Wehrmacht troops escort a female Soviet prisoner captured near Uman in Ukraine in the Summer of 1941
Wehrmacht troops escort a female Soviet prisoner captured near Uman in Ukraine in the Summer of 1941
There's no verifiable numbers that can be compared. The Red Army committed brutal rapes in Germany as the war began to end, no one's denying this, but to say the Germans raped way less than their Soviet counterparts isn't exactly true.
Soviet soldiers raped anyone from young girls to old women in Germany and in other soon-to-be Soviet-controlled territories, but the Germans aren't exactly chaste. Sexual violence was frowned upon during the occupation of nations like Denmark and France, where rape was relatively scarce until the end of the war and when it did occur the chance of punishment was much greater.
On the Eastern Front it was a different matter, because all the rules of war were abandoned (if I recall correctly, the USSR not having signed the Geneva Convention was the excuse that the Nazis used but I could be wrong); it was a race war more than anything, extermination at any cost to secure "living space" for Germans, whereas the existing Slavic population would be killed, deported, or enslaved. Given the anti-Slavic and anti-communist propaganda all these men were fed for years and years, I doubt that many Wehrmacht or SS soldiers felt pity for Soviet troops or civilians or even saw them as human, much less the women.
Both the Wehrmacht and the SS committed mass rapes on a number we can't even comprehend. They opened military brothels in occupied territories in which young girls were raped, on numerous occasions you hear about how nurses and doctors were raped and then murdered. That's nothing compared to the rapes you don't hear about which were unreported, especially from women who were in remote villages or from men who didn't want to suffer the embarrassment. German troops actively bragged about rape-homicide, especially when it came to female Soviet soldiers of female Partisans. The Nazis thought that allowing women to fight was just another sign of the USSR's barbarity and although there were orders for female POWs to be immediately shot, there were many who didn't get the mercy of a bullet before being brutalized.
Female Partisans' bodies were branded, mutilated, and paraded around as prizes. There are numerous photographs documenting this that are just a Google search away where German soldiers are documented raping and murdering women on the Eastern Front, whether they were armed combatants or not.
>*Soldiers of Nazi Germany also committed rape on a massive scale. It is furthermore known that the Wehrmacht ran brothels where women were forcibly made to work, \[...\] In the Eastern territories the Wehrmacht used to brand the bodies of captured partisan women - and other women as well - with the words "Whore for Hitler's troops" and to use them accordingly. (War and Rape: Analytical Approaches by Ruth Seifert)*
Rapes were never punished. If they were, it wasn't because of rape *or* rape and murder; it was because of Rassenschande.
As I said, of course you can't put a number on war rape when you consider the pointlessness of reporting for the victim due to how brutal and chaotic the Eastern Front was, as well as the fact that many of the perpetrators left no survivors. If you *do* want a number, there are some estimates that German soldiers are responsible for as many as one million children born out of rape in the Soviet Union, and as many as ten million rapes in total.
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