[rademamj]

majority of russian losses in WW2 were by incompetent russian leadership on battlefield, severe weather and starvation.

[chefbob09]

eastern europeans are primative

[DoubleZ1013]

[northernlights]

You Can Never Ever Forget'

After a long silence, 83-year-old Ruth Schumacher decided to tell her story this year. She vividly remembers seeking shelter from the punishing American and Soviet air and artillery strikes. She was just 18 years old when she huddled, wounded, with dozens of other civilians knee deep in cold water in an abandoned mine in Halle-Bruckdorf in eastern Germany.

Schumacher says it wasn't long after the shelling stopped and American forces had moved on that Red Army soldiers began sexually assaulting the town's young women.

"I was immediately gang raped by five Russians. The memories come back to you over and over again; you can never forget something like that. Sometimes after I talk about it, I sleep for a few hours and then wake up crying, screaming. You can never ever forget," she says.

Schumacher has forgotten little in the ensuing 65 years — the faces of her attackers, the pain. Many of her friends were also raped repeatedly. But she says they almost never talked about it.

"I warned a friend not to speak about what happened to her either," Schumacher says. "Nobody talked about that; the danger was too great."

In post-war communist East Germany, Schumacher says she was forced to sign a statement effectively denying the rapes even occurred. In the official narrative of the German Democratic Republic, the Soviets were liberators — not liberators who committed war crimes.

As a result, for many women, political fear and shame — mixed with guilt about Nazi atrocities — created a kind of code of silence.

"I didn't want to know about anybody else's experiences, and they didn't want to know about mine. My conscience was heavy enough. And I didn't want to make it worse. Of course we felt ashamed about what the Nazis had done. But one should never pay back in the same currency, right?" Schumacher says.

Lasting Impact Of Rape Trauma

But some Soviet soldiers saw it as time to pay back what the Germans had done to Soviet citizens with destruction, looting and rape. Historians estimate that at least 2 million German women were raped at the end of World War II. That figure is based on German hospital and abortion clinic records.

Many women, like Schumacher, were raped multiple times. Courts-martial and other records show that there were several hundred documented rapes by U.S. and French soldiers in 1945, but the vast majority of the rapes were carried out by Soviet soldiers in the eastern part of Germany.

Dr. Phillip Kuwert, a senior physician at the University of Greifswald's department of psychotherapy and psychiatry, estimates that about 200,000 children were conceived by native German women raped by Russian soldiers.

So far, Kuwert has interviewed 35 elderly German women who were raped in 1945. The study's main goal is not to offer the victims counseling but to document the long-term impact of rape trauma. Kuwert hopes to finally document these women's stories before all the victims die off.

"They found it very touching, most of them, and important that they get a voice. Even a late voice is better than no voice," he says.

Still, Kuwert chooses his words carefully. Germany has struggled with how to process the Nazis' genocide and terror. And until relatively recently, it was hard for researchers and scientists like Kuwert to look at non-Jewish Germans as victims.

"Before the wartime mass rape in Germany, also the German troops committed a lot of rapes mainly in Eastern Europe. And, of course, there was also a lot of sexualized violence in the concentration camps. I find it very important to mention that, not to come into any kind of doubt that I'm not trying somehow to minimalize the suffering of the people under the German Nazi occupation," he says.

Kuwert says he has received many e-mails from relatives of rape victims saying they wished he had conducted the study years earlier so their mothers and grandmothers might have taken part.

Rape Still A Weapon Of War

[northernlights]

A pile of raped and murdered german civilians.

[girliegirl]

[chefbob09]

Load of shit, holocaust never happened

[Ebrahimpourk]

[Pyramid_Head]

How horrible

[blancadon]