Talk:Rape during the occupation of Germany

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 13 May 2019 and 1 July 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Australyeah.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:48, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Splitting out the section on the rape by the Soviet troops

The section on the rape by the Soviet troops is very large making it "out of proportion to the rest of the article." Per Wikipedia:Splitting, such sections can be made into a new stand alone articles where more details can be inserted. Such a move is also encouraged by WP:SPINOFF. Furthermore, the current size of the article is ~ 47 kB, prompting more attention to the size issue. --Mhhossein ^talk 13:01, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't think the Soviet section is big enough to warrant an entire article of its own. Also, as per Wikipedia:Splitting: "Below 50 kB, an article may not need splitting based on size alone." I think that applies here (47kb). DemianStratford (talk) 23:15, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

For editors who are wondering why this is being brought up here, it's because it was brought up at Talk:American_rape_of_Vietnamese_women#Merge_to_Rape_during_the_Vietnam_War. Regards, AzureCitizen (talk) 14:28, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Polish! Czech! Slovac! crimes

Widely known about illegal violance agianst german and austrian cicvilian in East Prussia, Pomerania, Bohemia, Sylezia, Sydets and inner area in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Dmitriy Tehlin (talk) 04:42, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

"Mongolian." Who wrote this bullshit?!

The source (Grossman) clearly says that the description of "Mongol rapists" was a standard formula used by German woman as an argument for getting abortion. According to the Goebbels' racial hygiene laws, abortions were allowed only if there was a risk of "contaminating" "high quality Aryan blood" with the Untermensch blood. This law was still in effect in the occupied Germany, and German woman "drew upon the Nazi racial hygiene discourse which banned "alien" (artfremd) offspring (indeed, when rapes by other occupation forces were certified, the perpetrator was frequently identified as Negro if American or North African if French). They availed themselves of the rich repertory of Nazi racial imagery of the barbarian from the East, especially the Mongol from the Far East, associated with the cruel frenzy of Genghis Khan. A letter from July 24, 1945:

"I hereby certify that at the end of April this year during the Russian march into Berlin I was raped in a loathsome way by two Red Army soldiers of Mongol/Asiatic type."

(...) In a matter-of-fact but also desperate manner, women mobilized existing discourses, entangled them, and deployed them to tell their own stories for their own purposes. " I am going to remove mentioning of "Mongols" as the words that were taken out of context. Actually, by quoting these words out of context, Wikipedia reproduces Nazi racist myths. If someone wants to add this info, let's discuss it first on the talk page. Paul Siebert (talk) 05:13, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

I am shocked. Whoever wrote this racist bullshit, I am going to report them immediately if this text (The first Soviet troops to fight in Berlin consisted mostly of Mongolians.) will be restored.--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:19, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Apparently, these edits were made by a sock. I remove it completely. Some of the sources used by that sock may be useful, so I moved the quoted text here for future usage in a proper context.

Atina Grossman in her article in "October" describes how until early 1945, the abortions in Germany were illegal except for medical and eugenic reasons and so doctors opened up and started performing abortions to rape victims for which only an affidavit was requested from a woman. It was also typical that women specified their reasons for abortions as being mostly socio-economic (inability to raise another child), rather than moral or ethical. Many women stated they were raped but their accounts described the rapist as looking Asian or Mongolian. German women uniformly described the rapists as of "of Mongolian or Asiatic type".

Evidence of Central Asian troops committing rape in Berlin was recorded. In April 1945, Magda Wieland took shelter in the cellar of her apartment house. She described that the first Soviet soldier to find her was a young 16 year-old Central Asian male, who raped her. It was reported that a Soviet commander was greatly embarrassed by wholesale rape of German women by ethnic Kazakh soldiers who were by far the worse offenders and were described as being Mongol Hordes. Another recorded case involves German director Schmidt, who burst into Villa Franka, and yelled at Russian commander Isayev "Your soldiers are raping German women!". The raped German victim pointed at a Kazakh soldier being the perpetrator, and was arrested at the spot. The Kazakh soldier in return claimed he wanted revenge against the Germans who killed his two brothers in battle.

A woman who lived in Berlin recalled:

The front-line Russian troops who did the fighting – as a woman, you didn't have to be afraid of them. They shot every man they saw, even old men and young boys, but they left the women alone. It was the ones who came afterwards, the second echelon, who were the worst. They did all the raping and plundering. They stripped homes of every single possession, right down to the toilets.

Paul Siebert (talk) 15:05, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Memoirs quotes

I noticed many quotes from memoirs describe behaviour of Soviet military is details. I am not sure that is encyclopedic. However, if we believe that is ok, I found several books and articles that were published only recently, but that contain similar storied about American GIs and other Allied troops. I am going to add them per NPOV. Paul Siebert (talk) 05:27, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

If those books and articles "published only recently" are as reliable as sources used in the article, then yes, you can add them. If they're far-right or far-left propaganda aimed to whitewash either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, then no. Pizzigs (talk) 15:16, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

None of these sources seem to be a propaganda or whitewash of anything. However, #1 is a personal memoir; it is reliably published, but author does not seem to be notable, hence arguably undue on the page. Same applies to all other personal memoirs by non-notable authors/participants of the events. A research summarizing and citing eyewitnesses would be fine. By contrast, #10 (history of urban warfare), for example, is a scholarly book and a good source. My very best wishes (talk) 04:09, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

240,000 dead?

This is a claim that is being echoed elsewhere on the Internet, with this page as its apparent source. However, what is given as the source of this claim here is two entire books (one of them Befreiter und Befreite), without page numbers. Can we at least get page numbers, so that we can check the claim?

(In general, while rape is typically greatly underreported, corpses don't just disappear.) Feketekave (talk) 13:01, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Beevor

This article extensively uses Beevor. However, according to Ericsson, Kjersti, and Eva Simonsen, (Children of World War II: The Hidden Enemy Legacy. New York: Berg. 2005 ISBN: 9781845202064, page 233) Beevor just takes the figures published by Sander&. Ericsson&Simonsen say:

"...Beevor presented ostensibly new research on mass rapes. His figures, however, had been published in 1992 by the German team of Helke Sander and Barbara Johr".

I am going to replace Beevor (and mass-media that cite him) with the original secondary source. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:32, 27 May 2023 (UTC)