Desecration Of German Graves By The Soviet Army

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dwseiple
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Desecration Of German Graves By The Soviet Army

#1

Post by dwseiple » 29 Jul 2002, 17:19

A friend of mine was born and raised in Zittau, which is in the extreme south east corner of Saxony (Sachsen). This area was once part of Silesia (Schlesien), but was west of the Neisse River and remained with Germany in 1945. He reports that in the last days of the war when the Soviet Army rolled in they raped and murdered many people. However, he also says that they went so far as to dig up the graves in at least one of the cemeteries, break open the coffins, and steal wedding rings, other forms of jewelry, and even knock out gold fillings from the mouths of the corpses. Of course, they then left the graves open, went on their way, and were never prosecuted for their crimes. Does anyone else out there have any similar stories of Soviet grave robbing?
Thank you,
Dave
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Andy H
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#2

Post by Andy H » 29 Jul 2002, 21:22

I have no specific info regaring what you mentioned happening elsewhere but since the Russian's destroyed German war graves as they recaptured ground it wouldn't be out of the realm's of possibility.

:D Andy from the Shire


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David C. Clarke
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Hello

#3

Post by David C. Clarke » 29 Jul 2002, 23:14

Hi Guys, it disgusts me to report this, because I have some respect for the bravery of the Red Army, however, there is a report in Georg Gunter's "Last Laurels, the Defense of Upper Silesia" that advancing Soviet troops broke into the tomb of Marschall Blucher and desecrated the corpse, leaving parts of it in the road near the cemetery. This is shamefull and it is perhaps for the best that von Hindenberg's remains, interred at Tannenburg, were removed before the conquest of that area by the Soviets. Regards, David

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Benoit Douville
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#4

Post by Benoit Douville » 30 Jul 2002, 06:35

I am with you on that one David. The Red Army was really brave but this is really a shame. Revenge was really brutal by the Red Army and sometime worst than the Wehrmacht.

Roland
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#5

Post by Roland » 30 Jul 2002, 09:47

Sometimes worse than a Wehrmacht? Are You kidding me? Soviets did that everywhere! Not only with german graves. They did it with latvian graves. All cemeteries was completly levelled. In others they dug up latvian dead and burried their solders instead. In "Brothers cemetery" in Riga they dug up even solders killed in action in ww1. So much for the "brave Red Army"! What a disgusting thing to do! You never lived under upression of the"Red Army" so its hard for You to understand what kind of hatriot these "liberators" had for the rest of the world!!!

Best regards.

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#6

Post by Ovidius » 30 Jul 2002, 11:58

Benoit Douville wrote:I am with you on that one David. The Red Army was really brave but this is really a shame. Revenge was really brutal by the Red Army and sometime worst than the Wehrmacht.
Yeah right, the Brave Red Army under the enlightened guise of Almighty Joseph Stalin Himself was only "sometimes" worst than the Wehrmacht(the SS being out of discussion, since they had been declared a "criminal organization", and to say otherwise is punishable by law) :mrgreen:

A brilliant sample of hypocrisy, nevertheless.

~Ovidius

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David C. Clarke
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Sometimes...

#7

Post by David C. Clarke » 30 Jul 2002, 16:11

I am in complete agreement with Benoit. "Sometimes" is the operative word Ovidius. Unlike the Wehrmacht, the Heroic Red Army did not invent
the idea of "collective punishment" so frequently used by the Wehrmacht in its extensive anti-partisan warfare on the Eastern Front.
And most importantly, I seem to recall that it was Germany and its allies, including Rumania, which invaded the Soviet Union, not the other way around. It somehow doesn't surprise me that an army that had to fight it's way back from the Caucasas and the Don, through thousands of obliterated villages, dozens of sacked cities and the mass graves of it's country's citizens, might be somewhat "vengeful" when it finally reached its enemies' territory.
In fact, considering the circumstance, it amazes me how lenient the Heroic Red Army was with Rumania, Germany's major ally on the Ostfront. DCC

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#8

Post by dmsdbo » 30 Jul 2002, 16:11

In the book "The Last Battle", I remember reading about a woman who was shocked when the Red Army entered her town, and weren't raping or stealing anything. These were frontline troops, I believe Guards Infantry, and a lieutenant actually warned her that the men and women arriving after were pigs. So many of the frontline troops of the Red Army are not to blame for these incidents, but the support troops that followed them up.

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Benoit Douville
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#9

Post by Benoit Douville » 30 Jul 2002, 20:27

Where is the hypocrisy? I remember that you call "Tovarich" master hypocrite too... Maybe sometime was not the correct word to used and that the Red Army was more brutal and savage than the Wehrmacht when it came to atrocities. In number Roberto is probaly right saying that the Wehrmacht commited more crimes but in terms of brutality it was the Red Army. Just read the post by wildboard about it and i believe it's true.

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#10

Post by Roland » 31 Jul 2002, 13:31

This reply is for David C. Clark!

It is more than obvious that you have no clue about "Heroic Red Army"! In my eyes they are nothing more than bloodthirsty killers of innocent women and children! They never admitted their crimes and that makes them worse than any german solder!!! You also forget that red criminals invaded Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia before germans attacked Russia! They was not "lenient" by no means! In the future by posting statemants like that please remember that you are insulting all the people who suffered so much under red terror!

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David C. Clarke
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Roland

#11

Post by David C. Clarke » 31 Jul 2002, 16:37

This reply is for Roland.
Roland, it's real easy 60 years later to sit back and slander the Heroic Red Army. But the fact is that if Germany had won the war under it's Nazi leadership, ethnic minorities like the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians would have either been colonial slaves to Germany or assimilated wholesale into the Reich. The fate of the Slavs would have been much, much worse. So, to the extent that the Heroic Red Army saved civilization form Nazi extermination, they deserve to be honored. DCC

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#12

Post by Panzermahn » 31 Jul 2002, 20:02

This reply is for Roland.
Roland, it's real easy 60 years later to sit back and slander the Heroic Red Army. But the fact is that if Germany had won the war under it's Nazi leadership, ethnic minorities like the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians would have either been colonial slaves to Germany or assimilated wholesale into the Reich. The fate of the Slavs would have been much, much worse. So, to the extent that the Heroic Red Army saved civilization form Nazi extermination, they deserve to be honored. DCC

I think this view is something distorted..Heroic Red Army saving civillization from Nazi extermination??? Please tell that to 10 million Ukrainians, a few million kulaks, approximately a quarter of million Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and to other ethnic groups like the Don, Kuban Cossacks, Azerbaijanis, Caucasians, Armenians, Hungarians, Finnish..white Russians, Poles, Byelorussians, 2 million German women, and 2 million German POWs

If u want to compare the number of people that the Nazis exterminated with the number of people perished under Bolsheviks and Dzugashvillians, i can personally inform u that every major Historians such as John Toland, John Keegan, Ian Kershaw, Robert Conquest, David irving, Kenneth Macksey, Alfred De Zayas and even the anti-german historians will tell u that the Bolsheviks directly or indirectly killed more people than the Nazis did.

It is a big insult to those survivors of the russian bolshevik gulags if u said that the Heroic Red Army should be honored for saving the people from Nazi extermination...

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#13

Post by Reigo » 31 Jul 2002, 20:28

But the fact is that if Germany had won the war under it's Nazi leadership, ethnic minorities like the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians would have either been colonial slaves to Germany or assimilated wholesale into the Reich.
Actually the fact is that we don't know what the fact is. It could be so, like you said (or even worse), but maybe not. The Nazi top didn't have a clear vision what would happen after the victory. Some had harsher visions, some had softer. But what is a fact is that the Soviets occupied Estonia again in 1944, repressed tens of thousands, sent 500 000 mainly Russian colonists during the next decades and started slowly and cautiously to russify the country. Let me remind that according to the plan "Ost" there would have been also 500 000 German colonists, but alltogether in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarussia.

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Re: Roland

#14

Post by Ovidius » 31 Jul 2002, 20:59

David C. Clarke wrote:This reply is for Roland.
Roland, it's real easy 60 years later to sit back and slander the Heroic Red Army. But the fact is that if Germany had won the war under it's Nazi leadership, ethnic minorities like the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians would have either been colonial slaves to Germany or assimilated wholesale into the Reich. The fate of the Slavs would have been much, much worse. So, to the extent that the Heroic Red Army saved civilization form Nazi extermination, they deserve to be honored. DCC
On the "old" forum there was a character known as "Tovarich" or "Tovarich2", who had displayed a shining hypocrisy. His posts were so similar to those of our friend DCC that I wonder if they were not the same person :mrgreen:

Whatever.

This creature, whenever someone told anything about "Communist crimes", did one(or more) of the following things:

a) denied that any crime took place, and claimed that the Gulag did not exist, because otherwise all the inmates claimed by Western press must have been freed in 1991;

b) claimed that Soviets did not commit any crime in Germany;

c) when someone claimed to have had first-hand knowledge on the affair, he either claimed outright that the man/lady lies, or that "people ask for sources on Nazi crimes but believe blindly any slander on Communism".

Now I see our friend DCC had taken a different approach:

d) claims that the "Nazis" were going to do even worse things to people allied to them(and not only allied, but at least one of them - Alfred Rosenberg, a Balt by birth - was a full German citizen and Reichsminister of the occupied Eastern territories). Now I expect a description of the way Rosenberg, from his government position, was going to persecute his fellow Balts.

So DCC and "Tovarich" seem to be different persons, after all :mrgreen:

But if that "Tovarich" was around, it would have been a real pleasure to read him charging Roland(Gulag survivor) with "lie" and then fighting each other :mrgreen:

~Regards,

Ovidius

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David C. Clarke
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Insidious Ovidius

#15

Post by David C. Clarke » 31 Jul 2002, 23:04

Insidious, Ovidius and actually perfidious for you to suggest that I am, or have been "Tovarich". So, to the extent that most of your response was directed towards that individual, I will ignore it. By the way, I've noticed that you overuse the word "hypocrisy" and don't use it within it's definition.
I assume that this word doesn't have an equivalent in Rumanian? Or is it that Rumanian contains many words whose meaning falls under the English word "hypocrisy", just as certain Eskimo languages have multiple words for "snow"?
At any rate, I stand by my original post. While I admire the heroism of the individual Landser and the professionalism of many German Officers, I detest Nazism and believe it to have been much the greater evil than Stalinism.
However you might want to distort history, the fact remains that it was the Heroic Red Army that stemmed the tide of Nazi evil as it washed over
the European continent and, ultimately, all of our freedoms depend upon this historical fact. DCC

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