Several days ago a Polish artist Jerzy Szumczyk presented this sculpture in Gdansk.After few hours the sculpture was removed by government police.
http://www.polskawalczaca.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=23050
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The Soviet witness Rabichev: Nemmersdorf in the eyes of the perpetrators.
This is a translation of a shocking account of a Russian wittness to a mass rape in East Prussia in 1944-45.
From the beginning of the German-Soviet war, the communists, seeing that their slaves, instead of fighting the Germans, preferred to capitulate or just to run away, decided to wake in the crowd the basest of feelings – hatred – and use it as a means of keeping men in the ranks. Hatred became a weapon of war. The brilliant writings of Ilya Ehrenburg, a great literary talent, and a friend of the greatest writers of the time, were particularly inflammatory.
This account comes from an excellent Russian historical website krotov.info.
Leonid Rabichev (b. 1923), a half-century after the war, talked about what other veterans preferred to remain silent – about the events of the early 1945. Rabichev at the time was in Eastern Prussia. This part of the essay “Fog of war” (“Znamya” 2005, № 2) should be part of any history book Russia – for Russians. “This is something that I did not dare tell my father Gabriel Krotov, who was at the same time in East Prussia platoon sergeant”. However, the father did not live to the age of Rabichev. The worst thing is – and this is exactly what Rabichev singled out – that this sin cannot be explained with that “everybody did it.” It was not everywhere, and it was not everybody.
The fog of war will cover everything
“Our troops in East Prussia caught up with the civilians evacuating from Goldap, Insterburg and other cities which were left by the withdrawing German Army. They drew carriages and cars. On foot, women, children, large patriarchal families slowly moved to the west on all roads and highways of the country.
Our tanks, infantry, artillery and communications troops prodded them in order to clear the road. They pushed them into the ditches on each side of the highway, with their carts, furniture, bags, suitcases, horses. They ran down the elderly and children, and, forgetting to be thankful to the German troops retreating without a fight, thousands attacked women and girls.
Women, mothers and their daughters, were lying to the left and right of the highway, and in front of each, stood a giggling line of men with their pants down.
Those bleeding and losing consciousness were dragged away. The children throwing themselves to help them, were shot. You could hear growling, laughing, screaming and moaning. And their commanders, majors and colonels, stood on the road, some laughing, some directing – or rather, regulating the traffic. This was in order to make sure that all of their soldiers without exception participated. No, it was not to insure collective responsibility, and not at all a revenge on the accursed invaders – it was just one hell of a deadly group sex.
Permissiveness and impunity, impersonality and cruel logic of a maddened crowd.
Shocked, I sat in the cabin of my truck, my driver Demidov stood in line, and then Flaubert’s Carthage appeared to me. I realized then that the fog of war would not cover everything.. A colonel, who had just been directing, now could not restrain himself and stood in the line too, while the major was shooting witnesses, the hysterical children and the elderly.
- Cut it! To the cars!
Behind us there was already the next unit. I could not stop my signalmen, who were already forming a new queue, and my telephone girls choked with laughter. Nausea was raising to my throat. To the horizon, I could see mountains of rags, overturned carts, bodies of women, old people and children.
The highway was now free of traffic. It was getting dark. On the left and right there were German farms. We received an order to take accommodation for the night. Me and my platoon got a farm two kilometers away from the highway. Corpses of children, elderly and women, raped and shot dead were lying in all rooms. We were too tired to pay attention to them. We just lied down on the floor between them and went to sleep.
May 7, 2002, fifty-eight years later.
- I do not want to hear it, I want you, Leonid, to destroy this text, it cannot be printed! – tells me my friend with her voice breaking – the poet, novelist, journalist Olga Ilnitskaya. This is happening in a third hospital for veterans of the war in Medvedkovo. … I write before and after breakfast, I write under a drop, in the afternoon, evening, and sometimes at night.
I hasten to fix the suddenly erupting from the subconscious frames of forgotten life. Olga came to visit me. She was thinking, I would read her my new poems. Her face has a grimace of disgust, and I’m puzzled.
I was not thinking about the reaction of the future listener or reader. I was thinking about how important it was not to miss details. Fifty years ago it would have been much easier, but then this overwhelming need did not arise in me, and is it me who is writing this? What is it? me fate. … Why am I writing it? What will be the reaction of our generals and our German friends, and particularly of our enemies in Germany?
Inspiration comes suddenly. This is not a game or self-assertion, it’s from other dimensions, it’s repentance. Like a splinter, it dwells inside, not only in me, but in my generation, probably in entire humanity. This is a special case, a fragment of a criminal century, and with it, as with the dispossessions of the 1930s, as with GULag, as with the loss of tens of millions of innocent people, as with the occupation of Poland in 1939 – it is impossible to live with dignity. Without this repentance I cannot die with dignity. I was a platoon commander, I was sick and looked at it as if from the outside, but my soldiers stood in these horrible criminal lines, and laughed when they should have been burning with shame, and, in truth, committed crimes against humanity.
The colonel-regulator? Wouldn’t it be enough with a single command? But after all, the commander of the Third Byelorussian Front Army General Chernyakhovsky was driving on the same highway in his jeep and saw it. He saw it all, went into the houses where women were lying on beds with bottles in their vaginas. Wouldn’t it be enough with a single command? So who was more guilt? A soldier from the ranks, the major-traffic controller, the laughing colonels and generals, or the observing me? Or all those who said that the “fog of war would cover it all”?
In April, my 31-th army was transferred to the First Ukrainian Front in Silesia, bound for Danzig. On the second day, on the orders of Marshal Konev, forty Soviet soldiers and officers was shot in front of the ranks, and there were no cases of rape and murder of civilians in Silesia. Why did the army general Chernyakhovski do the same in East Prussia? “
From “Genocide of East Prussia” by Peter Hedrook
And that’s what was Soviet prisoners told during interrogations:
“Before he entered Germany, the officers gave us instructions according to which property the German civilians did not have to be respected, and the population could be treated as a game. Women might be raped.”
“Two weeks ago, the platoon commander told us that, upon the entry on German soil, the soldiers can openly loot and pillage.”
“Before, it was forbidden to take spoils, but for now, on German soil, it will not be punished. Everybody can take as much as he can carry.”
“The company commander and platoon commander said that on German territory, they may with impunity plunder and violate German women.”
Military doctor Nikolai Sienkiewicz, who worked in a field hospital, said that a group of German prisoners allegedly refused to answer during interrogation : “We just took them to the side, about 100 meters away, and shot them.“
Most of the Germans who surrendered have not seen the camps for prisoners of war. “We killed the prisoners just like that – said Captain Vasily Krylov, and snapped his fingers. – When the soldiers were ordered to bring the prisoners to the rear, they were likely to be” killed while attempting to escape.”
Witold Kubaschewski recalls how unbearable it was for him to shoot the prisoners, and he tried not to look the doomed people in the eyes. But, like everybody else he shot, following an order.
“In war, there is only one rule – you go into battle, you see an enemy, and the enemy for you is not a person – says Sergeant Nicholas Tymoshenko. - Raising you hands will not save you.“
Stalin encouraged soldiers to conduct “registers of retaliation” by writing data about fictional “German atrocities” and fixing down personal contribution to the “settling of accounts” with the enemy. Political instructors, for the same purpose, were carrying out “meetings of retaliation”, calling on the Soviet soldiers to kill and loot.
“We all know that the German girls could be to raped and killed – Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, during the war an artillery officer. – It was almost seen as a distinction in battle.”
He is echoed by Gabriel Temkin, who served as a translator in the 78th Infantry Division, “The easiest way to take revenge is to take possession of the enemy’s women.”
The rage of the conquerors only grew when they first saw with their own eyes how richly the Germans lived. “Their villages and towns looked like heaven on earth, compared to ours – says Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko. – Everything was so neat and tidy. So many beautiful buildings. They were so much richer than we were.“
Looting acquired an epic scale – and to this contributed the order, in which each soldier once a month could send home a parcel with trophies. They dispatched everything to Russia – food, drinks, livestock, clothing, jewelry. If civilians foolishly complained of looting, the soldiers simply set fire to their homes.
When the Red Army finally captured Königsberg (today Kaliningrad – s.), they killed thousands of people. Women were raped even in maternity wards of hospitals. One doctor recalls their desperate cries of “Shoot me!”, “Shoot me!” But the torturers assigned to their victims a slower death.
Michael Wieck – one of those who survived the massacre – said: “They shot every encountered man and raped every woman. At night, from anywhere we heard screams and cries for help. They locked people in cellars and set fire to the houses. They herded civilian residents to former battlefields around the town and shot or burned them.”
Few people know that on November 17, 1941, Stalin issued a secret directive number 0428, according to which special commandos were instructed to dress in German uniforms, cross the front line and kill civilians in the German-occupied territory. However, a few people have always been kept alive, so that they would then be able to tell that these crimes were committed by the Germans.
http://shoabloger.wordpress.com/2013/09 ... petrators/
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Jerzy
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