In an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russian history professor Elena Sinyavskaya in a discussion with Alexey Ovchinnikov disputes the factual provenance of the Red Army rape of Germany.
The Myth of the “Rape of Germany” was Invented by Goebbels
In recent years, Victory Day has unfortunately acquired a not very pleasant tradition: the closer the holiday comes, the more do all sorts of “researchers” begin to broadcast the myth of “raped Germany.”
In this way, over the years the number of German maidens, allegedly victims of the Red Army, simply grows. But for whom is it necessary that the Russian soldier remain in the national memory not as a liberator and protector, but as a rapist and a robber? This is something that we have talked about to a leading researcher at the Institute of Russian History, the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Elena Sinyavskaya.
“The Nazis intimidated people to the point that they committed suicide”
Elena Spartakovna, is all this the result of restructuring? Those years generated a lot of rubbish …
Not really. This nasty story began much earlier, with Goebbels’ propaganda, when it was announced to the population that the Red Army was brutally raping all German women between the ages of 8 to 80 years. And the people were really intimidated to the limit, to the extent that Nazi party activists firstly killed their families and then themselves.
So why was such an Image necessary?
Firstly, to increase resistance against the advancing Red Army, and secondly, so that the population would leave the lost territories and could be of no assistance to the Soviet armed forces.
Goebbels’ line was then continued in the same year of 1945 by the allies, when the first publications appeared in which it was attempted to represent the Red Army as an army of looters and rapists and with absolutely nothing said about the outrages that were happening in the western zone of occupation. With the start of the “cold war” the theme was exaggerated, but not so aggressively and massively as has begun to occur in the last twenty years. The numbers “raped” were initially modest: from 20,000 to 150,000 in Germany. But in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Germany there was published a book by two feminists, Helga Zander and Barbara Jor, “The Liberators and Liberated,” where for the first time a figure of 2 million was arrived at. Moreover, it was derived from a completely flawed premise: statistical data for 1945-1946 were collected in a Berlin hospital in which there were born somewhere around 500 children per year and approximately 15-20 people were listed under “nationality of father” as “Russian”. Moreover, two or three such cases were classified as “raped”. What did these “researchers” do? They arrived at the conclusion that all the cases where the father was Russian were the result of being raped. Then Goebbel’s formula from “8 to 80” was simply factored in. However, the mass distribution of this figure took place in 2002 with the publication of Anthony Beevor’s book “The Fall of Berlin”, which was published here in 2004, and the mythical figure of “2 million” was then taken out for a stroll by the Western mass media on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Victory.
