From Thomas Goodrich
All wars are bad. All wars are evil. All wars are inherently bad and evil. And World War Two was the most inherently bad and evil of all wars. No matter what some desk-bound Jewish propagandist might scribble, and no matter what some Christian nightly news reader might mumble, there is no such thing as a “Good War” and there was no such thing as a “Greatest Generation.” War unleashes pent hate. War lends a degree of legitimacy to the basest instincts in man. War is organized savagery. And never was this on uglier display than in World War Two. And never has the term “hell on earth” come closer to an actual manifestation than on the Eastern Front.
As momentum swung to the Soviet Union late in the war, the Red Army turned viciously on the crippled German Wehrmacht. First through Russia, then through Poland, the Soviets ruthlessly pursued the German army until by January, 1945, the communists were on the very borders of the Reich itself. When the final push for Berlin began, and when Soviet forces finally rolled across Germany, it caused widespread panic among German civilians.
The following is from my books, Rape Hate—Sex & Violence in War & Peace, and Hellstorm–The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947. It is not a pretty picture to paint. For over 70 years the world has been told only one side of that terrible war–the side that won. To this very day, unfortunately, these books and a handful of others remain the only books which actually attempt to describe what the war looked like to those who lost it. My hope when I began writing these books–my hope then, my hope now–was to tell the story as accurately and honestly as possible; to let the world know what actually occurred during that so-called “Good War,” not simply what we were told occurred. My hope then, my hope now, is that if enough people of good will read the books, understand the books, then act upon the books, then the day will soon come when the world will rise up and with a united voice declare that nothing like this will ever happen again, not in their names, not in their times, not to them . . . not to anyone.
Unfortunately, and as horrible as the ensuing pages are, the reader should keep in mind that the following deals with only one nightmarish component of a war filled with Allied war crimes–terror bombing, torture, starvation, massacre, enslavement—crimes that are even now, after over 70 years, still largely unknown. Taken together, the ugly things that were done to the defeated Germans by the victorious Allies remain to this day the darkest and best-kept secret in human history.
***
While those who remained endured unspeakable fates, Germans who fled with treks also suffered. “What surprised us most was the way they traveled,” recalled a British POW, who, along with thousands of other Allied prisoners, was being marched west away from the advancing Soviets.
❝
There was not a car, lorry or even a bicycle to be seen—only a seemingly endless line of covered wagons and carts drawn by horses or mules. . . . They were a pitiful sight, frozen, hungry, shoes and clothes falling apart, dragging themselves along to an unknown destination, hoping only that it might be beyond the reach of the Russian army. It was so cold that even in the day-time any drink mixed with cold water froze solid before it was possible to carry it to one’s mouth. At night men and women could keep alive only by huddling together in a wagon. . . . Those who fell asleep in the snow were dead within a few minutes. . . . Within an hour of taking the road prisoners and refugees had become indistinguishable. We were bound together by one common thought—to keep together so as to keep alive. . . . The refugees gladly let us climb on to their wagons and, as they had nothing with which to barter, we gave them what food we could spare.
Given the chaotic conditions, and with freezing refugees clogging the way, many treks were quickly overhauled by the Russians. Some Soviet tanks refused to leave the roads and crashed straight through the columns, squashing all in their path. After heavy traffic, the victims—men, women, children, animals, all—were eventually as flat as cardboard.
Young Josefine Schleiter records the horror when her group was overtaken:
❝
The [tanks] rushed through the rows of carts. Carts were hurled into the ditches where there were entrails of horses, and men, women and children were fighting with death. Wounded people were screaming for help. Next to me was a woman bandaging her husband who was losing blood from a big wound. Behind me a young girl said to her father: “Father shoot me.” “Yes father,” said her brother who was about sixteen years old. “I have no more chance.” The father looked at his children, the tears streaming down his cheeks and he said in a quiet tone: “Wait still a little while children.” Then came an officer on horseback. Some German soldiers were brought to him. He took his revolver; I shut my eyes, shots fell, and the poor fellows lay in front of us shot in the head, an expression of horror on their faces.
Those terrified survivors who scattered to the icy countryside fell easy prey. “The Russians found us and pulled us out of the barn,” said fourteen-year-old Horst Wegner. “They were Mongolians. They had huge scars and pockmarks on their faces. And they were draped in jewelry—they wore watches up to the elbows. They came in and pulled out everyone wearing anything military—a military coat, for example. They were taken behind the barn, shoved against a wall, and shot. They weren’t even all Germans; some of them were foreigners. They even shot the private who had bandaged my father’s leg.”
As always, for females the living death soon began. Renate Hoffmann:
❝
Suddenly three Russian soldiers came around the corner. They pointed their guns at us and forced us into the house. . . . [W]e knew what they had in store for us. We were separated. They put their guns to our heads. Any attempt to defend ourselves meant certain death. The only thing you could do was to pretend you were a rock or dead. . . . When the three men left the house, I opened the door of the room I was in. Another door opened down the hall and the nurse came out. We just looked at one another. . . . We were nauseated and felt miserable. Thank God there was still running water in the house.
As he struggled by car over the crowded roads, Major Rudolf Janecke of the Medical Corp gained a glimpse of what seemed to him an “endless agony.”
❝
Near a small village . . . I saw for the first time a trek that had been destroyed from the air. Many wagons had caught fire in spite of the wet—perhaps phosphor bombs—and were entirely burned out. The dead lay around in strange positions, among them children pressed against their mothers’ breasts. . . .
Soon afterward we were stopped by a man waving desperately. . . . He had seen the red cross on our car. His excitement nearly choked him. He was pale as death, and raised his right hand in an imploring gesture. He kept pointing to a wagon that stood out in the open field. His left arm, probably broken, hung limply from his shoulder. His wife would bleed to death, he managed to groan, if I did not help immediately. A Russian tank crew had caught them, two days ago, while they were resting in a village. Later they had got away. But now she was dripping blood. She hardly breathed any more—no one could help her.
I have performed some difficult operations in the field, under impossible conditions. But this was the first time I tried a tamponade of the uterus, on a snow-covered field over which an icy wind was blowing, with the patient lying on a filthy wagon in her blood-drenched clothes. . . . Some other women stood around. By the patient’s head cowered a befuddled boy of about fourteen, all the while close to tears. “He had to watch it,” the man said while I was giving the woman two injections I happened to have with me. “When the fifteenth man was on her they knocked me down because I dropped the light. He had to hold the light till they all were through.” The other women nodded, with not a word of their own misery.
As a rule, those who fled by train fared best. Speed did not always guarantee escape, however. Russian aircraft routinely strafed and bombed the cars from above and tanks cut the rails from below. When the Soviets suddenly captured the town of Allenstein, they forced the station master to signal the “all clear” to refugee trains still arriving from the east. As one unsuspecting train after another steamed into Allenstein, the Russians first slaughtered any men found on board, then passed their time raping carload after carload of females.
The real holocaust took place after Germany had surrendered.
Meanwhile, the red tide moved closer. In countless German cities and towns the pattern repeated itself, as the diary of a Catholic priest from Klosterbrueck reveals:
❝
Strange to say, the population intends to remain here, and is not afraid of the Russians. The reports that in one village they raped all the women and abducted all the men and took them away to work somewhere must surely have been exaggerated. How dreadful it would be if Goebbels was telling the truth after all. . . .
January 22nd
The machine-guns sound very near and some shells must have hit some of the buildings close by, because the house keeps trembling. The occupants of the cellar keep asking me what the Russians will be like. I keep asking myself the same thing. . . .
[Later]—We have had our first encounter with them, and are somewhat relieved. They are not as bad as we had expected. When we heard the Russians moving about in the church up above, we went up to them. Two Russian soldiers looked in at the cellar-door and asked if there were any German soldiers there. There was a strange look of tenseness and fear on their faces. A Russian kept watch at the entrance to the cellar the whole night.
January 23rd
After the fighting troops had moved on, a fresh lot of Russians arrived. Two of them entered the cellar, fired several shots into the ceiling, and asked us to give them our watches. They went off with fourteen wrist-watches. Then three more Russians arrived . . . . [They] swallowed the food like wild animals, and they drank the wine as if it were water. “The war is good here,” they kept saying. . . .
January 25th
All night long Russians entered the chapel and searched and questioned us. They ordered the woman to go outside with her small child. . . . [They] raped the woman and sent her back to us. She came back to the chapel, her small child in her arms, the tears streaming down her face. . . . During the morning three women from the village came to the chapel. The vicar hardly recognized them, for their faces were distorted with fear and terror. They told us that whole families had been shot by the Russians. Girls who had refused to allow themselves to be raped, and parents who had sought to protect their children, had been shot on the spot. . . .
January 26th
Last night was very troubled again. Fresh lots of soldiers kept on arriving and searching the house. . . . Every time the door is opened we start with fear. . . .
January 27th
We priests were allowed out of the chapel for half an hour today in order to bury Margarethe in the yard. Poor girl, it is a good thing you were dead and so did not know what the Russians did to your body!
January 28th
The night was very troubled again. . . . Many of the nuns are getting very distressed and nervous. They sleep even less than we do. I often hear them say, “If only we had fled before the Russians arrived!”
By the end of January, the routed German army was finally able to wheel and face its pursuer. Because the Red advance had been so swift, Soviet supply lines were unable to keep pace. Additionally, a sudden thaw melted icy rivers and turned roads into quagmires, making rapid pursuit impossible. While isolated enclaves continued to hold back the Russians, particularly along the Baltic coast, the bulk of the German Army took up defensive positions behind the Oder River, the last natural barrier before Berlin. Although the miraculous respite was spent regrouping and placing arms in the hands of the People’s Army, or Volkssturm, the morale of the Wehrmacht had received a severe blow. The incredible force and fury of the Russian onslaught now convinced most military men that defeat was unavoidable. And for the huddled and stunned civilian masses, the sickening depth of Soviet savagery also clearly foretold that the end would be vastly more nightmarish than even the most lurid imagination had dreamed. At first, only breathless rumors relayed by panic-stricken refugees revealed the nature of the approaching horror. Later, however, the extent of Russian atrocities was confirmed when stranded army units broke through to German lines or when the Wehrmacht launched small counterattacks and reclaimed bits of lost ground.
The “Good War”
“In every village and town they entered,” wrote one who spoke with soldiers, “the German troops came upon scenes of horror: slain boys, People’s Army men drenched with gasoline and burned—and sometimes survivors to tell the tale of the outrages. In some villages, they surprised Russians warm in the beds of women they had taken, and found the bodies of the many French war prisoners who had died defending German women and children.”
Staggered by what he had seen and heard, a German officer tried desperately to make sense of the disaster; to understand the minds of men “who find . . . pleasure in raping the same woman over and over, dozens of times, even while other women are standing near.”
❝
There is a perverse hatred behind this which cannot be explained with phrases about Bolshevism, or the so-called Asiatic mentality, or by the assertion that the Russian soldiers have always considered the women of the conquered as their booty. . . . I was in Poland in 1939 when the Russians moved in, and I did not see a single woman being molested.
“This,” concluded the young officer grimly, “shows the frightful power of propaganda.”
Millions massacred, millions raped, millions enslaved—but this was nothing. Worse was to come.
“The Germans have been punished, but not enough,” gloated Ilya Ehrenburg from his warm office in Moscow. “The Fritzes are still running, but not lying dead. Who can stop us now? …The Oder? The Volkssturm? No, it’s too late Germany, you can whirl around in circles, and burn, and howl in your deathly agony; the hour of revenge has struck!”
***
Like everyone else, Anna Schwartz was huddled in her basement when Danzig finally fell.
❝
In the following calm we heard the Russian panzer rolling in, and the first cheers of the Russian soldiers. Shortly afterwards Russian soldiers were heard coming down the steps of the cellar. The first Russian soldiers stood in front of us, and the first word we heard from them was: “Urr!”“Urr!” There was a stink of alcohol, sweat and dirty uniforms. After they had robbed us of our watches, with machine-pistols in their hands, they hastily disappeared into the next cellar, and did the same there. After five minutes the next two came, and so it continued, until we had no more jewelry, and the contents of our trunks had been turned upside down. In the meantime we heard the shrieks of women, who were being raped by Mongols. Suddenly a Russian officer appeared and called upon us in broken German, to leave the cellar at once. As quickly as we could, we took hold of our trunks and rucksacks, which had been searched over and over again, and rushed into the yard, which was full of guns and soldiers. All around the houses were burning, shells were exploding, and . . . wounded people and horses were screaming.
After the fall of Konigsberg, Hans Graf von Lehndorff courageously held to his post as hospital surgeon. When Red soldiers burst into the building, bedlam erupted as the frenzy for watches and jewelry began.
❝
The arrival of the first officers destroyed my last hopes of coming to tolerable terms. Any attempt to talk to them failed. Even for them I am only a coat rack with pockets; they see me only from the shoulders downward. A few nurses who got in their way were seized and dragged off and then released again thoroughly disheveled before they realized what was happening. The older nurses were the first victims. They wandered aimlessly along the corridors, but there was no place to hide, and new tormentors kept pouncing upon them.
As terrible as the situation seemed, it was trivial compared to what occurred when the Russians discovered a distillery near the hospital. Dr. von Lehndorff:
❝
They burst in here from the factory in crowds—officers, soldiers, riflewomen, all drunk. And not a chance of hiding anybody from them, because the whole neighborhood was lit up as bright as day by the burning buildings. . . . Now something like a tide of rats flowed over us, worse than all the plagues of Egypt together. Not a moment went by but the barrel of an automatic was rammed against my back or my belly, and a grimacing mask yelled at me for sulfa. Apparently most of these devils have got venereal disease. . . . On all sides we heard the desperate screams of women: “Shoot me then! Shoot me!” But the tormentors preferred a wrestling match to any actual use of their guns. Soon none of the women had any strength left to resist. In a few hours a change came over them: their spirit died, you heard hysterical laughter which made the Russians even more excited. . . .
[A] major who seemed to be still relatively reasonable, sent for me. . . . Thirty to forty Russians were rampaging among the patients. I was to tell him who these people were. Sick people, of course, what else? But what sort of sick people, he wanted to know. Well, all sorts; scarlet fever, typhus, diphtheria. . . . He gave a yell and hurled himself like a tank among his men. But he was too late; when the tumult had subsided, four women were already dead.
When the hospital caught fire, von Lehndorff and his staff began evacuation.
❝
Soon the whole hillside was occupied by patients, and the Russians were rushing wildly among them like a horde of baboons, carrying off indiscriminately nurses or patients, harassing them and demanding watches for the hundredth time. . . . I shouldered again a rather heavy man, and had just crossed the footbridge when I was stopped by a Russian. . . . I had to drop the man. The Russian ransacked him, then shot him in the belly as if by mistake, and went on. The man sat there, looking at me, an inquiry in his eyes. If only I could have given him the finishing shot! I gave him a dose of morphine and left him lying by the side of the road.
At night, the horror increased tenfold as the drunken mob went on a rampage of murder and rape.
“Grandma is too old,” Klara Seidler pleaded when a young soldier forced her into a telephone booth.
“Grandmother must!” said the rapist over and over.
Near the booth, a young mother was grabbed as she tried to slip her three children into a cellar. When the children began screaming, a huge soldier hurled them headfirst into a wall, one after the other. Despite her own torture, Klara Seidler would never forget the sound of little skulls being crushed. When the rapists left, Klara and other women tried in vain to shield the hysterical mother as another gang appeared. The shrieking woman was thrown down and one after another the soldiers continued the attack.
Soon after the fall of Danzig, hundreds of women and girls pleaded with an officer for protection. The Soviet pointed to a Catholic cathedral. After the females were safely inside, the officer yelled to his men, motioned to the church, and with bells ringing and organ pipes roaring the horror continued all night. Some women inside were raped more than thirty times.
“They even violated eight-year-old girls and shot boys who tried to shield their mothers,” groaned a priest.
The bloody nightmare which enveloped the Baltic coast was neither more nor less than that which transpired wherever the communists occupied German soil. In many places—Silesia, Prussia, Pomerania, the German communities of Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Yugoslavia—the horror had been in progress for weeks. There, the ghastly atrocities had abated little, if any, with the passage of time and to some it seemed as though Red soldiers were in a race with one another to see who could destroy, murder and, above all, rape the most. Some women and children were assaulted ten, twenty, even thirty times a night and for a female to be ravished hundreds of times a week was not uncommon.
“One could hardly any longer call it raping . . ,” a victim moaned. “[T]he women were passive instruments.” Thousands, of course, died from hemorrhaging and many who survived looked, acted and felt “like zombies.” There was no reprieve for anyone, living or dead.
“Russian soldiers even went so far as to violate some of the female corpses that lay in the mortuary at the cemetery prior to burial,” revealed one clergyman from Rosenberg. Desperate to save her little child from further assault, one frantic mother begged a commanding officer for mercy. “He asked to see the girl,” wrote a witness, “and when she appeared, he, too, raped her, and then sent her home.”
“Our fellows were so sex-starved,” a Soviet major laughed, “that they often raped old women of sixty, or seventy or even eighty—much to these grandmothers’ surprise, if not downright delight. But I admit it was a nasty business, and the record of the Kazakhs and other Asiatic troops was particularly bad.”
Of all things German, nothing—not even the Nazi Party—aroused greater hatred among Jewish communists than the Christian religion, particularly the Catholic Church. Relates a priest from Grottkau:
❝
He was utterly godless and the sight of my priest’s robe apparently infuriated him. He kept insisting that I deny the existence of God and, seizing hold of my breviary, threw it onto the floor. Finally, he dragged me out into the street and pushed me against a wall in order to shoot me. . . . He had just placed me against the wall when all the men, women and children, who had been sheltering in the house . . . appeared on the scene. They stood around us, pale and terrified. Thereupon he began to scatter the crowd by shooting at random in every direction. When he and I were finally alone once more he pointed his revolver at me, but it was empty. He started reloading it, but whilst he was doing so, two other officers, who had apparently heard the shots, came into sight. They rushed up to him and snatched the revolver from his grasp. . . . [then] dragged him away.
“He stood at the altar like a lord and eyed us triumphantly,” a priest from another church remembered.
❝
Then he ordered our old vicar to go outside with him. After a quarter of an hour they returned. The expression on the vicar’s face was dreadful. He collapsed in front of the altar, muttering, “Shoot me, but shoot me here, at the altar. I refuse to leave the altar!”—The nuns screamed, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” The Russian grinned, triumphant in his power and strength. With a lordly gesture he walked away from the vicar.
Lucky in these cases, most clergymen were not so fortunate. Many died in the prescribed Marxist manner: Bullet to the neck and skull bashed to bits.
For some Soviets, nuns were an especial target of debasement. Reveals a priest from Klosterbrueck:
❝
They had been tortured and raped by officers for several hours. Finally they returned, their faces swollen and beaten black and blue. . . . [At] the neighboring village . . . the Russians made all the nuns assemble in one room. Some of the younger nuns had managed to hide in the nick of time, in the water-cistern up in the attic. The rest of them were treated in a dreadful manner. They tried to defend themselves, but it was of no avail. They were brutally raped by the Russians—even the oldest nuns, who were eighty. For four hours the Russians ransacked the house, behaving like wild animals. In the morning they then boasted in the village that there were no longer any virgins at the convent.
“The nuns were completely exhausted when they came back. . . . We all sat there huddled together in one small room and prayed. . . ,” wrote a witness from another parish. “Again and again we heard heavy footsteps approaching, and Russians came and went. At about midnight a new lot of fiends entered the room. They kicked those who had lain down on the floor in order to get a little rest; they fired shots at the ceiling, and tore the nuns’ hoods off their heads. I shall never forget the terrible screams of the women and children.”
Like their lay sisters, nuns were raped with such sadistic regularity that some simply stopped praying. But most did not.
❝