The “Tomb of the Unknown Rapist” in Berlin
Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten
As we watch the savagery of the Israel-Hamas War going int 2024, we often forget that by its very nature, war is a terrible act of mankind. There is no good war.
Unfortunately in today’s ultra-connected world, the tragedies of war can be reported moment-by-moment, death-by-death.
Joseph Stalin once coldly remarked, “When one man dies it is a tragedy. When thousands die it’s statistics.”
There is a difficult reality that is often unreported in the history of The Second World War. We know of the savagery of the war in Eastern Europe. What is often unreported is what happened after the surrender of Germany in May 1945.
The war in Eastern Europe was a racial war as much as it was a war for territory. The Germans saw the people of Eastern Europe as untermensch, sub-human. Consequently, the Germans treated the people of Eastern Europe with a savagery that was unparalleled in the West. While Jews from Western Europe died in the Holocaust, the number of Western European Jews pale in comparison to the number of people from the East who died at one of several German extermination camps.
For example, there were an estimated 90,000 French Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Great Britain shows 130 Jews killed in the Holocaust. Denmark saw 60 Jews killed and Norway 870 Jews killed. Compare this to the countries in Eastern Europe:
Romania = 270,000 Jews killed
Hungary = 450,000 Jews killed
Ukraine = 900,000 Jews killed
Poland = 2.9 million Jews killed
Those are just the Jews. The Nazis also targeted many other ethnic groups and sub-cultures for extermination including homosexuals, the mentally ill, Jehovah Witnesses, intellectuals, communists, Gypsies, and more than 3.5 million Soviet prisoners of war. While we often hear of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, we often fail to mention these other victims, which combined with Jewish deaths, raises the total killed to an estimated 20 million people.
These are not war victims killed in combat or by the bombing of cities and towns. These are men, women, and children who were rounded up and systematically murdered as part of the Nazi plan to ethnically cleanse Eastern Europe to make room for a pure, Aryan race of Germanic people who would rule the world for a thousand years.
Once the war was over, the people of Eastern Europe did not want peace, they wanted revenge against the Germans. Unfortunately, the mad men who perpetrated the crimes of the Holocaust were either dead (Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and other top Nazi officials), on the run, or being held prisoner by the Western Allies. This left innocent Germans to bear the brunt of the revenge.
In a sadistic fulfillment, the Bible verse from Exodus 20:5, which describes the sins of the fathers being visited upon their children, became reality in post-war Germany.
As millions of Red Army soldiers flooded into Eastern Germany, eventually capturing the capital of Berlin, the order was passed down from Stalin himself that German women should pay for the sins their fathers, husbands, and brothers had committed in the East. Few German women and girls escaped the savagery of the Red Army.
Historians report today that nearly every German woman between the ages of 8-years to 80-years that lived in the Eastern part of Germany controlled by the Red Army was raped as many as a dozen or more times. It was not until the winter of 1946/47, more than 18 months following the surrender, that the Soviet authorities began to crack down on soldiers committing rape and start to reinforce discipline within their ranks. To this day, German women refer to the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin as the “Tomb to the Unknown Rapist.”
