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The looting, drunkenness, murder and despoliation indulged in by the Red Army in East Prussia, Silesia and elsewhere in the Reich – especially Berlin – were the inevitable responses of soldiers who had marched through devastated Russian towns and cities over the previous twenty months. ‘Red Army troops loathed the neatness they found on the farms and in the towns of East Prussia: the china lined up on the dressers, the spotless housekeeping, the well-fenced fields and sleek cattle.’86 The women of Germany were also about to pay a high personal price for the Wehrmacht’s four-year ravaging of the Soviet Motherland. ‘Altogether at least 2 million German women are thought to have been raped,’ records the historian of Berlin’s downfall, Antony Beevor, ‘and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.’87 In Berlin alone, 90,000 women were raped in the last few days before the city surrendered.88 As one Red Army veteran joked, he and his comrades used to ‘rape on a collective basis’.

Not only German women suffered. Polish women, Jewish concentration-camp survivors, even released Soviet female POWs were raped at gunpoint, often by up to a dozen soldiers. Because Order No. 227 had decreed that Russians who had surrendered to the Germans were traitors, gang rapes of Russian female POWs were permitted, even actually arranged.89 Age, desirability or any other criteria made virtually no difference. In Dahlem, for example, ‘Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were raped without pity.’ The documentary and anecdotal evidence is overwhelming and indisputable; the Red Army, which had behaved so heroically on the battlefield, raped the women of Germany as part of their reward, with the active collusion of their officers up to and including Stalin. Indeed he explicitly excused their behaviour on more than one occasion, seeing it as part of the rights of the conqueror. ‘What is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?’ Stalin asked Marshal Tito about the ordinary Russian soldier in April 1945. ‘You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be… The important thing is that it fights Germans.’90 As well as for the sexual gratification of the soldiers, mass rape was intended as a humiliation and revenge on Germany. If the men of the Wehrmacht had sown the wind in Operation Barbarossa, it was their mothers, sisters and daughters who were forced to reap the whirlwind. Yet it is perfectly possible that the Red Army would have brutalized the Germans even if they had not envied their enemies’ prosperity and wanted revenge. When the Red Army entered Manchuria in August 1945 there was widespread rape of Japanese and non-Japanese people, even though the USSR had not been at war with Japan and had not been invaded by her.91

It was not the Red Army alone that indulged in this form of warfare against innocents. In North Africa and western Europe, the US Army stands accused of raping an estimated 14,000 civilian women between 1942 and 1945, and although there were arrests and convictions, nobody was ever executed for raping a German woman. Furthermore, what punishment was meted out seems to have been decided on racial lines; although blacks made up only 8.5 per cent of the US Army in the European theatre, they accounted for 79 per cent of those executed for rape. Yet, for an overall perspective, Russian soldiers were not reprimanded for rape and 14,000 rapes over three years of war hardly equates with two million in one city.92

The issue of how many Russians – military and civilian – died during their Great Patriotic War was an intensely political one, and the true figure was classified as a national secret in the USSR until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead of exaggerating the numbers in order to excite the sympathy of the West, as might be expected of someone so well attuned to the use of propaganda, Stalin in fact minimized them