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Red Army atrocities
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Soviet war crimes refer to war crimes perpertrated by armed forces of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1991. This includes war crimes by the 'regular' army — the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army), the NKVD, and the Internal Troops. In some cases these crimes were committed on express orders — as part of the Soviet Government's policy of communist terrorism, in other instances they were committed by regular army troops as part of a Soviet culture of retribution against civilians of countries involved in previous conflict or resistance movements.
Many of these incidents occurred in Eastern Europe before and during World War II, and involved mass murder of prisoners of war and widespread murder and rape of civilians in Soviet occupied territories.
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Encyclopedia
Soviet war crimes refer to war crimes perpertrated by armed forces of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1991. This includes war crimes by the 'regular' army — the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army), the NKVD, and the Internal Troops. In some cases these crimes were committed on express orders — as part of the Soviet Government's policy of communist terrorism, in other instances they were committed by regular army troops as part of a Soviet culture of retribution against civilians of countries involved in previous conflict or resistance movements.
Many of these incidents occurred in Eastern Europe before and during World War II, and involved mass murder of prisoners of war and widespread murder and rape of civilians in Soviet occupied territories. Although there are documented cases of these incidents, no international Criminal Court or Soviet or Russian tribunal has ever charged any member of the Soviet armed forces with war crimes.
The Soviet State and terror
The Red Army was ideologically oriented and indoctrinated from its first founding in 1918 to defend the new communist Soviet regime during the Russian Civil War. Leon Trotsky, creater of the Red Army, used propaganda, indoctrination and terror as a weapon to fight the White Army.
The first official announcement, published in Izvestiya, "Appeal to the Working Class" on September 3, 1918 called for the workers to "crush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror". This was followed by the decree "On Red Terror", issued September 5, 1918 by the Cheka. The use of terror was seen by the Soviet Government and by both Lenin and Stalin, as a legitimate weapon to use in the consolidation of communism — both internally and externally. For Soviet citizens, punishment by the state could include summary executions, torture, sending innocent people to Gulag, involunatry settlement, and stripping of citizen's rights. Under the Soviet legal system, not only the accused — but all members of the family, including children, were punished simultaneously as "traitor of Motherland family members". During Lenin's and Stalins' reign, these repressions were conducted by Cheka, OGPU and NKVD in several consecutive waves known as the Red Terror, Collectivisation, Great Purge, Doctor's Plot, and others. The Red Terror, implemented by Dzerzhinsky on September 5, 1918, was vividly described by the Red Army journal Krasnaya Gazeta:
The Soviet Union did not recognize Imperial Russia's signing of the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907) as binding and refused to agree to it until 1955. This situation exacerbated the existing culture of terror and human rights abuse by Soviet armed forces.
The Red Army and the NKVD
As well as committing war crimes itself, the Red Army often gave support to the NKVD, which had as one of its functions the application of state terrorism. The main function of the NKVD was to protect the state security of the Soviet Union, but this was largely accomplished through massive political repression. As an internal security and prisons guard force, Internal Troops played immediate roles in political repressions and war crimes through all the Soviet history. Particularly, they were responsible for maintaining the regime in the GULAG labor camps and for conducting the mass deportations and forced resettlement of several ethnic groups.
During World War II, units of the NKVD Internal Troops were engaged alongside Red Army forces in combat and NKVD units were used for rear area security, including stopping desertion. In territory that was liberated or occupied the NKVD carried out mass arrests, deportations, and executions. The targets included both collaborators with Germany and non-Communist resistance movements such as the Polish Armia Krajowa. The NKVD also executed tens of thousands of Polish political prisoners in 1939–1941.
After the repulse of the German attack on the Soviet Union and Soviet troops entering Germany and Hungary in late 1944, there was significant eyewitness testimony of war crimes by Soviet armed forces — plunder, murder of civilians, and especially rape. In both Soviet and current Russian history books on the "Great Patriotic War" these war crimes are rarely mentioned. However, evidence of such crimes was found and published by Western historians after Soviet archives were opened to the public following the end of the Cold War.
Crimes by Soviet armed forces against civilians and prisoners of war in the territories it occupied between 1939 and 1941 — (Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia) — and the follow-up atrocities of 1944–1949 have been present in the historical consciousness of these countries ever since. Nevertheless, a systematic, publicly controlled discussion only began after the fall of the Soviet Union.. This is also true of the territories occupied by Soviet forces in Manchuria and the Kuril Islands after the Soviet Union breached its neutrality pact with Japan in September 1945.
Estonia
Estonia was formally annexed into the Soviet Union on August 6 and renamed the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1941 some 34,000 Estonians were forcibly drafted into the Red Army of which less than 30% of them survived the war. Political prisoners who could not be evacuated were executed by the NKVD. More than 300.000 citizens of Estonia, almost a third of its then population, were affected by arrests, mass murder, deportation and other acts of repression. As a result of Communist occupation, Estonia permanently lost at least 200,000 people or 20% of its population to repressions, exodus and war. On 12 January 1949 the Soviet Council of Ministers issued a decree "on the expulsion and deportation" from Baltic states of "all kulaks and their families, the families of bandits and nationalists", and others.
The various repressive activities of Soviet forces sparked a guerrilla war against the Soviet authorities in Estonia which was waged into the late 1970s by "forest brothers" (metsavennad) consisting mostly of Estonian veterans of both the German and Finnish armies as well as some civilians. In addition to the human and material losses suffered due to war, thousands of civilians were killed and tens of thousands of people deported along with hundreds of political prisoners till the late 1980s. By 1989, russification and colonization had reduced the percentage of Estonians in the population to 61%.
Latvia
In 1939, Latvia fell victim to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, leading to occupation and its incorporation into the Soviet Union on 5 August 1940. Establishment of a brutal Communist regime, a puppet-state Latvian SSR, resulted in mass terror, the extinction of civil society and civil liberties, termination of the existing way of life and economic model and a strong pressure upon Latvian culture. In all, over 200,000 people suffered from Communist repressions in Latvia of which some 60% were deported to the Soviet death-camps in Siberia and Far-East. The Soviet terror regime forced more than 260,000 Latvians to flee from the country. Although explicit terror subsided after Stalin’s death, the regime persisted and brought Latvia to the verge of disaster with the systematic russification policy which reduced the share of ethnic Latvians in the population to 52% by 1989.
Lithuania
In 1939, Lithuania, as the other Baltic States, fell victim to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, leading to occupation and its incorporation into the Soviet Union on 15 June 1940. The Communist occupation launched brutal measures to destroy civil society, civil liberties, the habitual way of life and economic order. Between 1940 to 1941 thousands of Lithuanians were arrested and arbitrarily executed hundreds of political prisoners. More than 17,000 people were deported to Siberia in June. In 1944 and Lithuania fell back under Soviet occupation. During the suppression of the Lithuanian armed resistance, the Soviet authorities murdered thousands of resistance fighters and civilians accused of aiding them. Some 300,000 Lithuanians were deported or sentenced to prison camps on political grounds. It is estimated that Lithuania lost almost 780,000 citizens as a result of Communist occupation, of which around 440,000 were war refuges.
During the Lithuanian restoration of independence in 1990, the Soviet army killed 13 demonstrators in Vilnius.
Poland
1919–1938
The Peace of Riga which ended the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21 left a sizeable Polish minority (almost 1 million people) under Soviet control, especially around Sluck and Zytomierz. This allowed the Soviets to carry out harsh reprisals against Poles — beginning with the confiscation of property (land, forests), religious persecution and eventually full scale deportation of Poles to Kazakhstan between 1931–1934. Under NKVD Order ? 00485 the Soviet government launched the "Polish operation", the second in a series of national operations of the NKVD, targeting "the liquidation of the Polish diversionist and espionage groups and POW units". Between 1937–1938 (according to the archives of the NKVD, the Soviet Security Forces) 111,091 Poles, and people accused of ties with Poland, were sentenced to death and 28,744 were sentenced to labor camps — 139,835 in total.
1939–1941
In September 1939, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland and occupied it in accordance with the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Later, the Soviets forcefully occupied the Baltic States and parts of Bessarabia as well.
Soviet policy in all these areas was harsh towards the people under its control, showing strong elements of ethnic cleansing. NKVD task forces followed the Red Army to remove the conquered territories of "Soviet-hostile elements." Polish historian Tomasz Strzembosz has noted parallels between the Nazi Einsatzgruppen and these Soviet units. Many tried to escape from the Soviet NKVD; those who failed were taken into custody by the Red Army and afterwards deported to Siberia and vanished into the "Gulags".
During the years 1939 through to 1941, nearly 1.5 million inhabitants of the Soviet-controlled areas of former eastern Poland were deported, of whom 63.1% were Poles or other nationalities and 7.4% were Jews. Only a small number of these deportees survived the war. According to American professor Carroll Quigley, at least one third of the 320,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by the Red Army in 1939 were murdered.
1944–1953
In Poland, Nazi atrocities ended by late 1944, but they were replaced by Soviet oppression with the advance of Soviet forces. Soviet soldiers often engaged in plunder, rape and banditry against the Poles, causing the population to fear and hate the Soviet regime.
The role of the Red Army during the Warsaw Uprising remains controversial. Soldiers of Poland's Home Army (Armia Krajowa) were persecuted, sometimes imprisoned and, in many cases, executed following staged trials. An example of this was the case of Witold Pilecki, the organizer of Auschwitz resistance. (See also Lack of outside support in the Warsaw Uprising.)
Units of the Red Army carried out campaigns by the the NKVD against Polish partisans and civilians. During the Augustów chase 1945, more than 2000 Poles were captured, and about 600 of them were killed. For more about this subject, see Cursed soldiers.
Polish sources claim that there are cases of mass rapes in Polish cities taken by Red Army, that in Kraków Soviet entry brought mass rapes on Polish women and girls, as well as plunder of all private property by Soviet soldiers. According to them, this behaviour reached such scale that even communists installed by Soviets were preparing a letter of protest to Joseph Stalin himself, while masses in churches were held in expectation of Soviet withdrawal..
Finland
1939–1944
The Continuation War was fought between Finland and the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944. During the war, Soviet partisan units conducted raids into Finnish territory and attacked civilian targets, such as villages. In November 2006, photographs showing atrocities were declassified by the Finnish authorities. These include images of slain women and children.
Soviet Union
Retreat by Soviet forces in 1941
Deportations, executions and torture, as well as hostage taking, and burning of villages took place when the Red Army retreated before the advancing Wehrmacht in 1941. In the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, and Bessarabia, the NKVD and attached units of the Red Army massacred prisoners and political opponents, before fleeing from the advancing German army. A particularly infamous example was the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn.
These actions increased the hatred by the local population of those who had collaborated with the Soviets, or who were suspected of being sympathetic toward the Soviet cause. The Jews, especially were unfairly blamed by the local population in this regard. As a result, the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, or special annihalation forces who came to German occupied areas could rely heavily on willing volunteers from the local population in the rounding up of Jews for the "Final Solution".
1943–1945
After the turning point in the war of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army steadly regained lost territory on the Eastern Front. This resulted in revenge actions against any accused of being collaborators during the German occupation. While in France this part of its history is well documented, debated and is the subject of many scientific reviews, very little is known about what happened in the path of the Red Army.
1946–1947
Many thousands of Russians, cossacks and other nationalities were executed by the NKVD after having been forcefully repatriated by British and American troops. Some of these fought alongside the Axis forces, although there is evidence that some of these, like the cossacks, included woman and children, and in some cases, were not previously Soviet citizens. These people were deemed by the Soviets to be traitors and Nazi collaborators, and in many cases were shot immediately on being handed over by the British and American troops. This shameful chapter in the history of Britain and America was later called "Operation Keelhaul.
Germany
1944–1945
According to historian Norman Naimark, the propaganda of Soviet troop newspapers and the orders of Soviet high command were jointly responsible for the excesses of the Red Army. Propaganda proclaimed that the Red Army had entered Germany as an avenger to punish all Germans. Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg wrote on January 31, 1945:
There are cases where the orders of Soviet generals encouraged their soldiers to commit attrocities. On January 12, 1945, Red Army General Cherniakhovsky told his troops: There shall be no mercy — for anyone, as there was no mercy for us... The land of the fascists must become a desert.
For the Germans, the organized evacuation of civilians before the advancing Red Army was delayed by the Nazi government, so as not to demoralize the troops, who were by now defending their own country. However, German civilians were well aware that the Red Army was conducting violence against non-combatants from reports by their friends and relatives who had served on the Eastern front. Furthermore, Nazi propaganda — originally meant to stiffen civil resistance by describing in graphic detail Red Army atrocities such as the Nemmersdorf massacre — often backfired and created panic.
Whenever possible, as soon as Nazi officials left, civilians began to flee westward on their own initiative.
Fleeing before the advancing Red Army, more than two million inhabitants of the German provinces of East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania died, some from cold and starvation, during the expulsion and post-war ethnic cleansing, and some when they were killed during combat operations. The main death toll, however, occurred when the refugee columns were encountered by units of the Red Army. The civilians were overrun by tanks, shot or otherwise murdered. Women and young girls were raped and left to die (as is explored firsthand in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Prussian Nights). In addition, fighter bombers of the Soviet air force penetrated far behind the front lines and often attacked columns of refugees.
Those who did not flee suffered the Red Army's occupying policies: murder, rape, robbery, and finally expulsion. For example, in Königsberg, the East Prussian capital city, approximately 100,000 German civilians still lived there in August 1945. By the time they were finally expelled from the city in 1948, only about 20,000 of the Germans were still alive (see also expulsion of Germans after World War II).
The Red Army's terrorisation and violence against the local German population during the occupation of eastern Germany often led to incidents like Demmin, a small city conquered by the Soviets in the spring of 1945. Despite its unconditional surrender and without any prior fighting near the city, nearly 900 civilians people committed suicide after Soviet commanders had declared Demmin "open" for looting, pillaging and rape — which lasted for three consecutive days.
Although mass executions of civilians by the Red Army were seldom publicly reported, there is a known incident in Treuenbrietzen, where at least 88 male inhabitants were rounded up and shot on May 1, 1945. The atrocity took place after a Soviet victory celebration at which numerous girls from Treuenbrietzen were raped and a Red Army lieutenant-colonel was shot by an unknown assailant. Some sources claim as many as 1,000 civilians may have been executed during the incident.
1945
Following the Red Army's capture of Berlin in 1945, one of the largest and most atrocious incidents of mass rape took place. Soviet troops reportedly raped German women and girls as young as 8 years old. Estimates of the total number of victims range from tens of thousands to two million. After the summer of 1945, Soviet soldiers caught raping civilians were usually punished to some degree, ranging from arrest to execution. The rapes continued, however, until the winter of 1947-48, when Soviet occupation authorities finally confined Soviet troops to strictly guarded posts and camps,“ completely separating them from the residential population of the Soviet zone of Germany.
Consequences
In The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949, Norman Naimark wrote that not only did each victim have to carry the trauma for the rest of their days, [but] it [also] inflicted a massive collective trauma on the former country of East Germany (the German Democratic Republic). Naimark concluded, "The social psychology of women and men in the Soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of occupation, through the founding of the GDR in the fall of 1949, until, one could argue, the present."
Hungary
1944–1945
During the occupation of Budapest, (Hungary), it is estimated that 50,000 women and girls were raped.
Hungarian girls in general were taken to the Red Army quarters, where they were incarcerated, raped and sometimes murdered. These atrocities were committed even against embassy staff from neutral countries, when Soviet soldiers attacked the Swedish legation in Germany.
Hungarian Revolution (1956)
According to the United Nations Report of the Special Committee on the problem of Hungary (1957):
The UN commission received numerous reports of Soviet mortar and artillery fire into inhabited quarters in the Buda section of the city despite no return fire and of "haphazard shooting at defenseless passers-by."
According to many witnesses Soviet troops fired upon people queuing outside stores. Most of the victims were said to be women and children. Many cases of Soviet fire upon ambulances and red cross vehicles were reported.
Yugoslavia
Although the Red Army crossed only a very small part of Yugoslavia in 1944, its activities there caused great concern for the communist partisans, who feared that the rapes and plundering by their communist allies would weaken their standing with the population. At least 121 cases of rape were documented later, 111 of which also involved murder. A total of 1,204 cases of looting with assault were documented. Stalin responded to a Yugoslav partisan leader's complaints about the Red Army's conduct by saying, "Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?"
Slovakia
Slovak communist leader Vlado Clementis complained to Marshal I. S. Konev about the behaviour of Soviet troops in Slovakia. Konev's response was to claim it was done mainly on Red Army deserters.
Bulgaria
Thanks to the better discipline in Marshal Tolbukhin's army, a relative similarity in cultures, a century of friendly relations, and an open welcome of the Soviet troops, there was a relative absence of rapes in Bulgaria, especially when compared with the the occupation of Romania and Hungary.
Czechoslovakia
of 1968
Georgia
in Tbilisi 1989 when an anti-Soviet demonstration was dispersed by the Soviet army, resulting in 20 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
Manchuria
A number of rapes committed by the Soviet soldiers were recorded. Where Soviet soldiers advanced, women and girls fled from their villages and towns, leaving only boys and men to be found by the Soviet soldiers.
Afghanistan
Destruction of cities and looting
In general, Red Army officers declared all cities, villages and farms open to pillaging and looting in Romania, Hungary and Germany. Although a written order does not exist, there are several documents which describe the Red Army’s behaviour. One of them is a report by the Swiss legation in Budapest, describing the Red Army's entry into the city in 1945. It states:
Walter Kilian, the first mayor of the Charlottenburg district in Berlin after the war, who was himself placed in office by the Soviets, reported extensive looting by Red Army soldiers in the area:
In the Soviet occupation zone, members of the SED reported to Stalin that looting and rapes by Soviet soldiers could result in a negative reaction by the German population towards the Soviet Union and towards the future of socialism in East Germany. Stalin reacted angrily: "I shall not tolerate anybody dragging the honour of the Red Army through the mud."
Accordingly, all evidence — such as reports, pictures and other documents of looting, rapes, burning down of farms and villages by the Red Army — was deleted from all archives in the Soviet occupation zone, which later was to become the GDR.
On many occasions Soviet soldiers set fire to buildings, villages or parts of cities, shooting anybody trying to extinguish the flames. For example, on May 1, 1945, Soviet soldiers set fire to the city centre of Demmin and prevented the inhabitants from extinguishing the blaze. Of the historic buildings around the market place, only a steeple survived the inferno. Most Red Army atrocities took place only in what was regarded as hostile territory (see also Przyszowice massacre). Soldiers of the Red Army together with members of the NKVD frequently looted transport trains in 1944 and 1945 in Poland.
Treatment of prisoners of war
The Soviet Union did not recognise the entry of Imperial Russia to the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907) as binding for itself and refused to sign it until 1955. This allowed the barbaric treatment of POWs on both the Polish and the Soviet side during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21. Moreover, the Soviet Union did not sign the Genevan Prisoners of War convention of 1929 until 1955. Accordingly, the Red Army was able to mis-treat its prisoners of war, without any effective international pressure.
During 1941, after emergency landings, German flight crews were often shot after their capture. Torture, mutilation, and murder were frequently carried out on German aircrews. During the winter of 1941–1942 the Red Army captured approximately 10,000 German soldiers each month, but the death rate became so high that the absolute number of the prisoners decreased (or was bureaucratically reduced). The murder of the prisoners was often arranged through instructions, reports and statements of Soviet commanders. Throughout the war, 300,000 German POWs in Soviet captivity died, a loss rate of 14.9%. By contrast, some 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity, a loss rate of 65%. German prisoners were not released after the war but many were kept in captivity until as late as 1956 under terrible conditions as part of the "Gulag".
Treuenbrietzen massacre
The Treuenbrietzen massacre took place during the last days of April and the first days of May 1945, after a tough battle in which the Red Army took and lost control of the village on more than one occasion. The Red Army rounded up around 1000 (mostly male) civilians and executed them in the nearby forest. These executions were allegedly made as retaliation for the death of a high-ranking Soviet officer during the battle for control of the village.
Discussion by historians
For decades, Western scholars have generally explained these atrocities in Germany and Hungary as revenge for German atrocities in the territory of the Soviet Union and for the mass killing of Soviet POWs (3,6 million dead of total a 5,2 million POWs) by the German army. This explanation is now disputed by military historians such as Antony Beevor, at least in regard to the mass rapes. Beevor claims that Red Army soldiers also raped Russian and Polish women liberated from concentration camps, and contends that this undermines the revenge explanation. Beevor's claims have encountered vast criticism from historians in Russia and the Russian government. The Russian ambassador to the UK said "It is a disgrace to have anything to do with this clear case of slander against the people who saved the world from Nazism."
O.A. Rzheshevsky, a professor and President of the Russian Association of World War II Historians, has charged that Beevor is merely resurrecting the discredited and racist views of Neo-Nazi historians, who depicted Soviet troops as subhuman "Asiatic hordes." Other prominent historians such as Richard Overy have criticised Russian "outrage" at the book and defended Beevor. Overy accused the Russians of refusing to acknowledge Soviet war crimes, "Partly this is because they felt that much of it was justified vengeance against an enemy who committed much worse, and partly it was because they were writing the victors' history"
Polish sources claim that there are cases of mass rapes in Polish cities taken by Red Army, that in Kraków Soviet entry brought mass rapes on Polish women and girls, as well as plunder of all private property by Soviet soldiers. According to them, this behaviour reached such scale that even communists installed by Soviets were preparing a letter of protest to Joseph Stalin himself, while masses in churches were held in expectation of Soviet withdrawal..
Movies
A movie "Anonymous. Women in Berlin" about war rapes in Berlin was made based on A Woman in Berlin diary by Marta Hillers.
See also
External links
- : Masculinities and rape in Berlin, 1945, James W. Messerschmidt, University of Southern Maine
- :
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, ISBN 0-8050-7540-2 , Kate Connolly, The Observer, June 23, 2002 , Anthony Beevor, The Guardian, May 1, 2002 , James Mark, Past & Present (2005) (The crimes during the Battle of Budapest) The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945-2002 - William I. Hitchcock - 2003 - ISBN 0-385-49798-9 ( The occupation of East Prussia) , quotations from Ilya Ehrenburg, poems by anti-cruelty Red Army officers and details of suicides and rapings of German women and children in East Prussia. History News Network (Focus on the Asian front)
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