False claim about German rapes of Soviet women

[Truthseeking]

There is a youtube video in which a man defends the monstrous and murderous atrocities against German women and girls by the Red Army by claiming that German soldiers raped 10 million Soviet women during Operation Barbarosa. He cited a page from gegenwind.info but I couldn't get to it. However, I did get to the home page and saw that it is in German.

I am very deeply appalled after reading Hellstorm by Thomas Goodrich, which everyone should read. What I am looking for is acccurate, substantial information about the incidence of rapes of Soviet women by German soldiers on the Eastern front. Thank you.

[Hektor]

Now use some logic. If that were true... You'd be sure that they'd trumped up already 80 years ago.

They didn't ... They didn't even bother to fill that into their 'atrocity reports'... Simple reason being that they can't load this with too much stuff that isn't believable.

The only legitimate sources on rapes by German/Axis troops would be trial records... By their own authorities that is. They occurred of course, as it does do in peace time... That it was rare was the reason why the Allies never trumped this up.

[Otium]

For some reason you made this thread twice, I responded with this post: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14786#p106745

This is a dubious claim to say the least.

It's not based on any solid figures, but on guesstimations.

This particular claim seems to originate from a Women's rights activist and open borders advocate named Ursula Schele and by extenstion the dubious mid-90s 'Wehrmacht exhibition' which sought to document the 'Crimes of the Wehrmacht'. This exhibition is known both by revisionists and mainstream historians to have been vicisious anti-German propaganda exhibition plain and simple. The facts presented in it were admitted to be either flat out wrong, or invented in some cases (IIRC). The mainstream Swedish historian Christer Bergström admitted:

Soviet partisans — in reality a branch of the repressive authorities — carried out atrocities against the civilian population on a large scale. A German report covering the period 11 December 1941-23 January 1942 established that three out of four victims of partisan killings were Soviet civilians. The fact that several among those executed were collaborators and killers of hostages and Jews, and the presence of “false partisans” does not alter the fact that the partisans upheld Stalin’s rule of terror over the population.

[...]

The Wehrmacht had a profound complicity in crimes against the Soviet POWs, but the extent to which it participated in the mass killings of Jews has been exaggerated — e.g. by the 1995 Wehrmacht Exhibition ("Verbrechen der Wehrmacht”), which was proved to contain many factual errors.

Christer Bergström, Operation Barbarossa 1941: The Largest Military Campaign in History. Hitler Against Stalin (Oxford: Casemate Publishers, 2016), pp. 268, 269.

The claim made by Ursula Schele was this:

In a discussion on the 1997 Wehrmacht exhibition in Bremen with Prof. Dr. Jan Phillip Reemtsma, among others, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Eichwede described the fact that there were an extraordinarily large number of children of Wehrmacht soldiers in the former Soviet Union. Referring to Russian historians and German sources, he assumes more than one million children conceived under wartime conditions and emphasizes that there are many testimonies of rapes (cf. Thiele, p. 96).

Based on biological facts, it can be assumed that statistically about every tenth sexual intercourse results in a pregnancy. Consequently, it must be assumed that about 10 million rapes were committed by German men on Russian soil alone. In Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, about 200,000 children of German occupation soldiers were born. To what extent the causal contacts were voluntary or carried out out of fear, hunger and under force remains speculation as long as there is no interest in research (see Sander, p. 71). Today, 54 years after the end of the war, only a few of the victims concerned are still able to answer our questions. Nevertheless, they have a right to our respect and attention.

Ursula Schele, "Vergewaltigungen und Zwangsprostitution im Krieg: ...und sie wissen, was sie tun", Gegenwind, 122 (Nov. 1998).

Schele's article was published in the openly Anti-Fascist, Communist periodical 'Gegenwind' in November 1998. It was published in their special issue entitled 'Schleswig-Holstein und die Verbrechen der Wehrmacht'. Other contributers published alongside Schele in the same issue were the nonsensically vile ravings of the 'Gruppe AntifaschistInnen Norderstedt' (Group Antifascists Norderstedt) who wrote, as one example, a short piece under the title 'Totengedenken "Deutsche Täter sind keine Opfer!"' (Commemoration of the dead "German perpetrators are not victims!"). How charming. . . Clearly Schele isn't much of a "Womans Rights Activist" if she'd so happily associate and contribute to the causes with which such fiends could claim female German victims of rape are supposedly "not victims", downplaying their immense suffering which would often lead to suicide. Though this conflict of interest is evidently of no concern to her.

You can read the full compliation of articles here: https://gegenwind.info/175/sonderheft_wehrmacht.pdf

Needless to say there is no real proof for these claims. Schele just pulled it out of her dusty crevice and proclaimed that we "must assume" this figure to be correct, while in the next line admitting she has no way to prove what was sexual contact was consenual or not. We have no reason to believe this figure.

Even if it were true, these kinds of horrific acts permeated both sides of the conflict except that the rape of German women continued in the Soviet zome of occupation well into the late 1940s, years after the war was over. Moreover, two wrongs don't make a right, the crimes of the Red Army are not "okay" or irrelevant because German soldiers "did it too".

---

What resulted in these final months of the war was a degree of atrocity and bloodshed which can only be compared to that of the German crimes committed earlier. In East Prussia civilians were routinely rounded up and executed, their houses burnt, and crops and livestock destroyed. As many as 1.5 million incidences of rape are estimated to have occurred during the initial five month occupation of East Prussia alone.8 Similar events unfolded in Silesia, Pomerania and Vienna. Torture, looting, rape, and murder became a common occurrence and affected virtually every German citizen who lay in the Red Army’s path. When the Wehrmacht’s “defense in depth” was breached at the Seelow Heights in late April 1945, nothing stood in the way of Russian troops advancing on Berlin. In the Nazi capital, the Soviet crimes committed against German civilians culminated in one of the most devastating and tragic episodes of human brutality occurring over a limited period. As the Soviets neared the Reichstag the rear echelon troops ravaged the civilian population. With no overall central leadership and few disciplined regiments to safeguard the people, Berlin lay at the mercy of Russian soldiers. Not only were tens of thousands of non-combatant civilians killed, it is also believed that anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 German women were raped by Soviet soldiers, 10,000 of whom died, mostly by suicide.9 Recent sources estimate that a total of two million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers during the final months of the war.10

Mikkel Dack, "Crimes Committed by Soviet Soldiers Against German Civilians, 1944-1945: A Historiographical Analysis", Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Vol 10 (2008), No. 4 pp. 4-5. http://www.glscott.org/uploads/2/1/3/3/21330938/crimes_committed_by_soviet_soldiers.pdf

Books on the topic of Soviet and Allied rape against German women:

[Hektor]

Dito, Otium.

"Women's Rights Activist"... In a country were there is no such thing as rights men have that women don't. I'd know about some legal distinctions in other fields, though.

Of course such activists will go for targets she doesn't expect being contradicted vehemently. So why not pick the German Army, then? If she picked members of Allied forces the situation would be expectedly different. So rather avoid harassment and go for something that is 'undefended'.

This was the same with the "Reemtsma"-show in the 1990s He would be pretty certain that those that were in the German army then and fought in Russia would be mostly rather old people, if not dead already. They didn't have a lobby anyway. And former soldiers still having active minds couldn't do a lot to challenge those collective accusations. It took some foreigners to point out that what the exhibition presented was sloppy at best. They also identified lots of forgeries and malicious accusations being made. Still there wasn't a lot of resonance in the German or other media then... It was just to convenient of a target and the organizers of the Reemtsma-Exhibition could be certain of this. Malicious accusations and cowardice can be a very powerful accusation. Especially when most of those in positions of public relevance already did grind an axe with the generation that were grown ups during world war two.

[Truthseeking]

I did post what you said about Ursila. So far, the guy has left it up. Usually, he removes my posts promptly.

But, I want to say that what was done to Germany in World War 1 and World War 2 was the most monstrous wronging of a country and a people that has ever happened. We are fed so many lies, about so many things, including all the wars, but, the lies about World War 2 are the most evil and grotesque of all. And since those lies form the whole moral foundation of our society, it means that it's all rotten to the core. I don't mean that every individual is rotten, but the whole foundation is rotten. And I'll admit that it's a heavy psychological burden for me, knowing that the whole history of the modern era, and the whole phony moral umbrella they hold over us, is wantonly corrupt and evil.

It's ironic that right now things are very bad between Russia and the West, but regardless, the lies about World War 2 is the one thing they will always have in common. Putin is as deluded about "The Great Patriotic War" as anyone else. So, even though we're sworn enemies, we can still do prisoner swaps, and we can always do lie swaps.

You know about the Kanye West debacle, and considering the amount of self-destruction he underwent, it's a shame he didn't say something that was truly meaningful and impactful. He did not do the cause any good. But then again, he is neither smart, knowledgable, nor does he have a way with words. I recall Kurt Vonnegut saying that what we did at Dresden was turn Hansels and Gretels into gingerbread. He had a way with words.

[Hektor]

Putin / today's Russians probably have to maintain a brittle consensus in their country. The Stalin-fans are a minority, but nevertheless a substantial and influential one. Their cohesion is probably stronger than other political factions in Russia.

And then there is the thing that many Russians have a feeling of having lost out after the dismantling of the Soviet Union... At least they "were someone", when Stalin ruled and they 'won World War Two'.... Not sure, if that was such a great thing though. The USSR was sustained by the US and the British empire at the time. Otherwise they would have collapsed in 1942. They didn't because of massive supply of equipment and commodities including industrial and agricultural ones during those years.

The Ukraine-conundrum is almost funny. I think Mike Peinovich did do a good podcast on this with Tim Kelly a while ago. So there is some awareness about things there. One obstacle may still be to prove and explain this to the laymen. Although in my experience, the main obstacle to the laymen is emotional/reputational not factual and evidential. They are quite willing to accept stories without evidence, if they are touched or, if that feels somehow safe to do so... But if it is something they have been conditioned to dismiss and when it makes them feel guilty, shameful or miserable, they will turn down the best evidences. They may even think that it is a trick, if you are convincing with your arguments. There is of course exceptions to this. And in the end it is the exceptional people that will make history. The rest is just there, because they have to.


I can comment on Kanye later. But bear in mind that he doesn't have advisor and a PR-office to support him. So it's an amateur having to deal with well-connected, well-prepared and ruthless networks that view what Kanye raised as vital to their power (and perhaps survival). On the other hand... This has drawn a lot of attention to the matter... Hence I'm not sure whether the ADL did really "win" the debacle.

When they pick a fight again, they may have to deal with somebody that is better prepared with Kanye. And I should say it again... Greenblatt may have done the Jewish lobby a big disfavor with his chutzpah. There have always been people that noticed that there are issues with organized Jewry that don't exist with other groups. And their number may be growing (again). What let to the present status was the fact that Jews were beyond critique for decades now. It was impious to criticize their behavior in the context of their ethnic group. You could attack groups like Germans, Boers, Americans - even Russians - but to say something less than reverend about Jews was indeed a risky endeavor.