And yet they would have deserved. During the invasion many women volunteered to defend the country.
The Germans executed all those they took as soldiers, often having raped them beforehand, as well as the political commissars. But anyway they starved their 5 million Soviet prisoners, when they didn’t use them in their “experiments”.
Roza Shanina (1924–1945):
The Einsatzgruppen, who were not SS, but good fathers, killed a million Jews, men women, children, during the Holocaust by bullets.
The Germans waged a veritable war of extermination against the Russians. In Belarus, between 30 and 50% of the population will be exterminated in two years of occupation. And between 19 and 46 million deaths for the entire Soviet Union.
On the French Wikipedia page of German war crimes in the USSR, rather well done, we can read:
“On July 23, 1941, barely a month after the start of the invasion, Wilhelm Keitel gave the order to reinforce the terror “in order to destroy at the root any attempt to resist”. In August 1941, Himmler visited the Einsatzgruppe B, he then witnessed a mass execution of civilians in Minsk 14. In the cities, the Wehrmacht was instructed to immediately and systematically shoot 50 hostages for a German soldier wounded by the resistance, 100 hostages for a soldier killed. campaigns, and under cover of fighting against the partisans, the Wehrmacht organized gigantic exterminations.On October 10, 1941, Walther von Reichenau, of the Wehrmacht, rejoiced in public at having killed several thousand civilians.
In November 1941, General Hermann Hoth, commander of the 17th German Army, reminded his soldiers in his instructions that “compassion and weakness towards the population are misplaced”, and called on soldiers to understand “the necessity severe measures against elements foreign to the [German] nation and the species.”
In a report, the commander of the Wehrmacht in Belarus declares that he shot 10,431 prisoners out of 10,949 taken during “fights with the partisans” in the month of October 1941 alone. The operation had cost the lives of only two soldiers on the German side. These figures concern only one of the many “anti-partisan” offensives which were in reality pure and simple massacres of unarmed civilians.
The extermination seems to have been general in scope. In Kharkov, Ukraine, upon the arrival of German troops in the fall of 1941, hundreds of men were hanged from city balconies where they remained exposed for several days (quoted by Philippe Burin in the “Army of Hitler”). Aurel Kowatsch, commander of the Das Reich division, was surprised by a horrified exclamation from the prefect Pierre Trouillé protesting against the executions of hostages in Tulle. He then explained that for the city of kyiv alone, more than 100,000 civilians, of all sexes and ages, had been hanged in retaliation for the actions of the partisans.
During the Battle of Moscow, the Germans razed villages within a 100 km radius of the capital, massacring their inhabitants.
When the term “partisans” seemed insufficient to legitimize brutality, particularly when obviously defenseless civilians were involved, the military sometimes resorted to a valuable euphemism, “agent” or “spy,” which transformed innocents into guilty.
Friedrich Schmidt, one of the ordinary torturers of the Wehrmacht, “responsible for security” in the village of Boudionnovka, near Mariupol, notes in his notebooks: “ March 9: difficult day. I have to put to death 30 captured teenagers. At 10 o’clock, two more young girls and six young men were brought to me. I had to hit them mercilessly. Since then there have been mass executions: yesterday, six, today thirty-three. The ditch is almost full. How heroically this Soviet youth knows how to die! Some of them, especially the young girls, did not shed a tear – March 14. I had Ludmila Tchoukanova, 17 years old, shot – March 23: I questioned two kids who had wanted to cross the ice to Rostov. They were shot as spies .”
Masha Bruskina (1924–1941) minutes before her execution:
In December 1941, Hermann Göring told Italian Foreign Minister Ciano: “ This year between 20 and 30 million Russians will starve to death in Russia. Perhaps it is good that this is so because some nations must be decimated .” In Kharkov, Ukraine, for example, 80,000 people died from starvation.
During its retreat, the Wehrmacht systematically razed all the villages it encountered, after having deported or exterminated the men it found there and left behind women and children in the greatest destitution, condemning them to die of hunger (the winters, women and children from razed villages are driven to desolate areas, without food resources, by cold temperatures of -30/-40°).
In August 1943, the Germans were defeated in the Battle of Kursk. During the occupation of the city, the Wehrmacht shot 3,000 civilians, 10,000 died of starvation and disease, another 10,000 were deported to Germany as “labor slaves”. Russian soldiers discover that in Rostov-on-Don more than 40,000 civilians were shot by the German army, another 53,000 were deported to Germany.
When Orel was liberated in August 1943, the Soviets counted more than 11,000 massacred civilians there. On August 24, 1943, Kharkov was liberated. Today it is estimated that around 300,000 people, civilians and prisoners of war, were executed in Kharkov, and more than 160,000 residents were deported to Germany.
In September 1943, Donbass, the first coal mining area in the Soviet Union, was completely liberated. More than 167,000 civilians were killed in Stalino (the city of Donestk was called Stalino in 1946), the first city of Donbass, starved or executed. On November 6, 1943, kyiv was liberated. More than 195,000 civilians were executed there, 100,000 people were deported. The destruction was such that when it was liberated, 80% of the inhabitants no longer had a home. On April 10, 1944, Odessa was liberated. The Germans killed 82,000 civilians there and deported 78,000 people. On May 9, Sevastopol was liberated. 27,000 civilians were killed there, almost the entire city was razed. In December 1943, most of Ukraine was liberated.
On January 19, 1944, Novgorod was liberated. During its occupation, the Germans killed 201,000 civilians and prisoners of war there. On July 23, Pskov was recaptured. The Germans executed 290,000 people there and deported another 11,000.
As for rapes, it was also commonplace.
Excerpt from Sexual Violence and Intimate Relationships. German soldiers in the USSR
” In fact, various testimonies attest to the rapes, often followed by murders, of young Russian girls or women, even Jews, committed from the start of Operation Barbarossa, as in Riga, in July 1941. “
“Finally, long hidden, sexual slavery was very widespread, affecting at least 50,000 women marked with a specific tattoo (yes, this is the minimum figure for slavery, the number of “simple” rapes must have been considerably higher). Without taking into account their nationality and/or religion, the Nazis selected them by age and physique, including in camps between 4 to 5,000 inmates of Ravensbrück from 1941 and opened numerous military brothels classified according to their clientele. “Private” initiatives were added to this: during the summer of 1943, for example, the 12th Infantry Division requisitioned young girls and childless women for domestic tasks and very probably also as “comfort women”. .”
Franz Mawick, the Swiss driver for Red Cross missions, wrote from Warsaw in 1942 about what he witnessed:
“Germans in uniforms […] stare at women and girls between the ages of 15 and 25. One of the soldiers pulls out a flashlight and shines a light on one of the women, right in the eye. The two women turn their pale faces towards us, expressing weariness and resignation. The first must be around 30 years old. What is this old whore looking for here? One of the three soldiers laughed. Bread, sir asks the woman […] You will get a kick in the ass but no bread. replies the soldier. The owner of the flashlight again directs the light onto the faces and bodies of the young girls […] The youngest is perhaps 15 years old […]. They open her coat and start groping her with their eager paws:this one is ideal for the bed, he says. »
A report by the International Military Tribunal writes: “ In the city of Smolensk, the German command has opened a brothel for officers in one of the hotels where hundreds of women and girls are taken. They are ruthlessly dragged down the street by their arms and hair . »
The consequences of these rapes remain for life. Repeated sexual intercourse on bodies that are too young means that many will no longer be able to have children, others will have them very late and that will be a “miracle”. Added to this is the brutality and mistreatment that cause lifelong disabilities.
However, many survivors do not consider themselves victims. For them, yes, their youth and their physique were the source of their misfortunes, but also, paradoxically, their life insurance, in the very harsh conditions of the German occupation of the USSR. Personally, I have never known how much of it is true or what the human mind prefers to believe, in order to be able to live with the unacceptable in there.
Mass murders give rise to another phenomenon, that of the “orphans of the Red Army”. Indeed, during the liberation of Soviet territory, the army took in a lot of orphans, they were taken care of by the soldiers, dressed and fed, sometimes armed and paid, but as a general rule they do not participate in combat but participate in the daily tasks.
Since the Germans considered compassion for the Slavs as weakness, it would have been right to treat them the same way. Except that by exterminating them, the USSR would have committed more harm than it suffered, which would have been unfair and stupid.
For example, the Americans during the Second War had no civilian losses to deplore and few military losses. Did this stop them from committing almost 200,000 rapes in Germany? To raze Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki?
Not to take prisoners and to take trophies, skulls, noses or ears, in the Pacific (60% of Japanese bodies repatriated from the Marianas without heads)?
And they seem really stupid to think they are virile because they behave worse than animals.
And if they were about applying the law of retaliation, then the survivors (or their children) will also be justified in taking revenge, so it’s endless.
Every man and potentially a monster, it is not limited to certain groups like “the Nazis”, the “faschos”, even the Jews or the Russians if we look at it from the Nazi point of view (see pro-Kiev people on this site for the Russians) which it would be enough to eradicate to eliminate the problem. Forgetting that it is by letting oneself be guided by one’s base instincts that one becomes one; it is the best way to even be one, or to condone monstrosity in others.
Edit: I would like to point out, for all those who would find it relevant to contest the comments of historians’ studies on the basis of their own beliefs, that the Slavs, like the Jews, were considered by the Nazis as subhuman and that from the start, this was announced in Mein Kampf where Hitler specifies that the Aryans must carve out a vital space in the east by enslaving the Slavs whom they did not massacre (and they thought they needed half) .
The rise of Nazism in Germany (moreover pushed by the employers who sought to oust the communists in their own country) was directly at the origin of Soviet industrialization in the 1930s which allowed the USSR to be the second industrial power in 1939 and to own 80% of the world fleet of tanks in 1940 (the goal of industrialization is to build weapons and avoid having one rifle for two as in 1914, moreover for the second war world, it is a myth, the Soviet divisions are better equipped in artillery and machine guns than their German counterparts). And from 1936, the USSR and the fascists clashed in Spain. And if Stalin made an unnatural reversal in 1939, it was because in 1938, the French are selling off Czechoslovakia, with which they were allied. Consequently, in front of the passivity of the Westerners, Stalin prefers to constitute a protective glacis and to try to delay the German attack as long as possible (a strategy which will be undermined by the rapid collapse of France), at least the time that its General Staff has recovered from the purges (which are also linked to the anticipation of a conflict since the collapse of the tsarist regime is due to its abandonment by the army and, conversely, the replacement of executives by Stalinist officers allowed the army to maintain its cohesion, even with Germans at the gates of Moscow).