The tone of your email suggests that the Red Army's position throughout the 1944/1945 campaign was that rapists and looters are shot on sight.
The Red Army leadership issued orders to that effect upon seeing the rapes. How well they were executed is another question.
...but that between 1944 and mid-1945, the Red Army, for whatever reason (I'll suggest two below) did not seriously crack down on rape and looting except in extreme or unusual cases.
Yes, I agree. Many low-level commanders have tolerated such events in their units (others have not, and following orders, they executed entire squads of rapists).
The reality of the situation, however, is that several million German, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Russian women were raped by Red Army soldiers, but only 4,148 soldiers were tried and convicted for the crimes.
How did one come about the "several million" number? Any decent statistics like for the Holocaust, or just say-so? And not just ~4000 were convicted and tried - that was in early 1945. But post-April 1945 a crackdown on rapists occured. One can wonder again how effective it was, but it's clear that mid-1945 when Germany was surrendering the USSR leadership and high Army ranks
did think of stopping the criminal behaviour.
With regard to the partisan movement, where would the manpower for that come from? Every able-bodied German male over the age of 12 had been called up to serve in the armed forces
In Belorussia, every third person was exterminated, and lots of males were drafted into the RKKA, which then fell back with those men. Where did the manpower come from?
Also, keep in mind that millions of Germans escaped westward toward the British, French, and American forces, and away from the Soviets.
Millions remained, however. And note that I didn't just mention Germany alone; the whole of Eastern Europe would have turned an incredible Third World partisan hellhole, with all the war ravage and mistreatment.
Soviet civilians were treated as brutally by Stalin's regime as they were by the Germans, so retreat (for either soldiers or civilians) wasn't really an option.
Oh please. Stalin didn't plan to murder or turn to illiterate slaves the entire citizenry, turn entire cities into lakes once the million-strong population inside has been exterminated, and didn't kill 10% of the country's population
in three years.
So there was a difference I guess.
So back to the dilemma - if the rapes were widely common and tolerated by rank commanders
despite orders, that's one thing. If you claim "the Red Army raped everyone for half a year", that's another thing alltogether and such would have resulted in massive alienation. Scale matters.
The German Army leadership didn't issue any orders to punish it's soldiers. In fact, it issued orders to the contrary - German Army would be absolved of ANY judicial prosecution for actions against Soviet civilians.
Not quite the same approach, right? Breaking counter-rape orders can be massive, no doubt. But when you give out specific orders to absolve the criminals of responsibility, that just makes the thing ubiqutous.
Yeah.
