Soviet war crimes in World War II

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As a Soviet war crimes during the Second World War are crimes or violations of international law referred to by members of the Soviet armed forces and their leadership in the time of World War II were committed.

background

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Red Army (RKKA) had already existed for 20 years. She had prevailed against the White Guards in the civil war and fought in the Polish-Soviet War in the early 1920s. Their leadership was due to the " Great Terror " of 1937/38, during which a large part of the officers (depending on the sources up to 80 percent of the generals ) were dismissed from the army and some were executed, themselves victims of their own leadership. The Stalin Purges left the Red Army in a weakened condition. In some cases there was a lack of experienced and capable managers. However, the omnipresent political commissars were no longer allowed to influence the strategic decisions after the purge (decision of the leadership of the RKKA in September 1940 after the failures in the winter war ).

In the years 1939 and 1940, the Red Army occupied according to the Hitler-Stalin pact a large part of Poland and once to the Russian Empire belonging Baltic states Estonia , Latvia and Lithuania . Finland had to make great concessions in a Soviet dictated peace after the Winter War .

The German attack on the Soviet Union ("Operation Barbarossa") on June 22, 1941 hit the Red Army hard, because large numbers of troops and material were stationed near the border and were quickly encircled and destroyed. Josef Stalin had been informed of the impending attack from various sources (for example by the spy Richard Sorge ), but had misinterpreted these reports as disinformation for the western states and wrongly believed that they were only intended to provoke a war between the Soviet Union and the German Reich. Because of this, the troop concentrations near the border were neither withdrawn nor warned or at least put on alert. In the months that followed, millions of Red Army soldiers fell into German captivity, for which the German leadership was not prepared. By order of July 17, 1941, soldiers of the Wehrmacht were forbidden to treat soldiers of the Red Army as comrades . Many of the Red Army soldiers who were captured by Germany died under various circumstances. These crimes were known to the Red Army soldiers.

Non-Russians were able to switch sides as early as 1941 and fight on the German side in Eastern Legions . In 1944, the former Soviet Lieutenant General Vlasov put a Vlasov army consisting of Russians into German military service. The members of this "Russian Liberation Army" were, if they saw the end of the war, extradited to the Soviet Union, where they faced draconian punishments. Almost all of them were executed for high treason or perished in prison camps.

The war was marked by strong ideologization on both sides. In the areas annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939/40, the German occupation troops were welcomed as “liberators” by parts of the civilian population in the hope of restitution of the land that had been lost to the collective farms . These hopes were soon dashed, however, as the Nazi leadership intended to decimate, expel or enslave the Slavic population and annihilate the Jewish population .

In total, several million Soviet civilians died as a result of direct or indirect warfare, war crimes and planned killings. The estimates range from six to seven million to 24 million civilians. The historian Christian Hartmann from the Institute for Contemporary History cites the number of 15.2 million Soviet civilians killed in 2011.

With 14 to 16 million soldiers, the Red Army recorded the highest casualties of any combatant in World War II. The reasons for this were the surprise effect of the German attack, strategic and tactical wrong decisions by the Soviet leadership that led to the encirclement of large contingents of troops, after-effects of the personnel clearing caused by the purges, superior German war experience, insufficient equipment due to insufficient supply by enemy forces in the initial phase of the war The Soviet armaments industry was overrun or, after evacuation, delayed to the pre-war level, as well as personal rivalries between individual commanders. Surrender or even desertion was severely sanctioned by the leadership. According to Josef Stalin's order No. 270 of August 16, 1941, officers were threatened with immediate shooting and arrest of their families if they withdrew or left them with subsequent imprisonment. Survivors of units of the Red Army who went into captivity were often murdered after the end of the war; Her family members were threatened with the cancellation of all government aid. In the Soviet and Russian historiography of the Great Patriotic War, this order is mostly not mentioned. During the Battle of Stalingrad alone , 13,500 Red Army soldiers were executed; the allegations ranged from withdrawing without orders to self-mutilation and defection to corruption or anti-Soviet activities .

In particular, when the German attack on the Soviet Union had been successfully repulsed and the Red Army in turn conquered German and Hungarian territory, the number of attacks increased. When the Red Army advanced on enemy territory, there were looting , rape , kidnapping and murder of civilians in many places . The Nemmersdorf massacre (October 21, 1944) is considered the first documented crime of the Red Army on German soil. It was used for propaganda purposes by the Nazi regime and Nazi propaganda to motivate the German population to persevere.

Sometimes these crimes are seen as acts of revenge for crimes committed on Soviet territory by Germans ( Wehrmacht and others), aided by Soviet war propaganda ( see also : Crimes of the Wehrmacht , Crimes of the SS ). Some also attribute the crimes of the Red Army to the Nazi policy of aggression and extermination practiced in Eastern Europe and are seen in this context. However, recent studies show that there were also rape of Soviet and Polish women and female concentration camp prisoners after their liberation. There were also rapes after the invasion of Yugoslavia .

Victim

Examples

Civilian victims

Poland and the Baltic States

With the practical implementation of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact , when Poland was divided between the German Reich and the Soviet Union and eastern Poland was occupied by Soviet troops 16 days after the attack by the Wehrmacht , suffering began for certain sections of the civilian population, especially members of the clergy and the academic and political elite. As a result, there were politically motivated terrorist measures against the civilian population, which consisted of Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians and Jews. Here the NKVD and the Red Army worked together. Many Poles tried to escape the attack of the Soviet NKVD, but were mostly arrested by the Soviet military and then deported. Operations groups directly subordinate to the army followed the army to "clear the area of ​​anti-Soviet elements". The Polish historian Tomasz Strzembosz saw parallels in these units with the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD .

There were also numerous crimes against the population in the Baltic States , Belarus , the Ukraine and Bessarabia : murders, hostage-taking, burning of villages, deportations , shootings, torture.

In 1941 the German attack on the Soviet Union took place . The crimes intensified when the Red Army had to retreat from the Wehrmacht attacking in 1941: Stalin ordered the troops to destroy all goods in the areas threatened by the German troops that could be of use to them (for more details see here: “ Scorched Earth "). The resulting hatred of the population for the Soviet troops played into the hands of the German Einsatzgruppen of the SS , which in turn - with the support of the population - were able to murder Soviet opponents and Jews.

Soviet order, 1945: “Some members of the army cause immense material damage to the state through their behavior by destroying valuables in the towns and villages of East Prussia, burning buildings and entire villages. [...] Furthermore, cases of weapons use by members of the armed forces against the German population, especially against women and the elderly, have been found. Numerous cases of shooting of prisoners of war have been established under circumstances in which the shooting was done absolutely without necessity and only out of willfulness. "

During the Soviet retreat in the summer of 1941 from approaching German troops, there were numerous mass shootings of political prisoners, mostly of Ukrainian, Polish and Baltic nationality, in the western regions of the Soviet Union.

After the Wehrmacht's initial successes, the end of 1942 saw the first turning point ( Battle of Stalingrad ) in the war; from the summer of 1943 ( tank battle of Kursk ) the Wehrmacht was in retreat.

Escape of the civilian population

When the front approached the eastern border of the German Reich in October 1944 , many civilians fled to the West on their own initiative - spurred on by German propaganda, which portrayed the "Russians" as barbaric subhumans in order to strengthen the population's will to defend. A state-organized evacuation that was carried out in good time did not take place. Following Adolf Hitler's orders , many Gauleiter and peasant leaders in the eastern areas of the German Reich prevented or forbade evacuation of the affected areas until the end and in many cases only organized their own escape. Civilians remained in the front line; whoever grabbed and fled beforehand was shot. The evacuation order was only issued when the Soviet tanks were immediately approaching. The mass exodus that suddenly began was uncoordinated and panicked. In the Baltic winter, the German population fled westwards through waist-deep snow, which 100,000 people did not survive. The situation was aggravated when the army command closed main roads and railroad trains to the fleeing civilian population. Hundreds of thousands of fleeing Wehrmacht soldiers pushed the fleeing civilians on hopelessly clogged country lanes and smaller streets.

In many cases, refugee trains were overtaken and looted by Red Army units, the refugees were driven away, shot and the women raped. Fighter pilots of the Soviet Air Force fired at refugee lines many kilometers behind the front.
At the end of January 1945, 2.5 million refugees were trapped by the Red Army in East Prussia and were now to be evacuated by ship across the Baltic Sea. More than 200 of about 800–1000 ships were sunk, and over 40,000 civilians and soldiers were killed.

Sexual violence, robbery and displacement

The much-cited town of Nemmersdorf (today Mayakovskoye), which is usually mentioned in connection with crimes of the Red Army, became a symbol of many places where civilian populations were killed in the course of the war through National Socialist propaganda. Due to the chaos of the war and subsequent expulsions, a timely investigation or documentation could no longer take place on some of them. Elsewhere, the events were reinterpreted by Nazi propaganda or the West German culture of remembrance, so that to this day it is often unclear what actually happened. The actions of the Red Army in many occupied villages were documented by the Polish side for the village of Przyszowice , near Gliwice . Here the soldiers of the Red Army took revenge for previous, costly battles and mistakenly assumed that they were already on German territory. The soldiers set fire to several houses and opened fire when civilians tried to put out the fire. Between 54 and 60 villagers were shot, women were raped and looting occurred. The Polish Institute for National Remembrance rates the events in Przyszowice as a crime against humanity .

According to the historian Norman M. Naimark, the propaganda of the Soviet troop newspapers was partly responsible for excesses by Soviet soldiers . There, atrocities against the Soviet civilian population, especially women and children, were reported in detail. The general tenor of the writings was that the Red Army came to Germany as an avenger and judge in order to punish “the Germans”. The Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote on January 31, 1945:

“ In contrast to the West Germans, the Germans have already been punished in Opole, Königsberg and Breslau. They were punished, but not enough. They were punished, but not all. "

Rapes

See also: Sexual violence in World War II

Numerous families evaded violence through suicide . In Hungary, the Soviet army leadership tried from February 1945 to curb "rape crimes". By then, thousands of Hungarian women had been raped by members of the Red Army. In some towns and villages, where there was still isolated resistance, soldiers were allowed to rob , loot and rape for three days . For Budapest alone , according to an estimate by Krisztián Ungváry, 50,000 women were raped.

One can only speculate about the extent of the sexual assaults by soldiers of the Red Army during their advance on German territory, as there are no even remotely reliable findings. The statistician Gerhard Reichling estimated that up to two million German women and girls were raped by men of the Red Army during the advance to Berlin, 1.4 million of them in the expulsion areas of East Prussia, East Pomerania, East Brandenburg and Silesia, 500,000 in the Soviet Occupation zone and 100,000 women in Berlin. In 12 percent of the women raped, the sexual violence suffered resulted in death. Historians like Norman M. Naimark estimate tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, and possibly up to two million victims. Catherine Merridale estimates "tens, most likely hundreds of thousands of German women and girls" as victims.

Military victims (treatment of prisoners of war)

Soviet radio messages tapped and recorded by the Wehrmacht

In the first two years after the attack on the Soviet Union began, more than 90 percent of the captured Axis soldiers were killed. For example, German aircraft crews who landed in an emergency in 1941 were often shot after they were captured. Torture, mutilation, murder and other violations of international law had been the order of the day since June 1941. Since the winter of 1941/42, the Red Army captured around 10,000 German soldiers every month, but the death rate was so high that the absolute number of prisoners fell by the end of 1942. The murder of the prisoners was sometimes ordered through orders, reports and statements from Soviet commanders. "Captured officers were all shot without exception," said a Red Army soldier. One of the earliest known cases of prisoner killing was the Broniki case , which occurred on July 1, 1941. The death rate decreased in early 1943 when the increasing number of prisoners required the establishment of a system for caring for prisoners of war and was finally implemented. Nevertheless, prisoners of war were mass murdered immediately after their capture, before they were sent to a prison camp; the case of Grischino became particularly well known .

According to records from the NKVD secret service, 3,127,380 German prisoners of war were registered, of whom 474,967 are said to have died.

According to other estimates, between 1.1 and 1.3 million German soldiers died in Soviet captivity (33 to 42 percent). When in November 1945 the approximately 3,000 Wehrmacht soldiers interned in Sweden received the news that they would be transferred to the Soviet Union, self-mutilation and suicide occurred in the camps .

Hungarian prisoners of war were executed en masse. Most of the 200,000 soldiers listed as missing died in Soviet captivity.

Tens of thousands of Japanese prisoners of war died in Soviet captivity, particularly as a result of extremely hard forced labor in Siberian mines.

Other violations of international law

Attacks on medical units

Medical personnel were also attacked by Red Army soldiers. For example, on June 28, 1941, in the Minsk area, a clearly marked column of ambulance train 127 was ambushed and the majority of the wounded and the medical personnel were killed. Furthermore, in a combat report, which was “inspired by the ardent desire to destroy many of the fascist reptiles”, there is also the entry: “A medical vehicle with 2 horses and 10 wounded fascists destroyed.” The political leader of the 1st company reported on September 5, 1941: "1 medical department smashed."

Destruction of cities and buildings contrary to international law

Many towns and villages, especially in East Prussia, were set on fire by plundering Soviet soldiers after they were captured, mostly without a fight. Places like Osterode , Angerburg , Arys , Lauenburg or Demmin can be cited as examples. In some cases (Demmin) the population was forbidden to put out the fire. As a rule, only a few buildings in the inner city survived the inferno.

The Saxon city of Altenberg was occupied by the Red Army on May 8th and burned down on May 10th. Two days after the end of the war, Soviet planes flew an attack on the city that destroyed 75 percent of the building fabric. The attack was probably aimed at units of the Wehrmacht fleeing across the Bohemian border. More than 100 civilians were officially killed.

Looting

Walter Kilian, the first mayor of the Berlin district of Charlottenburg after the end of the war, reported that there had been extensive looting by Soviet soldiers who "robbed individuals, department stores, shops, apartments [...]". The areas outside Berlin were also affected by the looting. As a result of the looting and destruction and the resulting lack of food, medicine and heating, the elderly, the sick and children in particular died of hunger, infections and the cold.

In the Soviet zone of occupation , members of the Communist Party raised concerns about Stalin over the looting and rape of Soviet soldiers. Stalin responded negatively to German concerns about the possible negative consequences for the image of the Soviet Union and, as a result, for socialism in Germany with the words: "I will not tolerate anyone dragging the honor of the Red Army into the mud."

In Poland, Red Army soldiers and members of the NKVD participated in the looting of transport trains.

Propagandistic exploitation of the crimes by the Nazi state

The Nazi propaganda used all relevant propaganda means (e.g. exaggeration, forgery, falsification, omissions). The main aim of her reporting was to increase the morale of the German soldiers and to strengthen the population's belief in the “ final victory ”. In September 1944 , Propaganda Minister Goebbels had the report spread that a Soviet soldier would never cross the German Reich border. When the Soviet advance reached Reich territory a few months later and the first crimes against the civilian population were committed by Red Army soldiers, Nazi propaganda used these crimes to increase the morale of the soldiers and tried to provoke international outrage. The first and best-known example of National Socialist propaganda in the East was the Nemmersdorf massacre in East Prussia. After the Wehrmacht was able to retake the village after the Red Army withdrew, all women and girls were found dead. Under the slogan “Revenge for Nemmersdorf”, the events were used as the first example of perseverance propaganda in the east. There were no witnesses who could testify what happened in Nemmersdorf.

Law enforcement through military jurisdictions

The Soviet daily orders issued at the beginning of the Soviet winter offensive in 1945 ( Vistula-Oder operation from January 12, 1945 to February 3, 1945 on a 1,200-kilometer-wide front between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains) did not contain any wording against the civilian population Directed calls to kill, there are still explicit calls for other violations of international law . Such disciplinary violations were sometimes expressly made a criminal offense. Sometimes soldiers were asked to "cruelly take revenge" for the suffering of the Soviet civilian population and their own soldiers.

In contrast, Konstantin Rokossowski threatened in a daily order of January 22, 1945, to punish such violations “up to and including shooting” in order to establish “exemplary order and discipline” as well as to protect material assets as quickly as possible. This order was classified as top secret and had to be communicated orally to the platoon drivers, that is, it was not intended for public propaganda purposes. In a detailed instruction from the military prosecutor of an army association dated January 23, 1945, which was captured by the Wehrmacht, demanded that several show trials of the guilty be carried out quickly . The military judicial service was instructed to prosecute indiscipline and expressly the “burning down of buildings and towns” as “acts against the state”. In addition, reprisals against the civilian population and in particular the use of weapons against women and children should be punished as "not common in the Red Army".

In mid-1947, the Red Army leadership tried to further contain the problem; the sentences ranged from arrest to execution. The Red Army was spatially separated from the resident population. In March 1949, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet finally issued a decree that standardized and increased the sentence. The Soviet occupation forces were instructed that the new laws also apply to them. Rape was subject to a forced labor camp sentence of 10 to 15 years, severe cases a sentence of 10 to 20 years.

The Soviet Union had not acceded to the 1929 Geneva Prisoners of War Convention . The Soviet leadership also did not recognize the accession of the Tsarist Empire to the Hague Land Warfare Regulations as binding. With reference to German violations of international law, the Soviet leadership did not recognize hospital ships , wounded transporters and refugee ships and treated them as military targets. Nevertheless, governments or army commanders who had not committed themselves to principles of international law were regularly called to account. And although international law had developed considerably since the end of the First World War and there were examples of international criminal prosecution of war crimes ( Leipzig trials , Nuremberg trials ), at no time were charges brought against the Soviet army leadership, unlike the German armed forces leadership, before an international military jurisdiction .

Root cause research

The Second World War, and especially the war against the Soviet Union, was marked by immense violence that claimed millions of lives. The Soviet Union suffered the greatest losses in this war; most of the Wehrmacht soldiers died on the Eastern Front. The Soviet civilian population had to endure massacres and abuse by the German attackers. It can be assumed that every soldier in the Red Army, at least those who came from the western part of the Soviet Union, suffered a loss in their own families as a result of the war. In addition, there was the loss of living space and the destruction of vital agricultural goods through the targeted burning of towns and the confiscation of food and livestock by the German occupiers, as well as through the " scorched earth " tactics that the German troops used when they withdrew carried along or destroyed many useful items. Sometimes they did not have time for this, because Hitler repeatedly forbade generals to withdraw from the military or only allowed them when it was too late for a planned and organized retreat.

Soviet war propaganda increased the personal hatred of many soldiers. Military newspapers or battle songs were distributed with similar content. In 1944 Ilya Ehrenburg himself discovered a large number of charred corpses stacked on top of one another in Minsk. To the personal suffering caused by war crimes committed by the German soldiers, which seemed to be more and more in line with the propaganda, the discovery of the first concentration and extermination camps triggered additional hatred. Again and again the advancing soldiers came across survivors or dead of the death marches, often people deported from the Soviet Union. The soldiers saw more and more concentration camps, often with prisoners shot at the last minute, especially political or Soviet prisoners, in order to deprive them of their triumph over the defeat of National Socialism.

The discoveries made during the advance into German territory also added up the high number of victims among their own comrades: the advance on East Prussia cost the lives of around 127,000 Red Army soldiers, and the battles between October 1944 and April 1945 claimed another 319,000 deaths on the part of the Red Army. Another 78,000 Soviet soldiers died in the Battle of Berlin. Towards the end of the war the excesses of violence among the Red Army soldiers increased. For a long time there were no measures from Moscow. In May 1944, Stalin announced a new strategy : "The wounded German beast" should be dealt the "death blow". Calls that were quite similar to those of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt . Assaults on the civilian population were ruled out, but in practice they were tolerated at least in the first few weeks after the Red Army conquered German territory. To a complaint from an officer regarding the attacks on the civilian population, Stalin responded impassively: “We make too many regulations for our soldiers; they should have some initiative of their own ”Only when it became clear that attacks - especially caused by alcohol from captured German stocks - were shaking military discipline, countermeasures were taken. When these apparitions were reported in January 1945, there was also a rethinking of Soviet propaganda. In a military newspaper from February 1945 it was said: "If the fascist two-legged beasts took it upon themselves to rape our women in public, that does not mean that we have to do the same." Sometimes draconian punishments were imposed for attacks on the civilian population. Assaults against German civilians were still inevitable, but no longer reached the level from the time the border was first crossed.

Controversies and professional reception

In the Federal Republic of Germany , the crimes of the Red Army that were committed at the end of World War II were part of a public controversy in the 1980s, the so-called historians' dispute . In his book Zweiierlei Untergang, the historian Andreas Hillgruber attempted a parallel consideration of the Holocaust and the collapse of the Eastern Front and the subsequent phase of flight and expulsion.

In the Soviet Union, this topic was taken up by human rights activists and dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Lev Kopelev , who had taken part in the war as soldiers and who later reported crimes in their works. It is largely taboo in the general public .

In Poland, Hungary and the Baltic countries this topic was always present in the historical consciousness; a systematic, public dispute, however, could only begin after the collapse of the Soviet Union .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

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  53. ↑ Quoted from Overy, Russlands Krieg , p. 399.
  54. ↑ Quoted from Franzen, p. 102.
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