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Feature: Book on WW II rapes upsets Russia
By Peter Almond

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 façade 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."