Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on 14 million people.
The war in the East was terrible, likely the worst three years of human conduct that ever has or ever will be enacted; the horrors that the Germans and Soviets committed upon one another and the millions of civilians across the battlespace are unimaginable even to historians who’ve documented them.
The Red Army was particularly brutal to women in the territories it clawed piece by piece from the Wehrmacht, during the three years it took to reconquer the territories lost to Operations Barbarossa and Blue. The German authorities estimate that at least two million East German women were raped, not a few of them to death, and eyewitnesses in the siege of East Prussia claim that no woman between eight and eighty was spared. Estimates for the reconquered Eastern European countries are harder to come by, but there are also plenty of anecdotal accounts that tell us the Red Army’s conduct in Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland was at best a difference of degree, and not of kind. Given the much larger populations of Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian women, it is likely that the German share of such brutality was at most half of the whole, if not less.
Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall 1945 goes into this aspect of the Red Army’s conduct during their victorious encirclement of Berlin. He has also written a forward to the English translation of A Woman in Berlin, which was published out of the diary of an anonymous woman who experienced the conquest first-hand. I am currently picking my way through the original version, and I have not yet gotten to the truly harrowing parts yet, but I will steel myself for them.
This brutality is in some sense understandable, though by no means excusable. The Germans launched a genocidal war in order to enslave and work to death every non-German between the Vistula and Volga rivers, and they prosecuted this war in contravention of every law of warfare ever established on the theory that their victims were at once subhumans barely capable of cultivating their lands and a dire ideological threat to the German way of life. The only real reason Germans did not employ chemical weapons on the battlefield, aside from the bitter experience they had gained in the First World War over the stalemate quality of such tactics, is because much of their capacity for producing such chemicals was dedicated to the Holocaust.
And make no mistake, if the Germans had defeated the Soviet Union and finished murdering the Jews and Roma and Soviet POWs, they would have kept the camps humming along for the Slavs in their conquered lands, in an attempt to replace the entire population with ethnic Germans (at least those themselves not deemed worthy of extermination). I personally believe that the enterprise would have collapsed in on itself even in this worst-case scenario, that the literal and social people-eating machines the Nazis developed would wind up eating the Nazis and millions of Germans besides before the society fell to civil war and anarchy, but I am grateful that these musings of mine were not tested by history.
In any case, in the face of such barbarism — not really seen since before the Bronze Age — the Soviets made great and terrible sacrifices simply to survive. Essentially every man between the ages of fourteen and sixty who could walk and hold a gun was pressed into military service, while almost all the women were set to work in military industries. And, of all those called, between a third and 40 percent would not survive to see the end of the fighting. Indeed, Germans took between two and three Soviet lives for each German life lost, but the Soviets did not stop until they had pushed the Germans from Moscow and Stalingrad all the way back to the Elbe. In order to do this, the Soviets had to endure privations, brutalities, and terrors that are quite simply unimaginable to any of us.
Americans often like to boast that they “won” WWII, that they “beat” the Nazis…and they aren’t exactly wrong, but they are usually misidentifying America’s role in winning the war in Europe. It is true that America invaded North Africa and Italy and France, and engaged in fierce combat at many points of the war on their own path to the Elbe, but for all that, less than two hundred thousand American lives were sacrificed in Europe, essentially every one of them a soldier. By comparison, the Soviet Union (including the countries it had occupied which became a part of the so-called Bloodlands) sacrificed approximately 27 million people, civilians and soldiers, in order to beat back and defeat the Germans.
But the Soviets were only able to accomplish this titanic loss of life, and the victory in the face of it, because the Americans supplied them with a vast amount of food and civilian supplies; indeed, Operation Lend-Lease sent more materiel to the Soviet Union than to the rest of the Allies combined, though this fact has been all but forgotten. The Soviets even made sure to stamp-over the American livery with Soviet emblems, so that their own troops wouldn’t realise that so much of their food had come from the United States. As it happens, a great deal of these supplies came up through the Volga, which had the benefit of never freezing over and not being threatened by German U-boats, unlike the Arctic port of Arkhangelsk; it is likely that Hitler set his sights on Stalingrad at least in part to cut this supply line, which might well have forced the Soviets to capitulate.
So imagine life as a young Soviet grunt. You’ve been indoctrinated your entire life into a cult of personality and into an ideology that places the existence of the state above your own, and gives you all the positive and negative incentives in the world to at least pretend to trust the word of those speaking on behalf of the leader of your country. Your country has been invaded by millions of maniacs that are actually intent on killing you and everyone you love, and geopolitical forces far beyond your understanding have turned your entire army into what is essentially the vanguard of the powers allied against your enemy — regardless of your position, you and everyone you know is in principle a front-line soldier. Half of the men you have fought with have died, and the only way that you have survived is to let almost everything human within you die, to become more pitiless and ruthless than your enemy and your comrades both.
Now imagine that the personality whose cult you’ve been pulled into has decreed that every civilian in occupied territory who is not a partisan or has not died fighting the enemy is a collaborator and a traitor, someone responsible for all of the suffering and death you have had to endure and inflict just to keep breathing. It becomes not simply a right, but something like a duty to punish them, to take your pleasures where you can before you, too, meet your end. Imagine that your superiors look the other way, or slap you and your fellow soldiers on the wrist — or, if you cross too many lines, they shoot you cleanly in the head and hand your rifle to the next man in line behind you, just as you were handed the rifle of the man who fell in front of you.
…as I said, this does not excuse such brutal conduct, but in the war in the East, there were no excuses. There was only horror, and blood.
