A bit of evil here for you, this time, it narrates the industrial scale rape campaign perpetrated by the Soviet troops in Germany in 1945. millions of German women, ages 4 to 85, were raped, most of them to death. This is from the memoirs of the Russian painter L. N. Rabichev, IIWW veteran who personally witnessed Soviet atrocities in Germany. I quickly translates this chapter from Russian, the translation doesn't pretend to be literary.
February 1945 East Prussia.
We crossed the street. The house is one-story, with several residential and office extensions, and at the entrance there is a horse carriage. Three large rooms, two dead women and three dead girls, all with their skirts up, and between their legs, empty wine bottles protruding outward. I walk along the wall of the house, the second door, a corridor, a door and two more adjoining rooms, on each of the beds, there are three of them, dead women with open legs and bottles protruding from there.
It looked like everyone was raped and shot. Pillows are covered in blood. But where does this sadistic desire come from — to stick the bottles in? Our infantry, our tank crews, country and city boys, all of them have mothers, sisters, girlfriends….
I understand - killing in battle, kill or get killed. After the first kill, one experiences shock, or starts vomiting, or develops a fever. But here, there is some terrible sadistic game, something like a competition: who will stick more bottles between women’s legs, and it’s the same in every house. No, it wasn't us, army communications. These are infantrymen, tankers, artillery guys. They entered civilian houses first …
... Yes, it was five months ago, when our troops in East Prussia caught up with the evacuating civilians from Goldap, Insterburg and other cities left by the German army. By carts and cars, on foot, old men, women, children, large patriarchal families, on all roads and highways of the country were slowly moving to the west.
Our tankers, infantrymen, artillerymen, signalmen caught up with them in order to clear the way, threw in the ditches their carts with furniture, their bags, suitcases, horses, pushed old people and children to the sides of the highway, and, forgetting about duty and honor and about German units retreating without a fight, threw themselves by thousands on women and girls.
Women, mothers and their daughters, on their backs right and left along the highway, in front of each one there is a cackling mass of men with their pants down.
Those who are hemorrhaging and fainting are being pulled aside. Children, rushing to help them, are shot. Cackling, growling, laughing, shouting and groaning. And their commanders, their majors and colonels are standing on the highway, chuckling and directing, no, rather, regulating, so that all their soldiers, without exception, take part. No, not for the sake of mutual implication, and not at all for the sake of revenge on the accursed invaders - just for the sake of this hellish deadly group sex.
Permissiveness, impunity, impersonality and the cruel logic of a crazed crowd. Shocked, I sat in the cabin of the truck, while my driver Demidov stood in the rape line, and I was imagining Flaubert’s Carthage, realizing that one couldn’t blame everything on the war. The colonel, the one that was directing the show, couldn’t take it anymore and got in line himself, while the major was shooting hysterical children and elderly that were witnessing this horror. “Enough! Into the cars!” Behind us there is the next army division. Then, another stop, and I can not stop my soldiers from forming new rape lines, and my telephone girls are choking with laughter, and my nausea rises to my throat. Mountains of rags, overturned carts, corpses of women, old people, children, all the way up to the horizon.
The highway is free for traffic. It's getting dark. Left and right there are German folwarks (ranches). We get the order to camp for the night. This is part of the headquarters of our army: the artillery, air defence and political department officers. Me and my platoon control get a folwark two kilometers from the highway. In all rooms, the corpses of children, the elderly and raped and shot women. We are so tired that, not paying attention to them, we lie down on the floor between them and fall asleep.
... Well, I’m helping to carry out the corpses. I suddenly froze by the wall of the house.
Springtime, the first green grass on the lawn, the bright hot sun. Our house has a pointed Gothic-style roof, covered with red tiles, probably about two hundred years old, a courtyard, paved with stone slabs, about 5 hundred year old.
In Europe, we are in Europe!
I was daydreaming, and suddenly two sixteen-year-old German girls entered the open gates. In their eyes there is no fear, but terrible anxiety. They saw me, ran up and, interrupting each other, started trying to explain something to me in German. I do not know the language, but I hear the words “Mutter”, “Vater”, “Bruder”.
It becomes clear to me that in a panic-driven flight they had lost their family somewhere.
I feel terribly sorry for them, then I realize that they need to run away from our HQ as fast as they can, so I tell them:
- Mutter, Vater, Bruder - nicht! - and point with a finger at the second distant gate - there, go! And I start pushing them.
Then they understand me, they are running away, disappear from sight, and I sigh with relief - at least I saved two girls, and go to the second floor to my telephones, to watch the movement of military personnel, but less than twenty minutes pass before I hear shouting, yelling, laughing, cursing.
I rush to the window.
On the steps of the house there is Major A. and two sergeants, who are twisting the arms of those same two girls, and right in front of them, all the staff officers — the chauffeur, the orderlies, the scribes, the messengers.
- Nikolaev, Sidorov, Kharitonov, Pimenov ... - orders major A. - Take the girls by the arms and legs, skirts and blouses off! Form two lines-ho! Undo your belts, pants and pull them off-ho! Right and left, one by one, start-ho!
A. commands, and my signalmen, my platoon, run down the stairs from the house and take place in lines. And two girls “saved” by me lie on ancient stone slabs, hands in grip, mouths are crammed with kerchiefs, legs spread apart - they are no longer trying to break free from the hands of four sergeants, and the fifth tears off and rips apart their blouses, bras, skirts and panties to pieces.
My telephone girls run out of the house - laughter and cursing.
And the lines do not get shorter, some rise, others descend, and there are already pools of blood around the martyrs, and there is no end to the lines, the cackling and the cursing.
The girls are already unconscious, but the orgy continues.
Major A. directs proudly with his arms up in the air. But now the last one gets up, and the sergeants-assassins attack two half-dead bodies.
Major A. pulls a revolver from his holster and shoots into the bloodied mouths of the martyrs, and the sergeants drag their mutilated bodies in the pigsty, and hungry pigs begin to tear off their ears, noses, breasts, and in a few minutes only two skulls, bones, vertebrae is all that’s left of them.
I'm scared, disgusted.
Suddenly, nausea rushes to my throat, and it turns my insides out.
Major A. - God, what a scoundrel!
I can not work, run out of the house without thinking where to go, I walk around, come back, I can’t , I have to look in the pigsty.
There are bloodshot pig's eyes in front of me, and mixed with the straws and pork manure there are two skulls, a jaw, several vertebrae and bones and two small golden crosses - two girls “saved” by me.
L. N. Rabichev