Some Things

never change.

I have just finished “The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War” by Andrew Roberts.  This is a different type of history that speaks of army units, political leaders, 3 & 4 star officers or their equivalents.  The book is mostly about the war by the Allies against the Nazis.  But this is not a book review.  It was published in 2011 and if I may have piqued your interest,  it is probably available in your library.

I want to point out one fact the author mentions late in the book.  He speaks about April 1945, leading up to and the fall of Berlin.

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 Antony Beevor,

. . .

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.

. . .

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.

So, in just the last two or three weeks of the war, there occur around 2 million rapes by the Russian soldiers.  By comparison

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 arrested 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.

From Black Capital

And, that 56% of all state and federal male prisoners are Black

Some. Things. Never. Change

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Tags: racism

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