LONDON, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- A forthcoming book about the Red Army's siege
of Berlin in 1945 is causing outrage among senior Russian officials. It
claims the extent of rape by Soviet soldiers against German women was much
greater than previously realized, and included large numbers of Russian
and Polish women who were raped even as they were being liberated from
German concentration camps.
The book, Berlin -- The Downfall 1945, to be published by Viking
in April, is by the acclaimed military historian Anthony Beevor,
author of the best-selling and award-winning book Stalingrad. As
with his research for that epic 1943 siege Beevor had access to detailed
Red Army reports and other documents of the period.
Responding to a full-page report on the book in Thursday's Daily Telegraph,
however, Grigory Karasin, ambassador to the Russian Federation in London,
called the allegations a disgrace and "a clear case of slander against
the people who saved the world from Nazism."
"The article appeared on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, which transforms
its publication into an act of blasphemy, not only against Russia and my
people, but also against all countries and the millions of people who suffered
from Nazism," Karasin wrote to the Telegraph.
Author Beevor replied Saturday by paying tribute to the "frequent acts
of great kindness to German women and children," and to the "great suffering,
courage and sacrifices of the Red Army in the Second World War." But unfortunately,
he said, "there is also a much darker side to the story."
Beevor's conclusions are that in response to the vast scale of casualties
inflicted on them by the Germans the Soviets responded in kind, and that
included rape on a vast scale. It started as soon as the Red Army entered
East Prussia and Silesia in 1944, and in many towns and villages every
female aged from 10 to 80 was raped.
Rape was condoned or even justified by Stalin and his commanders, and
Beevor cites the Soviet leader's retort to a protest from Yugoslav Community
Milovan Dijilas about Soviet troops raping Romanian, Croatian and Hungarian
women: "Can't he understand it if a soldier has crossed thousands of kilometres
through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?"
Rape against the enemy's women has a long history as an act of war,
but in an interview with Bookseller magazine earlier this month Beevor
said he was "shaken to the core" to discover that even their own Russian
and Polish women and girls liberated from German concentration camps were
also violated.
"That completely undermined the notion that the soldiers were using
rape as a form of revenge against the Germans," he is quoted as
saying. "By the time the Russians reached Berlin, soldiers were regarding
women almost as carnal booty; they felt that because they were liberating
Europe they could behave as they pleased.
"That is very frightening, because one starts to realize that civilization
is terribly superficial and the facade can be stripped away in a very short
time."
The details of the Soviet soldiers' behavior, he said, so shocked him
that they had forced him to revise his view of human nature.
"Having always in the past slightly pooh-poohed the idea that most men
are potential rapists (echoing the famous claim by the American feminist
Marilyn French that 'in their relations with women all men are rapists,
and that's all they are') I had to come to the conclusion that if there
is a lack of army discipline, most men with a weapon, dehumanized by living
through two or three years of war, do become potential rapists."
While the war in Europe ended in May, 1945, Beevor says that the ordeal
for German women in Soviet occupied areas continued. A "high proportion"
of at least 15 million women who lived in the Soviet zone or were expelled
from Germany's eastern provinces were raped. About two million women
had illegal abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.
One of the legacies of the Soviet occupation of Germany has been that,
at least until very recently, East German women of the wartime generation
referred to the Red Army war memorial in Berlin as "the Tomb of the Unknown
Rapist."