Proof of pre-planned Soviet mass rapes in Germany

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Flieger
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#46

Post by Flieger » 28 Dec 2007, 21:24

Dmitry wrote:
Flieger wrote:But what are you trying to say? Did not 2 million German women get raped according to you, or what? Or do you believe 10 million Soviet women were raped by German soldiers?
I gave the source of Beevor's claim on 2 million. That's all I wanted to say.
OK, thanks. I did not find a link to the PDF-file you mentioned, though, of the book The Fall of Berlin, 1945, if that's what you meant.

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#47

Post by David Thompson » 28 Dec 2007, 21:28

Flieger -- Please read our rules carefully before posting here again. You'll find them at:

H&WC Section Rules
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=53962


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Dmitry
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#48

Post by Dmitry » 28 Dec 2007, 21:31

Flieger wrote:OK, thanks. I did not find a link to the PDF-file you mentioned, though, of the book The Fall of Berlin, 1945, if that's what you meant.
I have (on my hard-drive) pdf copy of the book and I suppose that numeration of pages could be different from the hard copy of it, that's why I mentioned pdf.

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#49

Post by Flieger » 28 Dec 2007, 21:36

David Thompson wrote:Flieger -- Please read our rules carefully before posting here again. You'll find them at:

H&WC Section Rules
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=53962
I have actually read the thread and especially the parts relating to posting attachments and images. I made a mistake first by attaching the image, so then I posted a link instead, with respect to sensitive readers. But it got deleted as well and Mike the moderator changed changed his response yet again to basically saying "it's kiddy porn" (which it isn't). Now I don't know what rule I have broken, so that's why I asked if anyone can point it out for me.

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Michael Miller
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#50

Post by Michael Miller » 28 Dec 2007, 21:38

An extremely graphic image of rape involving an apparently prepubescent victim-- I don't know- sounds like kiddie porn to me.

~ Mike

Flieger
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#51

Post by Flieger » 28 Dec 2007, 21:44

Michael Miller wrote:An extremely graphic image of rape involving an apparently prepubescent victim-- I don't know- sounds like kiddie porn to me.

~ Mike
It's an illustration - not a real photo - of how some Red Army soldiers behaved in Germany at the end of WWII. This thread is all about those crimes. And I agree - it's graphic, that's why I posted it as a link instead with respect to sensitive readers. The user "germangirl" even claimed her grandmother was raped by Russian soldiers at the age of 14 (they apparently raped even raped girls as young as 8).

But OK, I'm not gonna fuzz about it even though I can't see what rule I've broken. Case closed.

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Kunikov
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#52

Post by Kunikov » 29 Dec 2007, 00:37

Flieger wrote:
The source is military historian Anthony Beevor, who has studied the Soviet archives.
Beevor can't read Russian, he uses a translator. Soviet archives do not have the number of women raped by Soviet soldiers, as far as I know. Beevor does NOT use Soviet archives for how many women were raped, as already pointed out. He uses one hospital estimate, from what I recall, an estimate that is not backed up by any real facts but rather a guesstimate.

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#53

Post by Kunikov » 29 Dec 2007, 00:39

Flieger wrote:
Dmitry wrote:Interesting that the same authors and in the same book estimate 10 million Soviet women raped by German soldiers. See here - http://www.helpline-sh.de/Kriegsvergewaltigung.html
Well, are there any eyewitness accounts of Soviet women being raped? I don't think nor have I ever heard of any. I have never even heard of German soldiers raping at all, certainly not those they were forbidden to touch because of Racial policies and because they were "subhumans" (Untermenschen).
Many women were raped, there is no single source that comments on how many women were raped in all because the greater damage the Germans reaped in the Soviet Union was the death of millions. The Germans concentrate on the rapes because they need to dehumanize the Red Army in the eyes of the West.

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#54

Post by Marcus » 29 Dec 2007, 00:55

Everyone, please stick to discussing the actions of Soviet soldiers in this thread, discussions on actions of German soldiers belong in other threads, thanks.

/Marcus

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#55

Post by David Thompson » 29 Dec 2007, 01:11

Readers interested in posting on the subject of German rapes in the occupied Soviet Union can use this thread:

German soldier's guilt-filled diary
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=29905

For background see:

The Barbarossa jurisdiction order 1941
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=62192
The Barbarossa Jurisdiction Order (Text)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=56057

Flieger
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#56

Post by Flieger » 29 Dec 2007, 01:56

Kunikov wrote:
Flieger wrote:
The source is military historian Anthony Beevor, who has studied the Soviet archives.
Beevor can't read Russian, he uses a translator. Soviet archives do not have the number of women raped by Soviet soldiers, as far as I know. Beevor does NOT use Soviet archives for how many women were raped, as already pointed out. He uses one hospital estimate, from what I recall, an estimate that is not backed up by any real facts but rather a guesstimate.
He also studied German archives, which surely should contain hospital records and the number of abortions, etc. in the Soviet-occupied areas of Germany near the end of WWII.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1939174.stm
Mr Beevor, whose previous book Stalingrad became a best-seller, says in Berlin alone it was estimated up to 130,000 women were raped, of whom up to 10,000 committed suicide.

Altogether two million German women are believed to have been raped and almost half of those suffered gang rape.

One woman was raped by 23 soldiers.

Mr Beevor said he was shocked by what he found during his research of German and Soviet archives.
What valuable information would he otherwise get from the German archives? I don't think it's a "guesstimate" at all. If this subject wouldn't be that taboo in Germany and especially Russia, things could probably be settled on how many women actually did get raped during those days.

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#57

Post by Kunikov » 29 Dec 2007, 04:15

Flieger wrote:
He also studied German archives, which surely should contain hospital records and the number of abortions, etc. in the Soviet-occupied areas of Germany near the end of WWII.
Surely? Where is the proof? As pointed out, this has already been discussed. Aside from what I have already mentioned Beevor presented no proof from any archives.

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#58

Post by David Thompson » 29 Dec 2007, 04:25

We've seen a lot of newspaper articles about Mr. Beevor's use of archives, but the footnoted sources we've gotten so far on the estimated number of rape victims don't cite to archives. Four years ago, there was an 8-page long H&WC discussion, now locked, on Mr. Beevor's claim and no one -- myself included -- was able to adequately reconstruct how the estimates of German rape victims were calculated. See:

Rapings commited by the soviet Soldiers
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=23744

The impression I've gotten is that someone, somehow, came up with these statistics at some point in time and they've just been repeated over and over again by popular authors, who have made no visible effort to verify them. This is apparently what Mr. Beevor has done, judging from Dmitry's copy of his footnote at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 62#1159262 :
p. 410 rape estimates, Dr Gerhard Reichling, and Charite and Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, quoted Sander and Johr, pp. 54, 59
Mr. Beevor attributes his second-hand estimates to this work:
Sander, Helke, and Johr, Barbara (eds), Befreier and Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder, Munich, 1992
Mr. Beevor has not cited to the original estimates directly, nor even given the name of the original study or studies, but instead quoted it or them from another secondary source. This is definitely not an example of Mr. Beevor's archival research, and the form of the footnote is sloppy.

For example, Charite and Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, cited to by Mr. Beevor, are probably the names of the two Berlin hospitals Mr. Beevor mentions in his book, rather than (as the form of his citation might suggest) the authors of a rape study. There is a Kaiserin Auguste Victoria children's hospital in Berlin, according to a google search, and the only other google references to the name involve the wife of Kaiser Wilhelm II and a ship named after her. There is also a Charite hospital in Berlin, where the University of Berlin medical school is located. Both were operating in 1945.

Mr. Beevor's other derivative source is Dr Gerhard Reichling, a prominent statistician and author of at least one book -- Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen -- on the flight of ethnic German refugees from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and Nazi-occupied Poland. While Dr. Reichling is an expert on statistics, there are problems common to statistical extrapolations, the most acute being the reliability of the base figures from which the extrapolation is made. This wikipedia article has a useful discussion on the subject:

Demographic estimates of the German exodus from Eastern Europe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographi ... ern_Europe

In this discussion, it would be helpful if we had copies of the original rape statistical study or studies to look at, and see what the estimates are based on. The quote from Mr. Beevor, given by Dmitry in his post referenced above, is:
Berliners remember that, because all the windows had been blown in, you could hear the screams every night. Estimates from the two main Berlin hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 13o,ooo rape victims. One doctor deduced that out of approximately ioo,ooo women raped in Berlin, some io,ooo died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to be much higher among the 1.4 million who had suffered in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least 2 million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.
It's obvious that there were a very large number of rapes, but are the figures for the two hospitals a total for both facilities, a range estimate as to the number of victims treated at each hospital, or an estimate that 95,000 victims were treated at one hospital and 130,000 treated at the other? The next sentence suggests that the total number of women raped in Berlin was approximately 100,000, but what is the basis for the estimate?

When I tried to find more about the rape statistics in Berlin, I came up with this:
According to Botting, Douglas, "Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945-1949," Crown Publishing, New York: 1985, pp. 68-72:

(1) the total female population of Berlin in Apr-May 1945 was 1,400,000.

(2) 90,000 women subsequently sought medical assistance for rape injuries in Berlin.

(3) 80% of the reported rapes by Red Army men in Berlin took place during the ten-day period from 24 Apr-3 May 1945.

(4) There were 200 suicides of women as a result of rape reported in one district of Berlin -- Pankow district -- over a three week period after the fall of Berlin. Cornelius Ryan, in "The Last Battle," puts the number of suicides in Pankow during the same period as 215.
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 958#208958

According to Cornelius Ryan in The Last Battle, Berlin medical authorities estimated the number of rapes in the city as between 20,000 and 100,000. This is a very substantial range, and we don't know who the medical authorities were or how they arrived at these estimates. We don't know if the hospitals had (or kept) records, or whether the estimates of victims are based on impressionistic evidence. Consequently, we can't tell whether the figure of 20,000 victims is more or less likely than the 100,000 figure. We can't tell if there were 20-100,000 different rape victims, or what percentage of the victims sought treatment several times after multiple rapes. In short, all we can tell is that there were a lot of rapes in Berlin, with a wide variance in the estimates of the number of victims.

These problems are general throughout the popular literature. Mr. Beevor's quote states:
The death rate was thought to be much higher among the 1.4 million who had suffered in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least 2 million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.
Presumably there are some statistics and reputable principles of data extrapolation somewhere that support these estimates, but we're not getting them from the writers. Mr. Botting didn't give footnotes, and only provided sources chapter by chapter. My copy of Mr. Ryan's book has neither footnotes nor sources given chapter by chapter. Because we don't have the statistical base or bases of these rape estimates available to us, we can't tell whether the quoted figures are accurate.

The problem is reminiscent of the debate over the number of people killed in the Dresden bombing raids -- off-topic here but discussed on numerous other threads in the H&WC section. It remains to be seen whether the upper range estimates of the rape victims are realistic, or as it turned out with the victims of the Dresden raids, grossly exaggerated.

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Re: Proof of pre-planned Soviet mass rape's in Germany

#59

Post by Sergey » 09 Jun 2009, 15:51

Mr.Beevor in his book 'The fall of Berlin' wrote
In Dahlem, some of Rybalko's officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. She informed them that they had not hidden any German soldiers. The officers and their men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on
behind. Their prediction proved entirely accurate, but there was no chance of escape. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity. One woman compared events in Dahlem to `the horrors of the Middle Ages'. Others thought of the Thirty Years War.
Mr.Beevor pointed to these sources:
P. 326 `the horrors of the Middle Ages', Marianne Reinold, in Bollmann et al., p. 67
P. 326 events in Dahlem, see also Naimark, p. 82

The first book is not a well-known study. As for mr.Naimark then he mentioned Dahlem but did not mention Sister Kunigunde.

So who is this 'Sister Kunigunde'? Was she a real person? Cornelius Ryan in his 'The Last Battle' wrote
At Haus Dahlem, Mother Superior Cunegundes heard that one mother of three small children had been dragged from her family and raped through an entire night. In the morning the woman was released; she rushed
back to her youngsters--only to find that her own mother and brother had hanged all three children and then themselves. The woman thereupon slashed her wrists and died.

The nuns at Haus Dahlem were now working steadily around the clock. They had been overwhelmed by refugees, and by Russian bestiality. One Russian, attempting to rape the home's Ukrainian cook, Lena, was so infuriated when Mother Superior Cunegundes intervened that he pulled out his pistol and fired at her. Fortunately, he was too drunk to shoot straight. Other soldiers entered the maternity wards and, despite all the nuns could do, repeatedly raped pregnant women and those who had recently given birth. "Their screaming," related one nun, "went on day and night." In the neighborhood, Mother Superior Cunegundes said, rape victims included women of seventy and little girls of ten and twelve.

She was helpless to prevent the attacks. But she called together the nuns and the other women in the building and reiterated Father Happich's words to them. "There is also something else," she continued, "and that is the help of Our Blessed Lord. Despite everything, He keeps St. Michael here. Do not be afraid." There was no other solace she could give them.


So what is the right name? Cunegundes or Kunigunde?
David Thompson wrote:My copy of Mr. Ryan's book has neither footnotes nor sources given chapter by chapter. Because we don't have the statistical base or bases of these rape estimates available to us, we can't tell whether the quoted figures are accurate.
It looks as 'Mother Superior Cunegundes' is a fictional character. Some authors use this method. Let's recall Alexander Dumas's 'Three musketeers'. Main characters are fictional while the Cardinal and the King of course were real ones. Richard the Lionheart was a real character but some characters in Walter Scott's book are purely fictional and it is not right to use quotes from the book to prove (for example) that Robin Hood was a real person who met Richard the Lionheart.

No doubt that mr.Beevor has read 'The Last Battle' by Cornelius Ryan (it is mentioned in the Select Bibliography). Of course, this case of mass rape didn't escape his attention. So why mr.Beevod did not mention the 'The Last Battle' in the foot notes?

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Re: Proof of pre-planned Soviet mass rapes in Germany

#60

Post by Frankfurter » 09 Jun 2009, 16:46

Sergey wrote: So what is the right name? Cunegundes or Kunigunde?
David Thompson wrote:My copy of Mr. Ryan's book has neither footnotes nor sources given chapter by chapter. Because we don't have the statistical base or bases of these rape estimates available to us, we can't tell whether the quoted figures are accurate.
It looks as 'Mother Superior Cunegundes' is a fictional character. Some authors use this method.
That "some authors use this method" does not mean Beevor did. And as for Kunigunde or Cunigunde, thats the same name, like Marshal Shukov is the same as Shoukov or Schukow.
There is no doubt the Red Army turned into the Rape Army after entering Germany, no matter if this or that "event" in the media was fictional to dramatize reality.

kunikow wrote:
Flieger hat geschrieben:
Dmitry hat geschrieben:
Interesting that the same authors and in the same book estimate 10 million Soviet women raped by German soldiers. See here - http://www.helpline-sh.de/Kriegsvergewaltigung.html
Well, are there any eyewitness accounts of Soviet women being raped? I don't think nor have I ever heard of any. I have never even heard of German soldiers raping at all, certainly not those they were forbidden to touch because of Racial policies and because they were "subhumans" (Untermenschen).

Many women were raped, there is no single source that comments on how many women were raped in all because the greater damage the Germans reaped in the Soviet Union was the death of millions. The Germans concentrate on the rapes because they need to dehumanize the Red Army in the eyes of the West.
"The Germans" do not "concentrate" on the rapes to dehumanize the Red Army. First, there is no "concentration" on this theme in Germany at all, because that is rightfully still on the genocide crimes part of own people comitted. But do you really think that the Germans should look away from the worst mass rape in the history of mankind, perhaps because of the unseen atrocities a rather small percentage of the Germans comitted in Russia? Undoubtedly a part of the Red Army behaved like the "sub-humans" the Nazis called them. A "Glorious" Red Army thus did never exist and is a falsification as much as the "clean" Wehrmacht.
I do not deny that many German soldiers also became rapists in the East, but their percentage was low, not only because generally they had to face the death penalty for such crime. Even if that might not have been enforced all the time.

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