May 1 is International Workers Day, a celebration for socialists and communists. It has been declared such since 1889. In 1945 during the last days of the Nazi Reich, Stalin gave special orders to capture the Reichstag – the seat of Nazi power for 12 years prior and a powerful symbol of communist victory – to be captured for this date.
It is because of this that every May 1 an attempt is made to spoil the party for this great socialist victory over fascism.
The tactic is to bring up the accusation of “The Rape of Berlin”, alleging that 100,000s or millions of German women were raped by Soviet soldiers following the defeat of the Nazis. The entire Soviet army went “buck-wild” on an orgy for a month or two after Hitler shot himself – this is the crude image they hope to establish in our minds.
Such a heinous crime is too much to challenge, question or do anything other than accept. Except there are some very serious flaws in this narrative that need to be highlighted, because the evidence points to a very different picture.
There are 3 basic points to consider:
- It was the Nazis who committed mass rape during their genocide in the East
- The hard evidence of Soviet mass rape is so flawed as to be unusable
- The German mass rape was covered up by the European and American allies because they have been committing the same crimes of the same magnitude
Here is some brief evidence to back up these points:
1. NAZI SEXUAL CRIMES
- A) Lebensborn – the Nazis ran a human breeding program since 1936 which first involved selecting teens from the Nazi youth wing to be bred and then evolved to the kidnapping of children born to Nazi soldiers abroad and then to kidnapping blonde children in general
- B) Brothel network – the Nazis had a system of over 500 military brothels for their soldiers in occupied countries, with 34,000 women kidnapped into sexual slavery for this
- C) Mass rape – according to the Nazis own investigations, there were over a million babies born in the USSR fathered (without consent) by invading Nazi soldiers by 1943. There were an estimated 200,000 babies born in France to German soldiers. One can estimate from the number of babies born that the number of rapes that happened was multiples more.
2. WEAK EVIDENCE OF SOVIET MASS RAPE
- A) “understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle” – the only source of this supposed quote from Stalin comes from a former communist turned anti-communist activist. Such sentiments by Stalin have not been found among reliable sources
- B) Abortion was legal in Nazi Germany, but on racial grounds – under the Nazi medical system, a woman could get an abortion if she was raped. Abortion was required in the case of racially “impure” children, and the majority of medical requests for abortion made by German women list a case of rape by Asiatic, Negro, Arabic or Jewish soldiers – which would guarantee them a straightforward abortion. So our “statistical evidence” of mass rape comes from the Nazi medical system which was filled out by women accessing abortion services by filling out the necessary “rape by a racial alien” category needed to be allowed one.
- C) As the Nazis were defeated and the Allied powers negotiated on what to do with the German population, it was only the Soviet Union that argued against British and US proposals for mass collective punishment of Germans . The USSR was itself founded on the basis of women’s emancipation, and this was built in to the development of the Soviet state itself. One aspect of this was that 800,000 women fought against the Nazis. For comparison, the entire British army in 1939 was 1 million men.
3. EUROPEANS & AMERICANS SHARED NAZI VALUES
- A) AMERICA AND NAZI GERMANY HAD SIMILAR RACIAL STEREOTYPES – compare the violent hysteria in Germany 1919 of ‘Rhineland Bastards‘ and ‘Black Horror‘ with the Red Summer of 1919 USA
- The West German successor state to the Nazi regime was never de-nazified and continued to be run by “former” Nazis who continued racialised narratives of their state as the frontier defending the Christian West against the Asian hordes from the East
- It is worth comparing also the long American campaign to spoil the celebration of slave uprisings with similar allegations of atrocities
- B) AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN IMPERIALISTS DID NAZI STYLE GENOCIDE
- Before the Nazi 3rd Reich was the Second Reich, which committed the same kinds of genocides to its European neighbours
- Eugenics was a racial competition between the various Imperial powers
- The Nazis were inspired by the American “conquering the Wild West”
- Hitler described his plans for conquering the Soviet Union as the same as the British conquest of India. The European conquests of India and the Americas each involved the killing of 10s of millions, as did the Nazi invasion of the USSR.
- C) EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN SEXUAL CRIMES
- The Spanish conquest of the Americas involved sexual violence which changed the entire generic pattern of the continent
- The US ran a “slave breeding” program for hundreds of years involving millions of rapes
- Britain ran a forced prostitution system alongside it’s general genocide and mass sexual violence in India for 350 years
- The US Army took over and continued the Nazi and Japanese brothel and forced prostitution systems following their victory.
All in all what we are starting to see here is a pattern of Fascist and Imperialist crimes being displaced onto their common communist enemy.
Soviet soldiers definitely engaged in rape with numerous eyewitness testimonies as well as punishments and orders against it showing that it was a serious issue. However the allegation is that the entire Soviet army went on a beastly orgy of rape of every woman (including of female Soviet concentration camp prisoners) was a target. There is no evidence of this, while there is ample evidence that this is exactly what the European and American colonialists did for hundreds of years.
There is a circular logic used to get people to accept as self-evident that the soviets did any crime they are accused of, no proof needed.The “Rape of Berlin” must be true because the Katyn Massacre happened. The Katyn Massacre must be true because the Holodomor happened. The Holodomor must be true because Lenin nationalised women and fed people to rats. And so on.
Except none of these things are true!
Or rather they are not true of the Soviets, but equivalent acts were frequently done by the European colonialists in the creation of global capitalism that we all now living under.
The overarching narrative created by the global ruling class is that: the Nazis were evil and the communists were their twin. (And we see with the open acceptance of Nazism in Ukraine that they are are starting to downgrade the Nazis from ‘evil’ to ‘not so bad’).
However the fact is that fascism and imperialist capitalism are two sides of the same coin and communism is the negation of both. Almost all the crimes communists are accused of is the projection by capitalists of their own crimes onto another.
Of course this does not mean that communists do not make mistakes, errors, abuses and outright crimes. Of course they do. But the communist movement needs to hold itself accountable to the masses with a culture of criticism and self-criticism and a standard of evidence which is higher and better than the fraudulent claims which are invented and weaponised at an industrial scale by the capitalist ruling class.
In the case of the “Rape of Berlin” we can say for sure that many cases of rape looting and and murder took place but there is no evidence of a mass orgy of sexual violence. There is however plenty of evidence that Nazi regime engaged in a 12-year campaign of organised perverse sexual violence that reached crescendo with its eastward expansion.We can also say that this 12 year campaign of violence by the Nazis was an updated and rationalised form of the same system of global violence imposed on Africa, the Americas and Asia by the European colonialists for 500 years prior.
This is a simple historical investigation, which will hopefully be built on in the future.
To summarise:
- There is no evidence of systematic rape by the Soviet Union or Red Army
- There is evidence of systematic rape by the Nazi army
- There is evidence of systematic rape by the European colonisers and by the American slavers
- The propaganda machine of Western hegemony has successfully covered up Nazi, European and American mass sexual crimes by inventing a truism of Soviet sexual crimes to focus on