As Allied troops entered and occupied German territory during the later stages of World War II, mass rapes of women took place both in connection with combat operations and during the subsequent occupation of Germany by soldiers from all advancing Allied armies, although a majority of scholars agree that the records show that a majority of the rapes were committed by Soviet occupation troops. The wartime rapes were followed by decades of silence.

According to historian Antony Beevor, whose books were banned in 2015 from some Russian schools and colleges, NKVD (Soviet secret police) files have revealed that the leadership knew what was happening, but did little to stop it. It was often rear echelon units who committed the rapes. The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million.

Soviet troops Sexual violence was committed by the armies of the Western Allies and the Red Army as their troops fought their way into the Third Reich and during the period of occupation. Mass rape by Soviet soldiers first began during the Battle of Romania and during the Budapest offensive in Hungary. On the territory of Nazi Germany, it began on 21 October 1944 when troops of the Red Army crossed the bridge over the Angerapp creek (marking the Germany–Poland border) and committed the Nemmersdorf massacre before they were beaten back a few hours later. The details and level of violence committed on this incident have since been disputed.Fisch, Bernhard. Nemmersdorf 1944 – nach wie vor ungeklärt, Gerd R. Ueberschär (Hrsg.): Orte des Grauens. Verbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Primus Verlag, Darmstadt 2003; , pp. 155–67. Joachim Reisch testimony, schuka.net; accessed 7 December 2014.Reisch, Joachim. Ein Storchennest als Mahnmal – Ostpreußen: Ein Augenzeuge erinnert sich an das Massaker von Nemmersdorf, www.jungefreiheit.de 08/98 13 February 1998.

The majority of the assaults were committed in the Soviet occupation zone; estimates of the numbers of German women raped by Soviet soldiers have ranged up to 2 million. According to historian William Hitchcock, in many cases women were the victims of repeated rapes, some as many as 60 to 70 times. At least 100,000 women are believed to have been raped in Berlin, based on surging abortion rates in the following months and contemporary hospital reports, with an estimated 10,000 women dying in the aftermath.Atina Grossmann. A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers October, Vol. 72, Berlin 1945: War and Rape "Liberators Take Liberties" (Spring, 1995), pp. 42–63 MIT Press Female deaths in connection with the rapes in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000.Helke Sander/Barbara Johr: BeFreier und Befreite, Fischer, Frankfurt 2005Seidler/Zayas: Kriegsverbrechen in Europa und im Nahen Osten im 20. Jahrhundert, Mittler, Hamburg Berlin Bonn 2002 Antony Beevor describes it as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history" and concludes that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone. According to the Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse, Soviet soldiers raped German females from eight to eighty years old. Soviet and Polish women were not spared either.Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945. Richard Bessel, Germany 1945. When General Tsygankov, head of the political department of the First Ukrainian Front, reported to Moscow the mass rape of Soviet women deported to Germany for forced labour, he recommended that the women be prevented from describing their ordeal on their return to Russia.

When the Yugoslav Partisan politician Milovan Djilas complained about rapes in Yugoslavia, Joseph Stalin reportedly stated that he should "understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle".Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain, The Crushing of Eastern Europe, p.32 On another occasion, when told that Red Army soldiers sexually maltreated German refugees, he reportedly said: "We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have some initiative!" Nevertheless, there are no surviving records to prove that rape was legally sanctioned.

Konstantin Rokossovsky issued order in an attempt to direct "the feelings of hatred at fighting the enemy on the battlefield", which had little effect. There were also several arbitrary attempts to exert authority. For example, the commander of one rifle division is said to have "personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up a group of his men before a German woman spread-eagled on the ground".

Studies The historian Norman Naimark writes that after mid-1945, Soviet soldiers caught raping civilians were usually punished to some degree, which ranged from arrest to execution. The rapes continued until the winter of 1947–48, when the Soviet Military Administration in Germany finally confined Soviet Army troops to guard posts and camps strictly and to separate them from the residential population in the Soviet zone of Germany.

In his analysis of the motives behind the extensive Soviet rapes, Norman Naimark singles out "hate propaganda, personal experiences of suffering at home, and an allegedly fully demeaning picture of German women in the press, not to mention among the soldiers themselves" as some reasons for the widespread rapes. Naimark also noted the effect that tendency to binge-drink alcohol (of which much was available in Germany) had on the propensity of Soviet soldiers to commit rape, especially rape-murder. Naimark also notes the allegedly-patriarchal nature of Russian culture and of the Asian societies constituting the Soviet Union, where dishonor had been repaid by raping the women of the enemy. The fact that the Germans had a much higher standard of living visible even when in ruins "may well have contributed allegedly to a national inferiority complex among Russians". Combining "Russian feelings of inferiority", the resulting need to restore honor, and their desire for revenge may be reasons for why many women were raped in public as well as in front of husbands before both were killed.

According to Antony Beevor, revenge was not the only reason for the frequent rapes, but the Soviet troops' feeling of entitlement to all types of spoils of war, including women, was an important factor as well. Beevor exemplifies that with his discovery that Soviet troops also raped Soviet and Polish girls and women that were liberated from Nazi concentration camps as well as those who were held for forced labour at farms and factories. The rapes were often perpetrated by rear echelon units.

The description of the events by Beevor was criticized by General of the Russian Army Makhmut Gareev, who said the work by Beevor was "worse than Joseph Goebbels's propaganda". Russian Professor Oleg Rzheshevsky claimed that 4,148 Red Army officers and "a significant number" of soldiers were convicted of atrocities for crimes committed against German civilians.

Richard Overy, a historian from King's College London, has criticised the viewpoint put forth by the Russians by asserting that they refuse to acknowledge Soviet war crimes committed during the war: "Partly this is because they felt that much of it was justified vengeance against an enemy who committed much worse, and partly it was because they were writing the victors' history."

Geoffrey Roberts writes that the Red Army raped women in every country they passed through but mostly in Austria and Germany: 70,000–100,000 rapes in Vienna, and "hundreds of thousands" of rapes in Germany.

In 2015, Beevor's books were banned and censored in some Russian schools and colleges.

Eyewitnesses

A documentary book, War's Unwomanly Face by Svetlana Alexievich, includes memories of Soviet veterans about their experience in Germany.Svetlana Aleksievich, War’s Unwomanly Face, Moscow : Progress Publishers. 1988. According to a former army officer, We were young, strong, and four years without women. So we tried to catch German women and... Ten men raped one girl. There were not enough women; the entire population [ran] from the Soviet Army. So we had to take young, twelve or thirteen year-old[s]. If she cried, we put something into her mouth. We thought it was fun. Now I can not understand how I did it. A boy from a good family... But that was me. A woman telephone operator from the Soviet Army recalled: When we occupied every town, we had [the] first three days for looting and... [rapes]. That was unofficial of course. But after three days one could be court-martialed for doing this... I remember one raped German woman laying naked, with [a] hand grenade between her legs. Now I feel shame, but I did not feel shame back then... Do you think it was easy to forgive [the Germans]? We hated to see their clean undamaged white houses. With roses. I wanted them to suffer. I wanted to see their tears. Decades had to pass until I started feeling pity for them. While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union.

The rapists were mainly Red Army soldiers; some of them were from the Far East and Central Asian Republics, while others were non-Soviet European and American soldiers.Equality of Women and Men: An Unstoppable Evolution of Humanity By Reynaldo Pareja https://books.google.com/books?id=xpcqDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT84 However, stereotypes of the "hordes of Mongolian savages," eager to murder, pillage, destroy and rape, had been propagated by the Nazi authorities to mobilize people for the fight against the Soviet offensive. Even the young German-Jewish fugitive Inge Deutschkron, described her first "Russian" as small, with crooked legs and "a typical Mongolian face with almond eyes and high cheekbones". Accounts of rape of German women by the Mongolians were also recorded in the letter. For example, a letter dated 24July 1945 from a German woman stated that she had been raped by two Mongol soldiers, and another letter from 20August 1945 also accused a "Mongol" soldier of raping German women.

For example, a letter from July24, 1945 by a German female victim stated: 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.

A letter from another German female victim in August20, 1945:On the way to work on second Easter holiday I was raped by a Mongol...

Eyewitness testimony from females in the Battle of Berlin also described Soviet soldiers of "Mongolian" type: The next morning, we women proceeded to make ourselves look as unattractive as possible to the Soviets by smearing our faces with coal dust and covering our heads with old rags, our make-up for the Ivan. We huddled together in the central part of the basement, shaking with fear, while some peeked through the low basement windows to see what was happening on the Soviet-controlled street. We felt paralyzed by the sight of these husky Mongolians, looking wild and frightening...

Social effects