New Revelations about the Red Army's Campaign of Rape in Its Occupied Zones
By Brian Carnell
Tuesday, January 29, 2002
Historians have long known that as the Red Army advanced on Nazi forces at the end of World War II, soldiers in the Soviet army engaged in the wholesale rape of women in their path. A new book by historian Anthony Beevor, however, argues that rape was committed at a mind boggling pace, and that the Red Army did not reserve rape as a punishment for the much-hated Germans, but also raped women in concentration camps that the Red Army liberated. During the war, Stalin and others in high ranking positions actively condoned and occasionally justified the rape of women in territories conquered by the advancing Red Army. The Daily Telegraph notes that when Yugoslavian Communist leader Milovan Djilas complained to Stalin about the rapacious nature of Soviet soldiers, Stalin complained, "Can't he understand it if a solider who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?" Beevor's research suggests that as the Red Army entered East Prussia in 1944, soldiers raped practically every female over 10 years of age in the towns they passed through. Beevor also claims that the Red Army raped even Polish and Russian women that were liberated from Nazi concentration camps, though the total number of women there was much smaller than the German victims of rape. The total number of women who were raped by the Red Army necessarily remains unknown, but Beevor points out that there were about two million illegal abortions performed in Eastern Germany from 1945-1948 -- an astounding number considering that there were only about 15 million women in East Germany. In 1946-47, the Red Army finally cracked down on rape, not because of any concern about women in the territories it occupied, but over concern about the rapid spread of sexually transmitted diseases among its soldiers. Source: Red Army troops raped even Russian women as they freed them from camps. Daniel Johnson, Daily Telegraph (London), January 26, 2002.