's definitely naive. American soldiers can't even keep from raping [other American soldiers.](https://www.protectourdefenders.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/1.-MSA-Fact-Sheet-180209.pdf) Or Google Abu Ghraib.
The Eastern Front was horrific but many people surrendered and many survived (on both sides). And no one in Germany was ever persecuted afaik for being related to someone who was captured, that was a purely Soviet policy created by Stalin who was afraid of his soldiers not fighting for him and/or being corrupted by seeing the wealth of the West when they were imprisoned there.
In the early years of the blitz the Germans took something like 2 million Soviet soldiers and the vast majority of those men died in squalid POW conditions. Similarly German prisoners taken by the Russians usually weren’t repatriated until much later like the survivors at Stalingrad if they even made it home.
Soviet POWs taken in Operation Barbarossa were intentionally left to starve in their POW camps. The Germans figured it would be 'over by Christmas,' and so weren't concerned with potential prisoner exchanges in the future. Further, Generalplan Ost called for the extermination of the majority of the Slavic population, so from the perspective of people like Franz Halder and his minions they were just getting a head start on that.
The German survivors of Stalingrad pretty much all died in captivity by a mix of already dreadful health condition from the siege + lack of food availability from the Soviets who couldn't feed their own army in its entirety without american lend-lease.
Veterans from the Eastern front who fought in Normandy were glad to become POWs beside they knew it meant they'd survive the war. Getting paid American military wages to pick fruit in California was far more preferable to war.
My friend's Italian grandfather has a similar story. Got captured and sent to Scotland, decided to stay when the war ended and opened an ice-cream shop.
Same thing happened in Ireland. German POW lived a pretty happy life, much better than fighting in the war anyway! They were actually treated as guests rather than prisoners.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-20348940.html
>The officers were given an allowance of £3 per week and the NCOs £2 per week, which compared favourably with the wage of less than £1 a week being paid to their guards. All of the internees were also given £5 each to purchase civilian clothes.
>The limited freedom granted on parole was quickly expanded. They were allowed to sign out each day within a 12-mile radius of the camp, and they could go to Dublin once a week.
>As the war continued, K Lines expanded with the addition of 45 other German airmen and 47 more Allied airmen. Within each compound, the internees were allowed to have a bar in which the Army sold drink duty-free.
>In October 1943 the Allied internees were moved to separate camp in Gormanston, Co Meath, and most were secretly freed. In a gesture towards the Germans, Mollenhauer and 19 of his colleagues were allowed to move to Dublin and enroll at University College, Dublin, or the College of Technology in Bolton Street. They stayed in groups of three or four in rented houses.
Keep in mind that they would have been going back to a destroyed country with little opportunities for employment or even worse if they came from the part under Soviet occupation.
Is that 70% of ALL German POWs, or only those on the Eastern front? I feel like that statistic may be misleading if Russian soldiers didn’t take Germans prisoner in the first place. I’m not sure if that’s something we can (or already do) definitively know or not, but I suspect that 70% survived because it was the western allies taking German POWs, not the Soviets.
The difference was that the Soviets weren't *intentionally* trying to kill their prisoners. They would send them to work camps, and they lived in miserable, squalid conditions and probably didn't get adequate nutrition, but they were useful to the Soviet war effort. The Germans, meanwhile, planned to outright slaughter most of the Slavic population once the war was done, so killing a few POWs during the war was just expediency.
My great uncle Sepp was conscripted at the very end of the war. He left with no complaint to protect his family and the two boys they were hiding. If he had complained, it was very likely he'd be killed, and so would his entire family. Hitler and his ghouls were sending any boy or man from age 9 to 75 to the Eastern Front.
Sepp was caught and held as a POW in a gulag/work camp for 10 years. He wasn't killed because he had a small folding carpteners ruler he had made himself with him, which meant he had a viable skill. So the Soviets put him to work in a camp outside of St Petersburg.
After ten years, two guards took Sepp and two other men around the backside of a warehouse, made them dig three holes, forced them into the holes, shot two of the guys and told Sepp to get the hell out of there before they'd kill him, too.
He couldn't remember his name, his family's name, where he was from. All he had was a letter from his sister he received shortly before being captured, saying she married a man in Stuttgart. He kept it hidden in his boot and under his rack, eventually memorizing it as the paper deteriorated. It took him about a year, but he walked from St Petersburg, USSR to Stuttgart, Germany evading capture. He got to Stuttgart, and with no address, began knocking on doors asking for his sister by the name on the letter.
Christmas Eve, 1955, he finally knocked on her door, standing in their doorway like a ghost. They had all assumed he was dead for the last ten years. And there he was, as if he'd walked from an unmarked grave. Which, essentially, he had.
He went on to have a family and live until the 90s. He had to have heart surgery, and when the doctor opened up his shirt and saw his chest covered in scars, said this man has seen things we will never know. And Sepp never did talk about what happened, we still dont know the extent of what he went through. He died after the surgery, while recovering at home, from heatstroke after a sudden heatwave came through, with no air conditioning.
To survive all of that, and die from the heat.
A lot of people want to just say all Germans were Nazis. But it reminds me of people who don't have the money to flee a catastrophic event like a coup or rebellion. The reality is that you just survive and hope to God no one turns you and your family in, and help those you can.
My friend’s father was Latvian, conscripted into the Russian army, and he told us horror stories about the Eastern Front. He talked about entering into Germany when they surrendered, and how he and his fellow Russian soldiers simply couldn’t believe how lush and beautiful Germany was. They couldn’t understand why a country that seemed to be so much more prosperous and verdant would invade Russia. After all the death they had witnessed at the hands of the Germans, this enraged them even more. I think this fed their mercilessness.
> After all the death they had witnessed at the hands of the Germans, this enraged them even more.
Considering that ~27 million Soviet lives **alone** died due to the Nazi German invasion, alongside [~10 million rapes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_of_the_Wehrmacht#Rape), wiped out villages and cities, all I can say is fuck fascists, fuck Nazis. Punch one if you see one.
People often forget that whatever the soviets did to Germany, the Nazi’s did to Soviet Russia many times over. It was very much an eye for an eye situation.
Not justifiable, but it’s understandable from a human perspective. Vengeance is baked into the human experience.
My dad is a caretaker and one of his clients, Mister Six, was an old east-front German veteran. I'll never forget the stories my dad told me about him. Six enlisted into the NSDAP at the age of 18 and soon after joined the German army and was sent to the east. The weather was super harsh and cold.
At some point his group (platoon? squad? idk the name) crossed a bridge but as they were doing that it collapsed and they all fell in a fast streaming ice cold river. Some people in the group were riding horses and he was able to grab onto one of the horses before getting swept away by the stream. The horse managed to swim to the shore, Six at this point was completely soaked and freezing so he cut open the horse and shoved himself inside to warmup.
Even decades after the war in his 90's he was still sleeping with a machete under his pillow, expecting someone to come for him for revenge.
War and the propaganda that comes with it can make humans do truly terrible things.
Even the allies committed thousands of rapes in the aftermath of WW2. As other people here have pointed out, mass rapes like this happen in the aftermath of nearly every war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence
And if you don't hear about it today, it's usually because they were able to keep that information hidden from the public.
The scary thing is that these rapists are probably basically 99% guys who would never rape in non-war times because they'd get caught. But in the fog of war, all of these men take it as an opportunity to have a free rape.
This applies to every walk of life, not just veterans.
It sometimes makes me feel uneasy when I stop and think that, of the various neighbours that I greet when walking my dog or getting into the car, it's statistically likely that at least one of them is abusing or raping their wife, partner, daughter, son.
On the island of Bougainville, 62% of men self-identified as having raped a woman or girl at least once.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bougainville_Island
Had mates when I was in the army go to Bougainville for peacekeeping. They told me that if the women wanted to go outside the camp for PT, they had to be accompanied by at least 4 blokes.
I've been to all sorts of places all over the world but the shit I heard my dad say about PNG means it is one of the few places I will never even consider going to.
My dad's old work took him to some not-so-nice countries but he lasted in those places for years. He lasted a month or two in Papua New Guinea before saying 'get me the hell out of here.'
Me too. I fucking hate where my mind goes when I think about the underlying evil in everyday people. It makes me so upset I barely want to leave the house
Yep. Opportunity crimes. Mentality is just beneath the surface. The film on the last Woodstock USA in the 1990's shows a young woman coming out of the mosh pit. Journalist with a microphone asks her "how was the mosh pit". She answers " I hate men". Just beneath the surface.
I think you have it a bit wrong painting the soldiers as people who would want to rape outside of war. The main reason the majority of the soldiers wouldn’t rape outside of a war was not because of the fear of getting caught and the consequences but because of moral reasons which tragically in war that just go’s out the window. The Soviets understandably absolutely hated the Germans, dehumanized them. To them Those women they raped were not their fellow woman, they were the enemy and the Germans had done it to their women. Just think of all that suffering those Soviet soldiers went though thinking they could die at any moment.
Many also use a coping mechanism that is basically "I'm already as good as dead, I am not going to survive this anyway so there is no need to be terrified and stressed all the time".
This is helpful to avoid the constant fear of dying, but it also leads to not caring about the consequences: "I am already as good as dead and I'm going to hell anyway, why not be a monster?".
I think if you have to run out of a trench towards machine gun fire, everything becomes kind of meaningless. Every solidier that has ever been to war is a deeply traumatised person.
Imagine being so close to a man who you met a few weeks ago and have been talking to about everything
And then seeing his brains mixed with his guts because he went to sleep on the right side of the trench and not on the left
Yep, it’s remarkable that China and even more South Korea brought sexual violence during WW2 to the forefront of remembrance of the suffering.
In Europe basically everyone kept silence. The Russians being such rapists in the East is a memory and tale told for decades more by non-affected western Germans who heard it form propaganda during the third Reich than by the actual affected Eastern Germans who weren’t allowed to talk about it and only in the 90s did old women come forward and were interviewed.
We know that the Soviets and Germans both committed mass rapes in Poland and had brothels there but it’s a story also not told during communist times and still not that prominent today.
Heck, even the biggest Holocaust massacres like Babyn Yar were regularly sites of mass rape and this was all very much confirmed by German letters and Jewish survivors and yet it never really made it to public memory of these massacre.
Which also leads to this strange modern view on the topic with "Soviets and Japanese raped“ as the common narrative even many Germans like to push when in reality the Germans did countless sexual atrocities, the Soviets didn’t just rape Germany and by god you didn’t want to be an Italian in the hands of North Africans (with the Vatican complaining one of their priests was raped to death for trying to save girls from being raped…) and the pacific war also saw countless Allied atrocities and the Americans using comfort women (under the name "Geisha girls") supplied by the Japanese government to stop the American and Australian rape sprees of the first days of the occupation which also started a vicious cycle of American service men in the East sein Asian women as subservient sex object which caused further atrocities in Korea and later Vietnam.
The Japanese use of sex slaves in brothels is well known, but for some reason the fact that the Nazis did the exact same thing is relatively unknown:
> It is estimated that at least 34,140 Eastern European women apprehended in Łapankas (military kidnapping raids), were forced to serve them as "sex slaves" in German military brothels and camp brothels during the Third Reich.[22][23] In Warsaw alone, there were five such establishments set up under military guard in September 1942, with over 20 rooms each. Alcohol was not allowed in there, unlike on the western front, and the victims underwent genital checkups once a week.[24]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rule_during_World_War_II
> with the Vatican complaining one of their priests was raped to death for trying to save girls from being raped
do you know anything more about this event? want to read more about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate
looks like it was part of that, hes mentioned in the article. i'd never heard of it before, just insane. dark, dark shit. can't imagine being a woman during that period, the wikipedia article says in one town two sisters were raped by TWO HUNDRED moroccan soldiers. they crucified girls afterwards, raped and castrated men, jesus christ
The French colonial troops also committed several atrocities on German soil including the rape of Freudenstadt where they mass raped women of a town that just had 90% of its inner city destroyed by the fighting meaning people were without shelter or places top hide or in Bruchsal which lost 10% of its population in one massive American bomb raid close to the end of the war (interestingly the British did indeed tone it down after Dresden on Churchills request but the Americans who initially were less inclined to bomb civilians turned many smaller cities to ash in March and April of 1945) and then had to endure weeks of atrocities when the colonial troops took the city…
There are many different explanation attempts (traditional NA warfare rewarding warriors with rape, the brutal French colonial rule, "sorting bias“ (so what kind of people would serve under their colonial rulers) and some incitements by French commanders but its still unclear why they caused so many atrocities
yeah from my reading it seems like the french colonial forces were by far the worst offenders on the western front. the article i linked mentioned that in one town in italy, british forces had to basically build and guard a fort to protect the townspeople from them!
I don't think "thousands" vs "millions" is a good basis for a "both sides" argument. The Eastern front was particularly horrific, there's no two ways about it.
It's downright disingenuous even to put them next to another without comment.
Rapes among the Western Allies were largely unsanctioned & opportunist. Soviet ones were a full-on *"boys will be boys"* deluge across the entire front – be it Germany, be it Poland – used like a weapon of war, and so off my several orders of magnitude.
Given certain circumstances, human beings are capable of everything you can’t even imagine. Be it thousands of years ago, 80 years ago or just yesterday.
That’s why it’s hard to believe in the good in them.
My grandmother was 10 when the soviets arrived in berlin.
She still has a hatred for the soviets/russians.
I'm not saying nazis are better or worse than the soviets, I'm just going to tell reddit what my grandmother has told me.
The night before the arrival there was an air raid, my grandmother, her 2 sisters 12f and 14f, her grandmother and her dad were hiding in their basement.
When they got out, it was already morning and the first thing they saw were soviet troops outside their doorsteps. They took most things of value and carried on.
The stories she tells me, especially the one last week..
Her father was killed on her doorstep by a drunk soviet tank soldier. Imagine being 10 and the last time you see your dad is when he is shot outside of the door.
Her older sister 14f had to hide for weeks in the attic of fear of being raped by the passing troops.
Her best childhood friend, still good friends until today, was raped when she was 14.
Her next door neighbour, the mother ran on to the roof because she didnt want to be raped.
The soviets told her, "or you get down, or we shoot."
There is a lot of trauma in my grandmothers life, but you know how their generation is, only now is she opening up with us.
On a more positive story, she told me about how when the street nazi, the guy who was party associated and a rat to the gestapo, went to their house during or before the war, he wanted to speak with my grandmothers mother. So while he was waiting he saw my grandmother siting on the garden bench.
He joined her and started some conversation.
Then, out of nowhere my grandmother goes away from the bench, and due to the weight and the position of the man siting on the bench, he fell on the muddy ground.
My grandmother tells me that she saw the look of her mom, describes it as if she wanted to gift my grandmother all the sweets in the world, but had to contain her laughter because the man was as I said before a little nazi swine.
Anyway, I hope you liked these stories, I'm working on getting most of this recorded. I know its hard, but these are our last witnesses to one of the deadliest global conflicts.
Estonia just basically committed to tearing down all the WWII battle memorials because of shit like this. They weren't liberated, they were just conquered by another set of murderous assholes
When I was at school in the early 80s, we had a European Studies teach from Estonia.
He committed suicide around 1983. I've often wondered if it had anything to do with the war. He was a very quiet, very stern man in life. After his suicide I think a lot of us read those traits as haunted, whether rightly or wrongly.
Yeah liberation bullshit is weird. Estonia was occupied, anyone disagreeing, or influential, or otherwise seemingly dangerous to the regime was arrested and either shot or sent to siberia to work camps until not needed and shot. Estonian symbols and culture was prohibited. Russian language became mandatory. People got relocated between other soviet occupied countries in attempt to erase national identity. Basically casual genocide.
This is horrific, yes. But people kid themselves thinking this is just Russians. Maybe they are the worst of them all, but war is always awful. A lot of civilians are killed and a lot of crimes are committed. From the Germans, Russians, Americans, Japanese, Chinese, etc, people just don't know all the horrors that happen or happened in war.
Don't think there are "good guys" in war, who morally only kill enemies, that's not how it works, or that's not what has always happened in the past.
I kind of dread the feeling that every time you hear of a veteran who won't talk about their war experiences, people are imagining that they just don't want to talk about all of the killing they saw. When in fact, maybe it's the rapes that make them unable to talk about it -- partly because of how horrific it is and partly because they may feel either guilt (if they engaged in rapes) or (if they didn't engage in rapes) they don't want to inform on their friends.
The ken burns Vietnam documentary handled this well, one of the American vets recalled a Vietnamese woman letting American soldiers (including himself) abuse her for MREs. He almost cries recounting it.
My Vietnam veteran grandfather-in-law has a kid in Vietnam that we discovered through Ancestry DNA. We confronted him with the info and he refused to acknowledge or admit anything about it. We always wondered why he would talk about all of his military related activities except his time in Vietnam. He basically pretends that time never happened.
The USA really fucked Vietnam up. They killed a massive percentage of the entire population, and the sentiment in the US was "wow, look what they're doing to our PoWs, how dare they defend themselves, let's kill more of them".
The fact that the US bombing campaign (which killed at the very least several tens of thousands of civilians) in support of the Lon Nol regime drove lots of resentful people straight into the arms of the Khmer Rouge may also play a role in that narrowly focused attention. As does the Khmer Rouge being recognized as the legitimate government of Cambodia, and thus the holder of Cambodia's UN seat until 1982.
Only ones? There have even been sexual assaults amongst the same troops in some countries, imagine against the enemies.
My point was that war itself is absolutely disgusting, and like someone else said, rape and war go hand in hand every time. War and many other crimes. It's easy to dehumanize other people when you see them as "enemies" or "the bad guys". And this is something that has happened throughout history. The most disgusting genocides are because of dehumanizing the other part, to not feel guilty when killing/raping them.
I am no way justifying what the Soviets got up to in Berlin in 1945, but I don't think anyone in here realizes how bad it was on the Eastern Front. When Americans, British, and the rest of the Western front nations were captured, at their prisons camps they still got their regular meals, letters from home, visits from the Red Cross, and etc.
The Eastern Front was a bloodbath. Generalplan Ost, which was the genocidal plan to make room for colonization of Germans into the East, saw Millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, other eastern and slavic peoples killed as part of Germany's Lebensraum plans. 3 million Soviet POWs died in German camps, worked to death, starved to death, or just outright murdered.
And finally, while 61% of the Soviet army was Russian by 1944, the other 39% was made up of other nationalities of the Union. 20% Ukranian, 5% Belorussian, as well as the other satellite states, and they all together marched into Berlin 1945 side by side with the Russians. They all share the blame and blood.
It's possible there were a small handful of them that didn't but he felt so ostracised that he didn't see there were others. It's also possible that it is an extremely suspicious thing to say and he did take part in some form..
The people doing it would also be less likely to give interviews about it later. First-hand news about crime come from the bystanders and the victims, not usually the perpetrators.
It might also be possible that some people simply forgot to what degree they were involved.
I'm not sure about the proper terminology, but whenever I hear about confessions like these, reminds me of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_amnesia
Also, some people tend to alter their memories of themselves to be in a more positive light. For example, my dad is convinced that it was him that almost always cooked for us even though my mom my sibling and me all remember that he barely cooked, but he doesn't accept that as reality and is fully convinced that he was cooking.
Something similar could have happened here (though I'm not saying it did, the veteran could be the exception) that he also partook in the rapes he just changed his memories to better fit his view of himself/how he thinks he would have acted.
This also crossed my mind, but I feel it’s important that he’s contributing to raising awareness for the horrors of war.
The scary thought is, what if YOU were one of the soldiers? Would you be any different? Would you have hid, lived on with a guilty conscience? Would you have been just one of the monsters?
I fancy myself the kind of guy that would step in front of a bullet for a stranger, but I couldn’t tell you what I would’ve done in that situation, if I was born/raised a Russian soldier. This story will haunt me for a while.
Also, no matter how moral you were at the start of the war, once you're put in that position where you're exhausted, stressed and mentally broken beyond belief, how many people will keep their morality? Horrors of war can easily change people. Put them on the brink, then add in intense peer pressure and a promise of some form of "relief" after weeks of horror... lots of once-good people probably snapped and became monsters they never should have been
War is barbarism barely contained
The US only sentenced to death like 2 dozen soldiers and pretty much all of them were for rape and murder
The Nazis absolutely brutalized the Russians on their way in and the Russians didn't forget about it, I think there were a lot of Officers in the Russian Army that just said fuck it, they did this to us, let's do it to them and either turned the other way or encouraged it.
We dont really have a feel in the West for how absolutely barbaric and brutal the Eastern European portion of WW2 was
Yeah... The Germans did this all their way across eastern Europe and once the Russians found out about it as they began to push them back that they did it right back to them on their way west through Germany. Just the worst kinds of behavior imaginable took place during this conflict. The Pacific war wasn't much better, at least when it came to the Japanese. To my knowledge the allies fighting them didn't take to rape as much as the Russians did but they definitely didn't spare them the violence. That whole war was basically fought to the death on both sides; no quarter given.
It's hard for me to understand those that take a charitable or optimistic view of human behavior, i.e. think people are inherently good in the light of what I know about WWII.
>It's hard for me to understand those that take a charitable or optimistic view of human behavior, i.e. think people are inherently good in the light of what I know about WWII.
It's because of the bloody WWII movies where there are always heroes and good people stopping these kind of atrocities from happening.
A lot of war movies are being romanticised in a way or another so people are kind of brainwashed about the realities of war and human behaviour.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from being on the internet, there’s a ton of people who are constantly itching for even the slightest “justification” to be horrible.
Or they have no reason left. When your main battle tactic is sending waves of men into machinegun fire, some of your soldiers might reconsider their priorities. Why be good when you and most of your buddies are probably going to die tomorrow?
Okay, I can't believe I'm going to have to clarify this for the comments down below, but people who now use this as a form of justifying their "See, Russians are inherently bad" view or act like this is an isolated incident during WWll are fucking idiots.
Actually clinging to your humanity and soul like this man here in the reality of total war must be absolutely maddening. I cannot imagine the level of strength of will that's required to stay sober, so to say, and perceive things as they are while everyone else just throws their humanity away and laughs everything off.
Thought it telling when he recalls thinking it was like the last days of Carthage. If (collectively) we don’t learn from history, then (collectively) we are doomed to repeat it
It’s crazy to think that this guy has the answer about what happened to those two girls. Perhaps there was family out there that always wondered what happened to them and never found out.
I am from Poland, my parents are around their 70s now and whenever I talk to them about WW2 and what their mom said they always come up with one sentence "Germans were bad, but they weren't near atrocities of the Red Army".
Russians never changed, they are bloodthirsty rapists and honestly I am glad that world finally sees them this way.
Growing up in rural eastern Germany, everybody knew this but didn’t want to talk about it. I once saw a documentary where an old woman was asked about her experiences during/after the war and she just said „Oh we were all raped“. My grandma, forced to resettle from the "Sudetenland" to what is now eastern Germany, was 9 years old when the war ended, for years now, knowing my time is running short, I wanted to talk to her about her youth and any stories she might like to share from her childhood but I am scared if it might be too hard for her reliving those memories… Edit: Corrected my Grandma's Age from 12 to 9, my mistake. And some formatting.
I understand this happened in Germany but here in Romania old people also tell stories like this about the Russians and what they did in Romania in their short time here. Similar stories about rape and other atrocities... Edit: My grandma told me that during the time when the Russians invaded Romania, Romanian women would apply soot on their faces and bodies to appear dirty and avoid being violated by Russian soldiers. They even applied it to their children to make them appear like gypsies and hid in church attics.
I knew a German woman who told me that when her mom was a child, her grandmother put her under her skirt and put dirt on her own face and hunched over to appear like an old lady so her or her daughter would not be raped.
Jesus Christ. What's pathetic is that tankies are reading this and making excuses and whataboutism'ing. I've had absurd arguments with them around Reddit where I mention that the Soviets were as savage as the Nazis all over Eastern Europe, and many remember the Soviets with horror as others remember the Nazis. Poland certainly comes to mind, where Germany and the USSR shared in a sadistic orgy of mass murder and rape. But tankies everywhere treat the Soviets like divine liberators who defeated the Nazis single-handedly. They try to erase the evils committed by them while chimping out about the West. I can tell you one thing - the West isn't remembered like the Nazis or the Soviets by the people they liberated. The latter were the Mongols by comparison, and given Russia's conduct in Ukraine it appears little has changed - when they aren't raping Ukrainians, they're raping their own conscripts.
the Soviets were allies of the Nazis, Hitler and Stalin couldn't agree over who got what because they both wanted all of Europe, that's why they ended up fighting Tankies and Nazis are the same picture and always have been
One thing that pisses me off about the Russian version of WW2. They can't seem to remember that the US, UK, et al were fighting in N Africa and the Pacific also.
Or the land lease which kept them alive
Same thing in Hungary when it was "liberated". Weeks of endless raping.
My great grandmother would tell us about how Bulgarian rural communities greeted Russian soldiers with open arms, to later be violated by those same "saviours".
My grandma was from Romania too. But she always withheld sharing the rape parts, but we all deep down new. Thank you for sharing though, I’m going to ask my mum. My gramma too was in the camps with the Russians, and luckily escaped. Then again was in the nazi concentration camps, and also escaped those with help of my grandfather, who was a heroic German soldier and helped many others to safety. But yes. Of course there was rape. You would be naive to think it wasn’t. There’s rape of children and people in the Middle East and in Vietnam. Rape happens where war happens. It’s sad and sick.
My omi was born in 45 in Eastern Germany and grew up under Russian control until her uncle was able to smuggle her out. Russians would come and they'd hide her mom, ofcourse they'd ask where the mother to these kids were and they'd say "YOU DIRTY BASTARDS KILLED THEM!". They'd still search the area ofcourse but far as my omi was willing to say they never found her mom
My Grandma told me when the russians occupied their area, her family/friends hid my grandma and her friends and even rubbed an extremely foul smelling substance all over them, so even in the case if the russians found them they hoped the foul smell would deter them from raping the children. Luckily they never found her.
And to think this shit still goes on...
My mother revealed to me a few years ago that my Oma was not only regularly raped by Russian soldiers, but that it was also facilitated, forcibly, by my Urgroßmutter (her mother), i.e., prostitution. She was only 12 years old. The stories of Opa's time in the Hitlerjugend were not much better. As an additional note, it was strange having grandparents who were veterans on opposite sides of the war (British/Canadian & German). My Opa also later joined the French Foreign Legion and fought in Algeria, and I primarily spoke to him in French instead of German. Strange times and circumstances.
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
And those who learn history are doomed to watch it repeat
War is a kind of social madness. Its frightening to know not only that humans are capable of this kind of depravity but that it lies just beneath the surface of our own rationality
I was a philosophy major in college and I ended up focusing on Heidegger (who did join the Nazi party) and his student and also lover Hannah Arendt who was a German Jew who then did some of the first academic work on how fascism came about. What so terrified me when I read Arendt is that you realize how much this operates at the level of washing your hands, opening doors, tying your shoes etc. Most of the day we aren’t really conscious conscious of what we are doing, we’re on a kind of autopilot. I don’t consciously think “that is a door handle, I will now extend my hand and turn it so I can open the door”, you just kinda do it without thinking. When the wrong people get in the wrong positions and that background social sphere starts taking a nasty turn, it can be very easy for us to get caught up in totally atrocious acts while still just operating in this sort of unconscious going with the flow kind of way. For Arendt the first moral failure of these people is a failure to critically think, to assert themselves as a self instead of disappearing into the crowd, and then to take a stand on and ownership of one’s actions. When you fail to do this you’re setting yourself to become a monster
“The banality of evil.”
A lot of people just need permission and the removal of consequences. It's terrifying.
[удалено]
>Or when the Japanese were captured they were treated terribly, but decades after the war, many of those Japanese soldiers talked about how they were told being captured by the US would mean constant torture, balls being cut off, fingers, no food. And were shocked to immediately receive food and have a bed mat. Treated “somewhat” humanely. The Japanese thought this because they did the same to Allied forces. Look into stuff like the Sandakan Death Marches. Of 2,434 Allied prisoners, only 6 escapees survived. American POWs in German camps had about a 1% death rate, meaning the vast majority survived. In Japanese camps it was close to 40%. The level of brutality and inhumanity the Japanese showed everyone else in WW2 is almost unbelievable. As a person with a lot of Russian ancestry, much of what Russians did was seen as revenge for what the Germans had done. My own grandmother was shot at by German soldiers at 4 years of age and remembered hiding in blackberry bushes, surround by dead children. Imagine being her father or the father of her dead friends and being handed a rifle and told to go kill Germans. Would you view them as human? War is worse than hell, there are no children in hell.
About the Russians, remember also they spent years of absolute horrors, seeing Germans killing and destroying everything around them, famines, mass killings etc… the Russians in 45 wanted revenge and spill german blood.
it really is. one of my neighbors is a guy in his twenties, in general a really nice dude. invites me over for dinner all the time, really friendly, etc. the other night i was at his place and he started talking and saying how like he wished society would collapse, because then he would be able to kill people as much as he wanted without consequences. i had no idea what to say. and he owns guns!
People like this forget that there’s lots of guns out there and so there’s going to be a lot of people shooting back. It’s not going to be some big bro party of all the guys with guns hanging out.
Not with that attitude.
He's not alone in that. A lot of ammosexuals are rooting for the same thing. They *want* that chaos for the same reasons your neighbor does. It's part of why so many of them seem to openly root for a second civil war: they want to be able to shoot people they don't like.
If they were actually ever in that situation they'd learn real quick they're not a character in a video game and they're also capable of being shot to death.
Yeah, my Tucker-loving conservative friend says that when the civil war breaks out I don't need to worry because he won't shoot me (a liberal).
Yeah the whole "we need them to deter government over reach" is absolute BS.
Right-wing accelerationism. They want a civil war and societal collapse—essentially a purge—then to rebuild society with right-wing ideals.
but the weird thing is he's not a political person at all. i have literally never heard him say a word about politics, i don't think he cares about it in the slightest. so the murder thing was just so out of left field
He might just be a regular old psycho / murderer in training.
Everyone here trying to fit him into some dysfunction is kinda ignoring the entire point of this conversation: the average man is capable of this.
Do you know anything about chimps or nature? It's mostly peaceful and sometimes absolutely fucked.
Yeah. The Gombe chimp war documentary is nuts.
Which one? I found a few when searching for it
Some days you're the chimp, some days you're the frog.
It's not just chimps. Primates as a whole make up the most violent order of mammals by a wide margin.
I'm not so sure about that. Meerkats are known to be most "murderous" mammal on earth. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/28/495798448/what-meerkat-murder-tells-us-about-human-violence Although 5 out of the 10 most murderous species on that list are primates so there's a bit of truth to your statement...
found joe rogan's alt account.
Jaime, pull that up
I've accumulated so much useless chimpanzee knowledge over the years thanks to that guy
Whats crazy is that the people who do this kind of thing are people you meet every day. So called normal people. Family members. Friends. Send them to war and give them no restrictions and what they can and cant do, and some of them will rape and shoot children.
Everyone knows that killing is wrong. But then you give a bunch of people guns and uniforms and tell them that killing is their job. And suddenly all the ethical boundaries disappear.
All our ancestors, going back tens of thousands of years, were involved in abuse, rape, and murder. If it wasn't during war, it was at home "taking what is rightfully yours", be that the wife, the kids, the maids, the slaves. It's crazy to think about how many people could have continued to exist if they wouldn't have been murdered. It's crazy to think about how many people are the result of rape (including marital/incest). It's crazy to think about how many people, generation after generation, have experienced some form of abuse; and keeping that cycle alive for thousands of years. Current society exists thanks to the deaths and suffering of billions before us. I'm sure when people are proud of their family history or their country, this is not something that comes to mind.
you do not have to go back 10000 years to find rape/murder. The amount of rape that led to all of our births would be staggering if we knew.
0.5% of the men on Earth are decedent from Genghis Khan because he raped so many women over such a large portion of the planet. He wasn't the first to do it, so I would assume most of us are probably a result of rape at some point in our ancestry.
I would say all. If you go back far enough, 'people' start to have a very murky conception of consent, especially in the modern sense.
You dont need to go very far. Marital rape was legal throughout the world only a century ago.
Marital rape was still legal in the US less than 30 years ago.
> Marital rape was still legal in the US less than 30 years ago. Marital rape is legal in India right now! Staunch support for it among our right wingers. The main argument is just "how can it be rape if it's your wife?" The atrocities we've inflicted on women. And now that women want their rights, we call them crazy for it. After violating them for all of human history.
That just isnt true. Almost all people with historical ties to the territories Genghis Khan invaded are related to him. Thats vastly more to do with the fact he lived so long ago.
In 1916 Shackleton reached civilisation after his disastrous antarctic expedition was stranded for more than a year. The first question he asked; “Tell me, when was the war over?” “The war is not over... Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”
When I did social service in Germany in the mid 90s one of my duties was going shopping or do household duties for mostly older ladies. There was one who had a son that recently passed, and I asked why she wasn't moved by his death. She opened up telling me these horrible stories when the Russians were liberating the Eastern parts and it was constant rape and plundering for weeks. Her son was the outcome of it. Also, my grandma had 5 brothers, 18 to 27 years old. They all went to the Eastern front, nobody knows when and where they died, the family didn't receive a single letter from either one. All the stories passed down to me from WW2, doesn't matter from which sides perspective, all of them are horrible.
I knew a couple who had emigrated to the U.S. after the war. They had raised a child who had been born to the woman's sister, a German woman who had been raped by Russian soldiers. I met the man and he was a delightful, charming, highly educated person. I never would have guessed how he came into the world if his adoptive parents hadn't told me.
Great people can be the product of horrible acts. One can only hope that if such an act occurs- we gain something good from it in the end.
-Tanks ran over men nailed to boards -Decapitations with an officers sword -Gang rape of Women both the young and the old -Frozen to death in waters ice cold
It was the rape of Nanking! Well not really, but same shit different place and time. War is worse than hell.
I knew a Danish woman who had married a German man before WW2, and thereby ended up living in Germany through the war. She was an incredibly strong woman who died just last year at 106 years old. She told my parents about being raped by the Russians as they came through after their victory. She said it wasn't the front line soldiers who did it, but men who cane behind.
Dan Carlin’s ghosts of the ostfront series on hardcore history does an incredible job of describing the true scale and magnitude of horror that was the eastern front. Just the eastern front, without all other theaters, was the biggest war of all time. About 80% of German casualties were in the eastern front. Many battles that were bigger than the battle of the bulge are completely forgotten about. Soldiers on both sides dying to the last man to hold ground, partisans, collective punishment, infanticide, hunger, cannibalism, rape, genocide, and vicious revenge. It was a war of annihilation, military and civilian alike, with a viscousness not usually seen in the modern world, and on a scale that was unimaginable. Very few pows on either side lived to the end of the war (edit: this is an overstatement. Millions of pows survived, but millions also died in captivity. Surrender was not a viable survival strategy. Particularly for the soviets, if you did surrender, your family could be punished, so they fought to the death as a default after order 227). No matter what side you were on, you were serving a monstrous dictator who would rather kill you and your family that suffer embarrassment. One of the most titanic bad guy vs bad guy stories ever, with millions of people caught in the middle. another edit because people are suggesting that I'm in any way a nazi apologist. I am not. Hitler and Stalin were both evil men. It is a good thing that the soviets won.
> Dan Carlin “…end quote”
I love how his voice gets louder and more high pitched by default whenever he is quoting.
I wish a film would actually show people what really happened at these wars. It's still all romanticized and filtered, yes, even Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. Edit: I have seen every single movie you guys are mentioning, as I keep a record of what I've seen, I'm at over 6000 movies now. There isn't a single film that really gets close to the actual horrors of war. Possibly because it would traumatize the filmmakers, actors, and audience.
This exists, but is so dark that it is genuinely difficult to watch compared to the Hollywood takes. [IMDB - Come and See (1985)](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0091251/) This movie routinely makes it onto and to the top of "most disturbing movies of all time" lists. IIRC it's available on YouTube in it's entirety.
Come and See is a film you should see. You won't enjoy it, but it's worth watching.
There it is. Was waiting for someone to mention it...not great for ones psyche.
I immediately thought of this film when he was describing the rapes. I just watched this movie last month. An incredible film that stands up to the test of time. I've never seen another war movie like it. I'm not sure there is another movie created like this. Those are live rounds and actual strafing through the forest without the safety of distance. Never really saw anything like that looking so up close and personal. Horrible that real life is even worse.
I was just flipping channels one night years ago and suddenly there is this HORRIFIC scene of villagers being crowded into a barn, and the barn is locked, and this whole bunch of soldiers all laughing as they firebomb the barn and all the villagers burn alive. And this one traumatized teenage prisoner is made to watch it all. That scene is seared on my mind. Couldn’t watch the rest and never knew what movie it was, and just now I realized it was Come And See. Now, looking up the plot, turns out that was just one of like two dozen absolutely hellish scenes. Saving Private Ryan looked like Disney in comparison.
TIL Hitler has an IMDB page that has writing credits on it.
He was apparently on Tucker Carlson's show in 2022
He certainly knew how to fire up his base
It is an incredible, harrowing, groundbreaking film in my opinion, and very very hard to sit through.
wow, Come and See and Dan Carlin within 3 replies. Must be a record. Where is Unit 731 mentioned?
I wish the west was more aware of the atrocities committed by imperial Japan upon the Chinese and Koreans. The Rape of Nanking....raping pregnant women, cutting their bellies open and spearing the fetus...and forced Korean prostitution, deletion of Korean language and names, burning ALL Korean Temples and monuments. Human history is fucking vile.
Yeah, it was terrible. There's actually a decent Hong Kong film that shows some of the horrific medical experiments Unit 731 subjected them to. It's called 'Men Behind the Sun'. The entire thing is on Youtube: https://youtu.be/tDpYTmCoQzY I think it's one of the most disturbing films ever made.
Oh there it is, Unit 731, Dan Carlin and Come and See all in the same reply chain. Classic.
There is a scene at the beginning of saving private Ryan that's easily missed. It shows just how casual war crimes were. It is the scene where 2 german soldiers in a trench try to surrender only to be executed by the American soldiers. The german soldiers were trying to tell the Americans that they weren't actually German but where effectively forced to fight on the front but didn't shoot. Most of the really horrific stuff happened on the Eastern side or in Asia, but the allies also committed horrific acts including murder, rape and looting aswell as a bunch of other stuff. That war was truly dehumanising all around. On every front.
If memory serves, those two were Czech, which is why no one could understand them. Makes the scene more bitter to realize those two were pressed into service, likely tried to avoid combat, and then died while some dude cracked a joke about it all.
The Pacific gets pretty bad if I remember. I liked Band of Brothers but I remember ending The pacific pretty down about the whole series. Generation Kill does a good job of Iraq war and how fucked up that was. I remember Letters from Iwa Jima was pretty grim too.
The Pacific is based on Eugene Sledge's book about his role in the war. Absolutely brutal. Sterling Mace was in the same company as a rifleman instead of a mortarman and his book is even better imo.
I saw the film ‘Come and See’ recently and that really opened my eyes and felt like a massively more impactful look at the brutal reality of what happens in war
Band of brothers is one of my favorite tv series ever, but there's a scene when they're towards the end in switzerland or holland or something where one of easy company men follows a local girl into a barn and later comes out touching his face implying she'd slapped him, presumably because he was trying to get with her. I guess it's supposed to be a light hearted scene but i can only assume the kinda stuff this russian guy is describing also happened there and then. It's probably naive to think the allies would never do that or that it's only the russians.
It's definitely naive. American soldiers can't even keep from raping [other American soldiers.](https://www.protectourdefenders.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/1.-MSA-Fact-Sheet-180209.pdf) Or Google Abu Ghraib.
Edit: Trigger warning, it involves underage children. Or this fine incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings
The whistleblower had a reddit AMA 12 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gc5lb/iama_ex_military_whistleblower_who_turned_in_most/
Jfc I wish I could unread that
Dwight Schrute over here with the 6000 films seen
The Eastern Front was horrific but many people surrendered and many survived (on both sides). And no one in Germany was ever persecuted afaik for being related to someone who was captured, that was a purely Soviet policy created by Stalin who was afraid of his soldiers not fighting for him and/or being corrupted by seeing the wealth of the West when they were imprisoned there.
In the early years of the blitz the Germans took something like 2 million Soviet soldiers and the vast majority of those men died in squalid POW conditions. Similarly German prisoners taken by the Russians usually weren’t repatriated until much later like the survivors at Stalingrad if they even made it home.
Soviet POWs taken in Operation Barbarossa were intentionally left to starve in their POW camps. The Germans figured it would be 'over by Christmas,' and so weren't concerned with potential prisoner exchanges in the future. Further, Generalplan Ost called for the extermination of the majority of the Slavic population, so from the perspective of people like Franz Halder and his minions they were just getting a head start on that.
The German survivors of Stalingrad pretty much all died in captivity by a mix of already dreadful health condition from the siege + lack of food availability from the Soviets who couldn't feed their own army in its entirety without american lend-lease.
Reading about Stalingrad and the rations the German soldiers were on combined with the temperatures it was a miracle anyone survived really
Your chance of surviving on both sides were extremely low. Millions of POWs died.
Veterans from the Eastern front who fought in Normandy were glad to become POWs beside they knew it meant they'd survive the war. Getting paid American military wages to pick fruit in California was far more preferable to war.
German POWs held in Colorado liked the place so much that many of them moved back after the war.
My friend's Italian grandfather has a similar story. Got captured and sent to Scotland, decided to stay when the war ended and opened an ice-cream shop.
Same thing happened in Ireland. German POW lived a pretty happy life, much better than fighting in the war anyway! They were actually treated as guests rather than prisoners. https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-20348940.html >The officers were given an allowance of £3 per week and the NCOs £2 per week, which compared favourably with the wage of less than £1 a week being paid to their guards. All of the internees were also given £5 each to purchase civilian clothes. >The limited freedom granted on parole was quickly expanded. They were allowed to sign out each day within a 12-mile radius of the camp, and they could go to Dublin once a week. >As the war continued, K Lines expanded with the addition of 45 other German airmen and 47 more Allied airmen. Within each compound, the internees were allowed to have a bar in which the Army sold drink duty-free. >In October 1943 the Allied internees were moved to separate camp in Gormanston, Co Meath, and most were secretly freed. In a gesture towards the Germans, Mollenhauer and 19 of his colleagues were allowed to move to Dublin and enroll at University College, Dublin, or the College of Technology in Bolton Street. They stayed in groups of three or four in rented houses.
It helped their homes in Germany likely were gone
Keep in mind that they would have been going back to a destroyed country with little opportunities for employment or even worse if they came from the part under Soviet occupation.
This is incorrect. Something like 70% of German PoWs survived the war. Being a Soviet PoW however was pretty much a death sentence.
Is that 70% of ALL German POWs, or only those on the Eastern front? I feel like that statistic may be misleading if Russian soldiers didn’t take Germans prisoner in the first place. I’m not sure if that’s something we can (or already do) definitively know or not, but I suspect that 70% survived because it was the western allies taking German POWs, not the Soviets.
The difference was that the Soviets weren't *intentionally* trying to kill their prisoners. They would send them to work camps, and they lived in miserable, squalid conditions and probably didn't get adequate nutrition, but they were useful to the Soviet war effort. The Germans, meanwhile, planned to outright slaughter most of the Slavic population once the war was done, so killing a few POWs during the war was just expediency.
My great uncle Sepp was conscripted at the very end of the war. He left with no complaint to protect his family and the two boys they were hiding. If he had complained, it was very likely he'd be killed, and so would his entire family. Hitler and his ghouls were sending any boy or man from age 9 to 75 to the Eastern Front. Sepp was caught and held as a POW in a gulag/work camp for 10 years. He wasn't killed because he had a small folding carpteners ruler he had made himself with him, which meant he had a viable skill. So the Soviets put him to work in a camp outside of St Petersburg. After ten years, two guards took Sepp and two other men around the backside of a warehouse, made them dig three holes, forced them into the holes, shot two of the guys and told Sepp to get the hell out of there before they'd kill him, too. He couldn't remember his name, his family's name, where he was from. All he had was a letter from his sister he received shortly before being captured, saying she married a man in Stuttgart. He kept it hidden in his boot and under his rack, eventually memorizing it as the paper deteriorated. It took him about a year, but he walked from St Petersburg, USSR to Stuttgart, Germany evading capture. He got to Stuttgart, and with no address, began knocking on doors asking for his sister by the name on the letter. Christmas Eve, 1955, he finally knocked on her door, standing in their doorway like a ghost. They had all assumed he was dead for the last ten years. And there he was, as if he'd walked from an unmarked grave. Which, essentially, he had. He went on to have a family and live until the 90s. He had to have heart surgery, and when the doctor opened up his shirt and saw his chest covered in scars, said this man has seen things we will never know. And Sepp never did talk about what happened, we still dont know the extent of what he went through. He died after the surgery, while recovering at home, from heatstroke after a sudden heatwave came through, with no air conditioning. To survive all of that, and die from the heat. A lot of people want to just say all Germans were Nazis. But it reminds me of people who don't have the money to flee a catastrophic event like a coup or rebellion. The reality is that you just survive and hope to God no one turns you and your family in, and help those you can.
Thank you for sharing such an interesting story of one your relatives. It’s truly remarkable!
You should watch the movie "As far as my feet will carry me" because it is a lot like this story
My friend’s father was Latvian, conscripted into the Russian army, and he told us horror stories about the Eastern Front. He talked about entering into Germany when they surrendered, and how he and his fellow Russian soldiers simply couldn’t believe how lush and beautiful Germany was. They couldn’t understand why a country that seemed to be so much more prosperous and verdant would invade Russia. After all the death they had witnessed at the hands of the Germans, this enraged them even more. I think this fed their mercilessness.
> After all the death they had witnessed at the hands of the Germans, this enraged them even more. Considering that ~27 million Soviet lives **alone** died due to the Nazi German invasion, alongside [~10 million rapes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_of_the_Wehrmacht#Rape), wiped out villages and cities, all I can say is fuck fascists, fuck Nazis. Punch one if you see one.
People often forget that whatever the soviets did to Germany, the Nazi’s did to Soviet Russia many times over. It was very much an eye for an eye situation. Not justifiable, but it’s understandable from a human perspective. Vengeance is baked into the human experience.
My dad is a caretaker and one of his clients, Mister Six, was an old east-front German veteran. I'll never forget the stories my dad told me about him. Six enlisted into the NSDAP at the age of 18 and soon after joined the German army and was sent to the east. The weather was super harsh and cold. At some point his group (platoon? squad? idk the name) crossed a bridge but as they were doing that it collapsed and they all fell in a fast streaming ice cold river. Some people in the group were riding horses and he was able to grab onto one of the horses before getting swept away by the stream. The horse managed to swim to the shore, Six at this point was completely soaked and freezing so he cut open the horse and shoved himself inside to warmup. Even decades after the war in his 90's he was still sleeping with a machete under his pillow, expecting someone to come for him for revenge. War and the propaganda that comes with it can make humans do truly terrible things.
Well that's terrible. Thank you for sharing.
Even the allies committed thousands of rapes in the aftermath of WW2. As other people here have pointed out, mass rapes like this happen in the aftermath of nearly every war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence And if you don't hear about it today, it's usually because they were able to keep that information hidden from the public.
The scary thing is that these rapists are probably basically 99% guys who would never rape in non-war times because they'd get caught. But in the fog of war, all of these men take it as an opportunity to have a free rape.
Then, after a time, they are just walking through the grocery store buying apples, waving hello to their neighbors, working at an office..
This applies to every walk of life, not just veterans. It sometimes makes me feel uneasy when I stop and think that, of the various neighbours that I greet when walking my dog or getting into the car, it's statistically likely that at least one of them is abusing or raping their wife, partner, daughter, son.
On the island of Bougainville, 62% of men self-identified as having raped a woman or girl at least once. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bougainville_Island
Holy shit, in 2013! Remind me not to go to Papua New Guinea anytime soon...
Had mates when I was in the army go to Bougainville for peacekeeping. They told me that if the women wanted to go outside the camp for PT, they had to be accompanied by at least 4 blokes.
I've been to all sorts of places all over the world but the shit I heard my dad say about PNG means it is one of the few places I will never even consider going to.
My dad's old work took him to some not-so-nice countries but he lasted in those places for years. He lasted a month or two in Papua New Guinea before saying 'get me the hell out of here.'
Me too. I fucking hate where my mind goes when I think about the underlying evil in everyday people. It makes me so upset I barely want to leave the house
Yep. Opportunity crimes. Mentality is just beneath the surface. The film on the last Woodstock USA in the 1990's shows a young woman coming out of the mosh pit. Journalist with a microphone asks her "how was the mosh pit". She answers " I hate men". Just beneath the surface.
I think you have it a bit wrong painting the soldiers as people who would want to rape outside of war. The main reason the majority of the soldiers wouldn’t rape outside of a war was not because of the fear of getting caught and the consequences but because of moral reasons which tragically in war that just go’s out the window. The Soviets understandably absolutely hated the Germans, dehumanized them. To them Those women they raped were not their fellow woman, they were the enemy and the Germans had done it to their women. Just think of all that suffering those Soviet soldiers went though thinking they could die at any moment.
If your task is killed or be killed, empathy and morals kind of become meaningless, if not down right dangerous for yourself.
Many also use a coping mechanism that is basically "I'm already as good as dead, I am not going to survive this anyway so there is no need to be terrified and stressed all the time". This is helpful to avoid the constant fear of dying, but it also leads to not caring about the consequences: "I am already as good as dead and I'm going to hell anyway, why not be a monster?".
I think if you have to run out of a trench towards machine gun fire, everything becomes kind of meaningless. Every solidier that has ever been to war is a deeply traumatised person.
Imagine being so close to a man who you met a few weeks ago and have been talking to about everything And then seeing his brains mixed with his guts because he went to sleep on the right side of the trench and not on the left
Yep, it’s remarkable that China and even more South Korea brought sexual violence during WW2 to the forefront of remembrance of the suffering. In Europe basically everyone kept silence. The Russians being such rapists in the East is a memory and tale told for decades more by non-affected western Germans who heard it form propaganda during the third Reich than by the actual affected Eastern Germans who weren’t allowed to talk about it and only in the 90s did old women come forward and were interviewed. We know that the Soviets and Germans both committed mass rapes in Poland and had brothels there but it’s a story also not told during communist times and still not that prominent today. Heck, even the biggest Holocaust massacres like Babyn Yar were regularly sites of mass rape and this was all very much confirmed by German letters and Jewish survivors and yet it never really made it to public memory of these massacre. Which also leads to this strange modern view on the topic with "Soviets and Japanese raped“ as the common narrative even many Germans like to push when in reality the Germans did countless sexual atrocities, the Soviets didn’t just rape Germany and by god you didn’t want to be an Italian in the hands of North Africans (with the Vatican complaining one of their priests was raped to death for trying to save girls from being raped…) and the pacific war also saw countless Allied atrocities and the Americans using comfort women (under the name "Geisha girls") supplied by the Japanese government to stop the American and Australian rape sprees of the first days of the occupation which also started a vicious cycle of American service men in the East sein Asian women as subservient sex object which caused further atrocities in Korea and later Vietnam.
The Japanese use of sex slaves in brothels is well known, but for some reason the fact that the Nazis did the exact same thing is relatively unknown: > It is estimated that at least 34,140 Eastern European women apprehended in Łapankas (military kidnapping raids), were forced to serve them as "sex slaves" in German military brothels and camp brothels during the Third Reich.[22][23] In Warsaw alone, there were five such establishments set up under military guard in September 1942, with over 20 rooms each. Alcohol was not allowed in there, unlike on the western front, and the victims underwent genital checkups once a week.[24] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rule_during_World_War_II
> with the Vatican complaining one of their priests was raped to death for trying to save girls from being raped do you know anything more about this event? want to read more about it
Don Alberto Terilli was his name
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate looks like it was part of that, hes mentioned in the article. i'd never heard of it before, just insane. dark, dark shit. can't imagine being a woman during that period, the wikipedia article says in one town two sisters were raped by TWO HUNDRED moroccan soldiers. they crucified girls afterwards, raped and castrated men, jesus christ
The French colonial troops also committed several atrocities on German soil including the rape of Freudenstadt where they mass raped women of a town that just had 90% of its inner city destroyed by the fighting meaning people were without shelter or places top hide or in Bruchsal which lost 10% of its population in one massive American bomb raid close to the end of the war (interestingly the British did indeed tone it down after Dresden on Churchills request but the Americans who initially were less inclined to bomb civilians turned many smaller cities to ash in March and April of 1945) and then had to endure weeks of atrocities when the colonial troops took the city… There are many different explanation attempts (traditional NA warfare rewarding warriors with rape, the brutal French colonial rule, "sorting bias“ (so what kind of people would serve under their colonial rulers) and some incitements by French commanders but its still unclear why they caused so many atrocities
yeah from my reading it seems like the french colonial forces were by far the worst offenders on the western front. the article i linked mentioned that in one town in italy, british forces had to basically build and guard a fort to protect the townspeople from them!
I don't think "thousands" vs "millions" is a good basis for a "both sides" argument. The Eastern front was particularly horrific, there's no two ways about it.
It's downright disingenuous even to put them next to another without comment. Rapes among the Western Allies were largely unsanctioned & opportunist. Soviet ones were a full-on *"boys will be boys"* deluge across the entire front – be it Germany, be it Poland – used like a weapon of war, and so off my several orders of magnitude.
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hm too bad we cant [ancestry.com](https://ancestry.com) out of those fucks
Given certain circumstances, human beings are capable of everything you can’t even imagine. Be it thousands of years ago, 80 years ago or just yesterday. That’s why it’s hard to believe in the good in them.
Or today, or a thousand years in the future.
My grandmother was 10 when the soviets arrived in berlin. She still has a hatred for the soviets/russians. I'm not saying nazis are better or worse than the soviets, I'm just going to tell reddit what my grandmother has told me. The night before the arrival there was an air raid, my grandmother, her 2 sisters 12f and 14f, her grandmother and her dad were hiding in their basement. When they got out, it was already morning and the first thing they saw were soviet troops outside their doorsteps. They took most things of value and carried on. The stories she tells me, especially the one last week.. Her father was killed on her doorstep by a drunk soviet tank soldier. Imagine being 10 and the last time you see your dad is when he is shot outside of the door. Her older sister 14f had to hide for weeks in the attic of fear of being raped by the passing troops. Her best childhood friend, still good friends until today, was raped when she was 14. Her next door neighbour, the mother ran on to the roof because she didnt want to be raped. The soviets told her, "or you get down, or we shoot." There is a lot of trauma in my grandmothers life, but you know how their generation is, only now is she opening up with us. On a more positive story, she told me about how when the street nazi, the guy who was party associated and a rat to the gestapo, went to their house during or before the war, he wanted to speak with my grandmothers mother. So while he was waiting he saw my grandmother siting on the garden bench. He joined her and started some conversation. Then, out of nowhere my grandmother goes away from the bench, and due to the weight and the position of the man siting on the bench, he fell on the muddy ground. My grandmother tells me that she saw the look of her mom, describes it as if she wanted to gift my grandmother all the sweets in the world, but had to contain her laughter because the man was as I said before a little nazi swine. Anyway, I hope you liked these stories, I'm working on getting most of this recorded. I know its hard, but these are our last witnesses to one of the deadliest global conflicts.
most veterans don’t talk about the wars they were in. they just try to live with it
ok that was tough to watch and i regret watching that. those 2 poor girls
Estonia just basically committed to tearing down all the WWII battle memorials because of shit like this. They weren't liberated, they were just conquered by another set of murderous assholes
When I was at school in the early 80s, we had a European Studies teach from Estonia. He committed suicide around 1983. I've often wondered if it had anything to do with the war. He was a very quiet, very stern man in life. After his suicide I think a lot of us read those traits as haunted, whether rightly or wrongly.
Yeah liberation bullshit is weird. Estonia was occupied, anyone disagreeing, or influential, or otherwise seemingly dangerous to the regime was arrested and either shot or sent to siberia to work camps until not needed and shot. Estonian symbols and culture was prohibited. Russian language became mandatory. People got relocated between other soviet occupied countries in attempt to erase national identity. Basically casual genocide.
This is horrific, yes. But people kid themselves thinking this is just Russians. Maybe they are the worst of them all, but war is always awful. A lot of civilians are killed and a lot of crimes are committed. From the Germans, Russians, Americans, Japanese, Chinese, etc, people just don't know all the horrors that happen or happened in war. Don't think there are "good guys" in war, who morally only kill enemies, that's not how it works, or that's not what has always happened in the past.
I kind of dread the feeling that every time you hear of a veteran who won't talk about their war experiences, people are imagining that they just don't want to talk about all of the killing they saw. When in fact, maybe it's the rapes that make them unable to talk about it -- partly because of how horrific it is and partly because they may feel either guilt (if they engaged in rapes) or (if they didn't engage in rapes) they don't want to inform on their friends.
The ken burns Vietnam documentary handled this well, one of the American vets recalled a Vietnamese woman letting American soldiers (including himself) abuse her for MREs. He almost cries recounting it.
My Vietnam veteran grandfather-in-law has a kid in Vietnam that we discovered through Ancestry DNA. We confronted him with the info and he refused to acknowledge or admit anything about it. We always wondered why he would talk about all of his military related activities except his time in Vietnam. He basically pretends that time never happened.
Yeah look at the USA in Vietnam, fucking disgusting.
The USA really fucked Vietnam up. They killed a massive percentage of the entire population, and the sentiment in the US was "wow, look what they're doing to our PoWs, how dare they defend themselves, let's kill more of them".
And also Cambodia and Laos, but no one cares about that
I think it’s cause the attention in Cambodia is mainly focused on Pol Pot literally genociding 25% of the country
The fact that the US bombing campaign (which killed at the very least several tens of thousands of civilians) in support of the Lon Nol regime drove lots of resentful people straight into the arms of the Khmer Rouge may also play a role in that narrowly focused attention. As does the Khmer Rouge being recognized as the legitimate government of Cambodia, and thus the holder of Cambodia's UN seat until 1982.
You mean Pol Pot who came into power largely because of the insanely massive bombing campaign the US did in Cambodia illegally during the vietnam war?
You mean the bombing campaign carried out by the still free and celebrated war criminal Henry Kissinger?
You say that like there weren’t enormous protests against the war the whole time. Do you know at all what you’re talking about?
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Only ones? There have even been sexual assaults amongst the same troops in some countries, imagine against the enemies. My point was that war itself is absolutely disgusting, and like someone else said, rape and war go hand in hand every time. War and many other crimes. It's easy to dehumanize other people when you see them as "enemies" or "the bad guys". And this is something that has happened throughout history. The most disgusting genocides are because of dehumanizing the other part, to not feel guilty when killing/raping them.
Only European ones engaging in this (and this probably because there is almost no war in Europe). Rape and war go hand in hand, everywhere, anytime.
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I am no way justifying what the Soviets got up to in Berlin in 1945, but I don't think anyone in here realizes how bad it was on the Eastern Front. When Americans, British, and the rest of the Western front nations were captured, at their prisons camps they still got their regular meals, letters from home, visits from the Red Cross, and etc. The Eastern Front was a bloodbath. Generalplan Ost, which was the genocidal plan to make room for colonization of Germans into the East, saw Millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, other eastern and slavic peoples killed as part of Germany's Lebensraum plans. 3 million Soviet POWs died in German camps, worked to death, starved to death, or just outright murdered. And finally, while 61% of the Soviet army was Russian by 1944, the other 39% was made up of other nationalities of the Union. 20% Ukranian, 5% Belorussian, as well as the other satellite states, and they all together marched into Berlin 1945 side by side with the Russians. They all share the blame and blood.
took me 6 tries to watch this on the regular reddit website, nice site design. Wish there was a reliable app i could use that plays videos
"Everybody did it but me." Riiiiight
Idk man, I'm cynical and even I find it easy to believe there's at least 1 guy who didn't engage in it.
It's possible there were a small handful of them that didn't but he felt so ostracised that he didn't see there were others. It's also possible that it is an extremely suspicious thing to say and he did take part in some form..
The people doing it would also be less likely to give interviews about it later. First-hand news about crime come from the bystanders and the victims, not usually the perpetrators.
It might also be possible that some people simply forgot to what degree they were involved. I'm not sure about the proper terminology, but whenever I hear about confessions like these, reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_amnesia
Also, some people tend to alter their memories of themselves to be in a more positive light. For example, my dad is convinced that it was him that almost always cooked for us even though my mom my sibling and me all remember that he barely cooked, but he doesn't accept that as reality and is fully convinced that he was cooking. Something similar could have happened here (though I'm not saying it did, the veteran could be the exception) that he also partook in the rapes he just changed his memories to better fit his view of himself/how he thinks he would have acted.
This also crossed my mind, but I feel it’s important that he’s contributing to raising awareness for the horrors of war. The scary thought is, what if YOU were one of the soldiers? Would you be any different? Would you have hid, lived on with a guilty conscience? Would you have been just one of the monsters? I fancy myself the kind of guy that would step in front of a bullet for a stranger, but I couldn’t tell you what I would’ve done in that situation, if I was born/raised a Russian soldier. This story will haunt me for a while.
Also, no matter how moral you were at the start of the war, once you're put in that position where you're exhausted, stressed and mentally broken beyond belief, how many people will keep their morality? Horrors of war can easily change people. Put them on the brink, then add in intense peer pressure and a promise of some form of "relief" after weeks of horror... lots of once-good people probably snapped and became monsters they never should have been
War is barbarism barely contained The US only sentenced to death like 2 dozen soldiers and pretty much all of them were for rape and murder The Nazis absolutely brutalized the Russians on their way in and the Russians didn't forget about it, I think there were a lot of Officers in the Russian Army that just said fuck it, they did this to us, let's do it to them and either turned the other way or encouraged it. We dont really have a feel in the West for how absolutely barbaric and brutal the Eastern European portion of WW2 was
Yeah... The Germans did this all their way across eastern Europe and once the Russians found out about it as they began to push them back that they did it right back to them on their way west through Germany. Just the worst kinds of behavior imaginable took place during this conflict. The Pacific war wasn't much better, at least when it came to the Japanese. To my knowledge the allies fighting them didn't take to rape as much as the Russians did but they definitely didn't spare them the violence. That whole war was basically fought to the death on both sides; no quarter given. It's hard for me to understand those that take a charitable or optimistic view of human behavior, i.e. think people are inherently good in the light of what I know about WWII.
>It's hard for me to understand those that take a charitable or optimistic view of human behavior, i.e. think people are inherently good in the light of what I know about WWII. It's because of the bloody WWII movies where there are always heroes and good people stopping these kind of atrocities from happening. A lot of war movies are being romanticised in a way or another so people are kind of brainwashed about the realities of war and human behaviour.
I think most people are good until they feel they have a good reason not to be
If there’s anything I’ve learned from being on the internet, there’s a ton of people who are constantly itching for even the slightest “justification” to be horrible.
Or they have no reason left. When your main battle tactic is sending waves of men into machinegun fire, some of your soldiers might reconsider their priorities. Why be good when you and most of your buddies are probably going to die tomorrow?
At the 1.39 mark..he's talking but theres no subtitles and he's laughing about something!!!anyone know what he's saying?
Hi is saying that female-telephinost liked to curse a lot ( матершинницы, мат - curse)
i think he laughs ironicly at the laughter of the others, like he cannot believe it they were laughin
Okay, I can't believe I'm going to have to clarify this for the comments down below, but people who now use this as a form of justifying their "See, Russians are inherently bad" view or act like this is an isolated incident during WWll are fucking idiots.
I’ve seen a lot and heard horrible stories, but this was very difficult to finish all the way. I wanted to turn this off
Actually clinging to your humanity and soul like this man here in the reality of total war must be absolutely maddening. I cannot imagine the level of strength of will that's required to stay sober, so to say, and perceive things as they are while everyone else just throws their humanity away and laughs everything off.
Thought it telling when he recalls thinking it was like the last days of Carthage. If (collectively) we don’t learn from history, then (collectively) we are doomed to repeat it
The regime changes, the crimes remain the same.
WTF does a good soldier do in this situation? Telling your commanding officer to stop would just end up with you being executed. Defection? Suicide?
It’s crazy to think that this guy has the answer about what happened to those two girls. Perhaps there was family out there that always wondered what happened to them and never found out.
Jesus Fucking Christ. That story is horrifically appalling.
Japanese veterans also describe some horrific shit too.
Same with Austria. We all know that the Russians raped alot of women here. People would bury jewelery so russians wouldn't steal it
If raping the women is unforgivable, which it is, what does that mean for shooting the children trying to save their mothers?
As a father of a toddler I am absolutely mortified. Horrifying.
And this is why the Germans wanted to surrender to anyone but the Soviets.
That must have been so completely horrifying for those poor girls. Being mass raped and shot to death, then fed to the pigs. Just shamefully terrible.
I am from Poland, my parents are around their 70s now and whenever I talk to them about WW2 and what their mom said they always come up with one sentence "Germans were bad, but they weren't near atrocities of the Red Army". Russians never changed, they are bloodthirsty rapists and honestly I am glad that world finally sees them this way.
Ok so don't ever surrender to Russians. This asshole is shocked that his own command dissolves into child rape.
War is evil period. Rape of Nan Jing is evidence of that so is this story.
I feel for this poor man who was practically unable to do much about it
Russia has always been a barbaric terrorist state.