The Savage Peace

1,533 Views | 5 Replies | Last: 4 yr ago by Smeghead4761
lespaul
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AG
I watched this documentary on Netflix. Man is it depressing. I knew that rape was a big problem in Germany with the Russians, I had no idea it was such a massive endeavor.

Also, the movie goes through how brutally the ethnic Germans were treated in eastern Europe (Czech etc). The German soldiers were often dispatched brutally which brings up many moral questions. However, it was much worse. They would round up German speakers and kill them. I know the Germans went morally crazy during that time in history, but this documentary shows how evil manifests in all sorts of places.

Anyone else see this?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5267658/
CanyonAg77
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AG
Haven't seen that. I have heard a story from a local woman who was an occupation-era war bride. Her dad managed to get home from the front a few weeks before the war ended. He gave this woman's mother a pistol and told her to throw it in the river if the Americans come.

He told her if the Russians come first, to shoot all of their girls, then herself. I assume the boys were all in service.

The Americans came first, she threw it away. Then they withdrew, and the Russians came. She didn't really elaborate past that.

I've also read Bob Hoover's account of being with Russian troops after being shot down behind their lines. At one point he and his American companion took German girls to a dark corner of where they were staying with the Russians, and pretended to rape them. Otherwise, Hoover felt the Russians would have killed him.
aalan94
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AG
Yes, it was brutal and beyond anything most people can comprehend. I don't want to fall into the trope that the Russians were Eastern savages, but they were Eastern savages. They were raised often in primitive conditions compared to Westerners and had spent their entire lives (most of these troops were born after 1918) in a political system in which the state can do anything it wants. And they are part of the state.

Furthermore, it is certain some commanders promised to tolerate rape, and other commanders may have even ordered it.

Of course, this is nothing new in history, on the contrary, most armies operated this way in the ancient and even medieval words. In my own research into the 1812-13 revolution in Texas, the Spanish general Arredondo uses it as a weapon. His troops certainly committed hundreds of rapes in San Antonio in August-September 1813.
IDAGG
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AG
CanyonAg77 said:



I've also read Bob Hoover's account of being with Russian troops after being shot down behind their lines. At one point he and his American companion took German girls to a dark corner of where they were staying with the Russians, and pretended to rape them. Otherwise, Hoover felt the Russians would have killed him.
I have told this story several times before on this site. My father spent the last 5 months of the war as a POW in Stalag Luft 1. The same camp that Bob Hoover was at. He did not know Bob Hoover.

When the camp was liberated by the Russians, the prisoners wandered around the countryside trying to find anything to eat. My father (who spoke fluent German) witnessed the aftermath of several Russian atrocities. He told me that basically any woman from 13 to 70 was raped, old men and some boys were shot, etc.

The Germans almost starved the POWs to death the last few months of the war as there was little food. He had some hard feelings towards his captors, the Germans. But....

HE HATED THE RUSSIANS WITH A PASSION. All caps because I heard these stories from him first hand. He was visibly very angry and upset when talking about what the Russians did to the German civilians. He died before the Berlin Wall fell. I wished he had lived to see that and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was a very serious guy, but I am pretty sure he would have enjoyed the hell out of that.

The POWs were stuck with the Russians for a couple of weeks until the US could coordinate with the Russians and fly in stripped down bombers to fly them back to France. BTW, my dad was 6 foot even. When he was weighed when he arrived at the hospital in France he weighed just under 100 lbs.

I think Hoover actually stole a German plane and flew it to freedom. BIG BRASS BALLS. And it still pisses me off how the FAA treated Hoover late in life.
CanyonAg77
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AG
Yeah, some anal orifice FAA bureaucrats wanted a scalp, and they almost got it. Bob Hoover was probably the finest pilot who ever lived, and was until the day he died.

Also in Hoover's book was being in a house with a bunch of Russian troops who were from Mongolia or someplace. They found a toilet with the overhead tank, and were gathered around it. They would pull the chain, watch it flush, and laugh themselves silly. then do it again and again.
CT'97
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AG
It wasn't just in Berlin, the treatment of the Polish in Warsaw was along the same lines.

It makes me wonder what the russian women in their Army delt with along the way. I find it hard to believe that the same army that systematically rapes every adult woman in a city would also hold off on other women regardless of what uniform they wore.
Smeghead4761
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Without seeing it, I'm wondering if the film is based on the book Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe. I may need to move that closer to the top of my reading list.

One thing that is largely left out of the history books (especially at the high school and even college World/European history survey level courses) is the amount of what we now call ethnic cleansing that went on in the aftermath of the war. While this mostly involved pushing ethnic Germans out of various areas, including most of what was once Prussia, it also involved Poles being pushed out of western Belorus and Ukraine and into old Prussia (somewhere I have a German map that shows the regions of Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia as "Unter Polnisher Verwaltung" - Under Polish Administration.) Areas of Finland that were taken by the Soviets were sparsely populated, but I'd bet that most ethnic Finns living there moved out as well.

Ethnic cleansing is a bad thing, and almost always, as noted accompanied by rape, murder, and all sorts of terror and awfulness. This process did result in much more ethnically/nationally homogenous populations on both sides of the various borders. (Especially areas bordering the new Germany. One of the unstated - or at least left out of most history books - objectives of the war was to destroy 'Prussianism' once and for all.) And the effected areas have been largely free of conflict in the 70+ years since (although the Cold War had much to do with that.)

The one place that remained heavily mixed - Yugoslavia - suffered extremely nasty fighting once the Cold War lid (and Tito's dictatorship) were removed. And other areas with ethnically mixed populations - eastern Ukraine, Moldova - remain flashpoints and/or low to mid-intensity war zones. (I will note that most, if not all, of those such areas east of Vistula River involve populations of ethnic Russians whose ancestors were mostly planted there under Stalin.)

It's open to debate how much of the barbaric behavior exhibited by the Red Army once they entered German territory was payback for the equally barbaric behavior of the Germans on Soviet soil (Einsatzgruppen, anyone?). Not that it excuses said behavior, but it does much to explain it.

I will note that the Soviets' treatment of their own soldiers who had been captured by the Germans (and somehow survived to be repatriated) was truly brutal - but I think that had more to do with Stalinism/Communism than anything uniquely Russian.
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