The Triumph of International Communism
Today is the 79th anniversary of the Red Army raising the red flag of the hammer and sickle over the Reichstag in Berlin, signifying the triumph of international communism over National Socialism in Germany. To many in the West, it was a celebratory moment as it marked the end of the war in Europe. But to those in Central and Eastern Europe, condemned to live under the bloody tyranny of communism for the next 46 years, there was no celebration.
May 2nd marks the end of the Battle for Berlin, one of the most horrific events in all of western history. The Red Army was absolutely ruthless as it raped, pillaged, plundered, and murdered its way through the city.
Victor Davis Hanson, the professor in our free online course, “The Second World Wars,” points out in his book by the same title, “More German women were likely raped there than during any siege of the past.” And British military historian Sir Antony James Beevor writes,
Women soon learned to disappear during the “hunting hours” of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night. It was impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in.
Estimates of rape victims from the city’s two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rapes.
If anyone attempted to defend a woman against a Soviet attacker it was either a father trying to defend a daughter or a young son trying to protect his mother. “The 13-year old Dieter Sahl,” neighbours wrote in a letter shortly after the event, “threw himself with flailing fists at a Russian who was raping his mother in front of him. He did not succeed in anything except getting himself shot.”
Some today still argue that because of the Holocaust, the women, children, and old men in Berlin deserved everything they got from the Red Army. However, Sean McMeekin, renowned historian on Russian and European history, and one of the professors in our upcoming documentary on Marxism, argues in his book Stalin’s War,
The problem with this apologia is that it was not only German women who were raped as the Red Army crashed into Europe in 1945, but Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, and Czech women too. In Berlin, in the belly of the Nazi beast, Red Army soldiers raped even Jewish women, including girls interned at a Holocaust “transit camp” on Schulstrasse. Fed on Ehrenburg’s agitprop diet of indiscriminate bloodthirstiness, for most Red Army soldiers it was a matter of “Frau ist Frau”: a woman is a woman. This kind of thinking was consistent with the indiscriminate logic of retribution, of atrocity and counter-atrocity, that had defined the bloodlands ever since Stalin’s pact with Hitler had erased the borders of Eastern Europe in September 1939.
McMeekin also notes that a
Soviet Red Army major confessed to a British journalist, Red Army men were by 1945 “so sex-starved that they often raped women of sixty, seventy, or even eighty—much to these grandmothers’ surprise.” Numerous eye-witness reports backed up this claim, with the Vatican representative in Germany, Monsignor G.B. Montini, adding that elderly nuns were raped in the middle of Berlin “wearing their religious habits.”
And author Keith Lowe, in his book Savage Continent, observes that,
it is important to remember the effect that routine rape and exploitation of women had on the soldiers who indulged in this behavior, especially since the majority of them received absolutely no punishment whatsoever for their actions. The fact that the incidence of rape was high for several years after the war suggests that it was not motivated solely by revenge as many people contend—instead we are confronted with the far more worrying suggestion that many soldiers committed rape merely because they could.
When thinking about World War II, we tend to forget about all the atrocities committed by our ally, the Soviet Union. We tend to focus on the ones committed by the Germans and the Japanese. But “Uncle Joe,” as Roosevelt affectionately called his friend, was a committed Marxist who fought World War II with the same ruthlessness and disregard for human suffering that he had in his quest for the triumph of international communism.
It is one of the most troubling aspects of 20th century American history that we propped up the Soviet regime—the second most murderous regime in history after the Chinese Communist Party—from the time of its inception. In August, we will be releasing a documentary on Marxism, consisting of six episodes that cover Marx, his philosophy, the Soviet Union and the spread of communism up through to the present day. To combat the influence of Marxism today, we must face the reality of the atrocities it has always entailed.
