russian atrocities in east prussia

In fact there are other testimonies that suggest that among certain groups (Cossacks in particular), looting and abusing civilians was part of the benefits package of being a soldier, and I think this expectation has a very long lineage in the history of warfare. Historical Background. Translated by Joshua Sanborn. Thousands of Breslau civilians had waited to evacuate the city when they heard news of the Soviet advance on January 14, 1945.They could not evacuate until 6 days later because of rail damage and battles. East Prussia (Ostpreuen), a former province of Prussia and the 2. und 3. It was a deceptively beautiful summer. Wyd. [146], Following the invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria), the Soviets laid claim to valuable Japanese materials and industrial equipment in the region. Polska a Rosja 193942. [130], According to historian James Mark, memories and opinions of the Red Army in Hungary are mixed. In panic and desperation, 50,000 to 60,000 left on foot, mostly women and children, in bitter winter weather. On Page 234 of his . 30 July 1914. [44], Another example of the destruction battalions' actions is the Kautla massacre, where twenty civilians were murdered and tens of farms destroyed. Soviet political repressions in Estonia were met by an armed resistance by the Forest Brothers, composed of former conscripts into the German military, Omakaitse militia and volunteers in the Finnish Infantry Regiment 200 who fought a guerrilla war, which was not completely suppressed until the late 1950s. The preferred form of suicide was poison, and most Berlin women seem to have been provided with poison before the Red Army arrived. [118], The explanation of "revenge" is disputed by Beevor, at least with regard to the mass rapes. [189][190] He is the only former Soviet partisan convicted of crimes against humanity. [50], During the restoration of Lithuanian independence in 1990 and 1991, the Soviet army killed 13 people in Vilnius during the January Events.[51]. [154], Russian historian Konstantin Asmolov argues that such Western accounts of Soviet violence against civilians in the Far East are exaggerations of isolated incidents and the documents of the time don't support the claims of mass crimes. I say this because letters I have read tend to be far less laconic than diaries. [171] Up to 2 million Afghans were killed by the Soviet forces and their proxies. It was a common Soviet practice to accuse their victims of being fascists in order to justify their death sentences. Lafayette College (Pennsylvania, USA), This is fascinating, Josh. In 2009, Captain Hosenfeld was posthumously honored by the State of Israel for his role in saving Jewish lives during The Holocaust. [31] As a result of the Soviet occupation, Estonia permanently lost at least 200,000 people or 20% of its population to repression, exodus and war.[32]. . My first post is a short translation Id like to share and briefly comment upon. Goldsmiths, University of London. The evacuation of East Prussia refers to the evacuation of the German civilian population and military personnel in East Prussia and the Klaipda region between 20 January, and March 1945, as part of the evacuation of German civilians towards the end of World War II. [30] More than 300,000 citizens of Estonia, almost a third of the population at the time, were affected by deportations, arrests, execution and other acts of repression. A German military judge who was at the scene stated in an interview during the 1970s that he saw a female body with her legs spread-eagled and a broomstick rammed into her genitals. The Prussian Holocaust began in August 1944 in two East Prussian villages called Nemmersdorf and Goldap. [25][26], In accordance with the MolotovRibbentrop Pact Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union on 6 August 1940 and renamed the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. [165], Soviet soldiers rarely bothered to treat wounded German POWs. Wybr i opracowanie Jan Tomasz Gross, Irena Grudziska-Gross. Ungvry writes that when the Soviets finally claimed victory, they initiated an orgy of violence, including the wholesale theft of anything they could lay their hands on, random executions and mass rape. This article examines whether East Prussia did, in fact, suffer "unheard-of brutality" at Russian hands during the invasions of 1914-15. It was from East Prussia that the Teutonic Knights launched forays into Poland and the Baltic regions in the 13th and 14th centuries. Everyone was all mixed up together, someone groaned, someone threw up. German historian Thomas Urban[53] writes that the Soviet policy towards the people who fell under their control in occupied areas was harsh, showing strong elements of ethnic cleansing. [69] In 1945 alone, the number of members of the Polish Underground State who were deported to Siberia and various labor camps in the Soviet Union reached 50,000. [120], According to Norman Naimark, after the summer of 1945, Soviet soldiers caught raping civilians usually received punishments ranging from arrest to execution. [20], On 6 February 1922 the Cheka was replaced by the State Political Administration or OGPU, a section of the NKVD. [56] Many civilians tried to escape from the Soviet NKVD round-ups; those who failed were taken into custody and afterwards they were deported to Siberia and vanished in the Gulags.[55]. For the same reason, I dont really think that World War I brutalized warfare as such in any substantial way. In one famous example, during the Gegenmiao massacre, Soviet soldiers, encouraged by the local Chinese population, raped and massacred over one thousand Japanese women and children. When Steve Barnes invited me to join this project, I hadnt given much thought to blogging as a scholarly enterprise. [] occupation of East Prussia http://russianhistoryblog.org/2011/02/atrocities-in-east-prussia-1914/ http://www.exulanten.com/murder.html http://www.ggsmn.org/Regional%20Pages/East%20Prussia.htm []. As well as being the natural course for the Russians to take upon the declaration of war with Germany, it was also an attempt to focus German military eyes on the Eastern Front, as opposed to the Western Front, where France was increasingly under the strain of her own German . Despite having been invited "as a comrade", Korneev exploded at them for offering "such insinuations" against the Red Army. To the contrary, I think many shifts occur very quickly and at the very outset of the war. At the time and long afterwards, German sources insisted that East Prussia had been despoiled and its inhabitants violated by the invading Russian troops in the time period between the Russian invasion and the German victories at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes that drove the Russians back on their side of the border. Bright and literate enough to keep a diary, but occasionally clueless enough to be confused about the actual army he was in (he wrote that he was serving in the Fourth Army), he left behind a diary of the war and several photographs. As a punishment, several entire ethnic groups were deported, mostly to Central Asia and Siberia into labor camps. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering 17,098,246 square kilometres (6,601,670 sq mi), and encompassing one-eighth of Earth's . "Unheard-of Brutality": Russian Atrocities against Civilians in East Prussia, 1914-1915 * Alexander Watson; Alexander Watson. I have read academic blogs from time to time and I usually enjoy them. The Soviets later forcefully occupied the Baltic States and parts of Romania, including Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. The scale and duration of civilian abuse in those regions was much greater than anything that happened in East Prussia. Women were gang raped by as many as several dozen soldiers during the liberation of Poland. . full stop. What soldier wouldnt race to get the best cheese? [191], On 27 March 2019, Lithuania convicted 67 former Soviet military and KGB officials who were given sentences of between four and 14 years for the crackdown against Lithuanian civilians in January 1991. General Korneev responded by screaming, "I protest most sharply at this insult given to the Red Army by comparing it with the armies of capitalist countries. On 17 June 1940, Latvia was occupied by Soviet forces. Polish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union (after 1939), Finnish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, Soviet partisan units conducted raids deep inside Finnish territory, NKVD and attached units of the Red Army massacred prisoners, Flight and evacuation of German civilians during the end of World War II, Flight and expulsion of Germans (194450), Rape during the occupation of Germany Soviet Military, evacuation of civilians before the advancing Red Army, forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union, Rape during the Soviet occupation of Poland, Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Soviet deportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Religious persecution during the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Kulchabat, Bala Karz and Mushkizi massacre, Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, crackdown against Lithuanian civilians in January 1991, Crimes against humanity under communist regimes, Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union, List of Soviet Union perpetrated war crimes, War crimes and atrocities of the Waffen-SS, "How Putin Manipulates Russians Using Revisionist History", "For Russians, Stalin is the 'most outstanding' figure in world history, followed by Putin", Controversial Reports on the Situation of the Jews in Poland in the Aftermath of World War, "CommunistCrimes.org Historical Introduction", "Soviet mass violence in Estonia revisited", Conclusions of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity, Deportation from Estonia in 1941 and 1949, 70th anniversary of deportation and uprising of 1941, The Soviet Occupation of Estonia in 1940-1941, "Deportation of 14 June 1941: crime against humanity: materials of an International Conference 12-13 June. Many others, however, remained in the GULAG long after the surrender of Nazi Germany. [156], The Soviet Army committed crimes against the Japanese civilian populations and surrendered military personnel in the closing stages of World War II during the assaults on Sakhalin and Kuril Islands. Its an exciting opportunity. Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?"[144]. "Okupowany Krakw - z prorektorem Andrzejem Chwalb rozmawia Rita Pagacz-Moczarska", see bibliogroup:"Dzieje Krakowa: Krakw w latach 1945-1989" in Google Books, https://web.archive.org/web/20080524235517/http://www3.uj.edu.pl/alma/alma/64/01/02.html, "Too awful an image of war: Sixty years on, there are no grounds to withhold images kept in a Finnish Defence Forces' safe", "Chechnya: European Parliament recognises the genocide of the Chechen People in 1944", Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, "Texts adopted: Final edition EU-Russia relations", ". . As I said, one gets much more of this emotion from letters, and certainly from memoirs as well. The Russian snapper spent over 1,400 days during World War II on the . These Japanese women mostly married Chinese men and became known as "stranded war wives" (zanryu fujin). [183] The rape of Afghan women by Soviet troops was common and 11.8 percent of the Soviet war criminals in Afghanistan were convicted for the offence of rape. In the early 1970s I worked at a hotel in Washington, D.C. with an elderly East Prussian, who, if memory serves, was from the Tilsit area. And, of course, the publishing process takes a long time. (From the description of the book you linked, it is clear that this was a phenomenon among many of the wars combatants.). Transfer of Property in Enemy Occupied Territory. . Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces in Ukraine have destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, shopping centers and ambulances, leaving thousands of civilians killed or wounded. [114] About 22,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed during the fighting in Berlin only. Martynas Jankus and the deportation of East Prussian civilians to Russia during World War I, . [3], In the 1990s and 2000s, some war crimes trials held in the Baltic states led to prosecution of Russian nationals for crimes against humanity committed during or shortly after World War II, including killings or deportations of civilians. [94] Soviet authorities did not allow the 55,733 people who had been handed over to settle back in Ingria, and instead deported them to central regions of Russia. by WalterS 15 Nov 2004, 20:56, Post Not that the NKVD had sadists in its ranks who had run amok; rather, this was a wide and systematic procedure. In the Russian Empire the Jewish and German minorities in particular were suspected of 'unreliability'. When the Allied Powers of World War II founded the post-war International Military Tribunal to examine war crimes committed during the conflict by Nazi Germany, with officials from the Soviet Union taking an active part in the judicial processes, there was no examination of Allied Forces' actions and no charges were ever brought against its troops, because they were also an undefeated power which then held Europe under military occupation, marring the historical authority of the Tribunal's activity as being, in part, victor's justice. In 1939, East Prussia had 2.49 million inhabitants, 85% of them ethnic Germans. A significant percentage of this death toll, however, occurred when evacuation columns encountered units of the Red Army. On a related note, I would argue that its easy to exaggerate the process of brutalization or weariness as processes that unfold slowly during the war. Most Red Army atrocities took place only in what was regarded as hostile territory (see Przyszowice massacre). It will be on display at the NATO headquarters from 6 to 15 July. And an Army which did not spare its blood for you! The original question on this thread was a quest for knowledge about the behavior of Russian troops in East Prussia in 1914, and whether or not they had committed atrocities against the civilian population. Some sources claim that as many as 1,000 civilians may have been executed during the incident. Russia began perpetrating war crimes in Ukraine in 2014, as part of its forced annexation of Crimea and upon launching the war in Donbas. The boredom of war is clearly communicated by the fact that Putiakov prefaces each entry in his diary with the never changing note, On guard. Beyond recording the amount of rations he was given each day and noting when he was able to melt snow in order to wash himself, Putiakov devotes much of his diary (which in total encompasses four notebooks) to trying to make sense of the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Panic spread throughout the Reich as Germans contemplated the province's likely fate. [54] The NKVD task forces followed the Red Army to remove 'hostile elements' from the conquered territories in what was known as the 'revolution by hanging'. Mariusz Lesaw Krogulski, "Okupacja w imi sojuszu" Poland 2001. sfn error: no target: CITEREFMarshall2010 (, sfn error: no target: CITEREFVouitra2011 (, Vertreibung und Vertreibungsverbrechen 19451978. He then "spoke agitatedly about the sufferings of the Red Army and the horrors that it was forced to endure while it was fighting through thousands of kilometers of devastated country." In the wake of a half a century of attempts to have international laws of war and other rules to mitigate its savagery, some held the expectation that European states would and should fight each other without the systematic abusing of civilian populations. Soldiers of the Red Army, together with members of the NKVD, frequently looted German transport trains in Poland in 1944 and 1945. Is this in fact the case, and if so, is it that something fundamental had changed prior to the beginning of the hostilities? This Russian order probably had very little distribution, and surely it has not been followed at all. Djilas writes that in response, Yugoslav partisan leader Joseph Broz Tito summoned the chief of the Soviet military mission, General Korneev, and formally protested. Following WWI, East Prussia became an enclave cut off from the rest of Germany as the land between West and East Prussia was ceded to Poland. Following World War II and the subsequent suppression of the Lithuanian Forest Brothers, the Soviet authorities executed thousands of resistance fighters and civilians whom they accused of aiding them. The habitat of the long-dead Prussian tribe comprises today's province called East Prussia, which forms the northeastern part of the Kingdom of Prussia. [115], Western estimates of the traceable number of rape victims range from two hundred thousand to two million. East Prussia (German Ostpreuen, stpsn Latin Borussia orientalis Russian ) was a province of Prussia from 17731829 and from 18781945. Asmolov also claims that the Soviets, unlike the Germans and the Japanese, prosecuted their soldiers and officers for such acts. Snyder, Timothy. inauthor:"Marcin Zaremba" in Google Books. A report by the Swiss legation in Budapest describes the Red Army's entry into the city: During the siege of Budapest and also during the following weeks, Russian troops looted the city freely. He recalled a story about invading Cossacks in the next town cutting off the right index finger of every young boy they captured, supposedly in the belief that this would prevent them from learning to shoot and becoming soldiers when grown. ", During the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact, 72 Czechs and Slovaks were killed (19 in Slovakia), 266 seriously wounded and another 436 lightly wounded. by michael mills 15 Nov 2004, 14:51, Post Given the delay of publication, there was also little outward censorship, which was fortunate given the political ramifications of atrocity stories in the twentieth century. Civilians were killed by conventional bombs during the invasion. [187], In 2003, August Kolk (born 1924), an Estonian national, and Petr Kislyiy (born 1921), a Russian national, were convicted of crimes against humanity by Estonian courts and each sentenced to eight years in prison. [87][88], The prosecution of Greeks in the USSR was gradual: at first the authorities shut down the Greek schools, cultural centres, and publishing houses. by WalterS 09 Nov 2004, 17:22, Post Only two were presentYuriy Mel, a former Soviet tank officer, and Gennady Ivanov, a former Soviet munitions officerwhile the other were sentenced in absentia and are hiding in Russia. by David Thompson 15 Nov 2004, 21:25, Return to Holocaust & 20th Century War Crimes. This caused the deaths of no less than 200,000 girls and women due to the spread of diseases, especially that many eyewitnesses recounted victims being raped as much as 70 times in that period. [64][65][66][67], Soldiers of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) were persecuted and imprisoned by Russian forces as a matter of course. ( 1)", "Stadt ohne Mnner - Berlin - Tagesspiegel", 'They raped every German female from eight to 80', "Red Army troops raped even Russian women as they freed them from camps", "Remembering Rape: Divided Social Memory and the Red Army in Hungary 19441945", "Masacrul de la Fntna Alb, ngropat de KGB: peste 2000 de romni ucii de trupele sovietice", "Masacrul de la Fntna Alb. An order of the military council of the 1st Belorussian Front, signed by Marshal Rokossovsky, ordered the shooting of looters and rapists at the scene of the crime. Subbotin reports his own behavior and the behavior of his comrades just after they crossed the German border in 1914 without a hint of self-censorship. Today I received joyful news. Things are progressing towards a purging of our territory [. [74], The attitude of Soviet servicemen towards ethnic Poles was better than their attitude towards the Germans, but it was not entirely better. According to Yugoslav politician Milovan Djilas, at least 121 cases of rape were documented, 111 of which also involved murder. Over 2,400 civilians were killed. A lot of guys were very drunk. I havent read much in WW I soldiers diaries, but the cadence of your translation reminds me of some of the British soldiers of the period. However, through a combination of coercion and rhetoric, which appealed by Tancred 14 Nov 2004, 03:27, Post by sylvieK4 11 Nov 2004, 03:29, Post So this group blog, from my perspective at least, is a chance to experiment with short-form publishing in which the peer review comes after publication (in the form of responses to the posts, which are always welcome) rather than before. Other evidence cemented the War Crimes Bureau's belief that Stalin had given secret orders about the massacre of POWs. " "? The Germans retreated. [164][need quotation to verify][pageneeded] Dr. Rdiger Overmans believes that it seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that an additional German military personnel listed as missing actually died in Soviet custody as POWs, putting the estimates of the actual death toll of German POW in the USSR at about 1.0 million. . Indiscipline hampered the cohesion and fighting ability of the troops (remember Subbotin's drunk and hungover men in the midst of battle). Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that Russian forces in Ukraine committed atrocities beyond even the Nazis in the 1940s. Konev's response was to claim it was done mainly by Red Army deserters. Soviet soldiers often engaged in plunder, rape and other crimes against the Poles, causing the population to fear and hate the regime. 1915 Persecution Of Six Million Jews Charged Against Russia CIVILIANS FOUND DEAD Telephones and Observations from Tower Said to Have Caused Death of . [18] Here we see this brutality already at the very outset of that war. Our artillery got into position, and we extended into a line. In November 2006, photographs showing Soviet atrocities were declassified by the Finnish authorities. And upon their arrival they were sent for punishment to Lieutenant Rekunov. where Chinese police forces in Manchuria arrested or even killed Soviet troops for various crimes, leading to some conflicts between the Soviet and Chinese authorities in Manchuria. 2000. Argnold did not like Russian soldiers in general, since he himself was a German baron, and Rekunov also was strict. The dates below are old style (13 days behind the western calendar), and the place names are straight transliterations from the Russian (thus Suvalki rather than Suwaki). all that solves the population problem a man might consider evil, id call it nature, heres to another century of glorious violence .

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