@firefly,
Quote:I am thinking of sponsoring a woman through Women for Women. I would like to feel I am actually doing something to help someone rather than just reading about these things and talking about them.
Are any of you familiar with Women for Women International? Are there other similar organizations that help women in war torn countries?
Do you think that programs to get disease free water and food and medical care to them might be slightly useful then re-trainers for now?
No of course not how silly could I be.
Too bad we can not send such re-trainers back in a time machine to deal with the German and Russian men in the same manner of re-education.
It would be even more useful if we do not bring the trainers back from the past as they could then get the woman movement going two generations early.
Sorry come to think of it I do not hate the Germans or the Russians that must.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_rape_of_German_women_by_Soviet_Red_Army
A wave of rapes and sexual violence occurred in Central Europe in 1944–45, as the Western Allies and the Red Army battered their way into the Third Reich.[1] The majority of the assaults were committed in the Soviet occupation zone; estimates of the numbers of rapes committed by Soviet soldiers range from tens of thousands to 2 million.[2][3][4][5][6] Around 100,000 women are believed to have been raped in Berlin, based on surging abortion rates in the following months and contemporary hospital reports,[4] with an estimated 10,000 women dying in the aftermath.[7] Female deaths in connection with the rapes in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000.[8][9] Antony Beevor describes it as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history", and has concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.[10] According to Natalya Gesse, "the Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty."[11]
After the summer of 1945, Soviet soldiers caught raping civilians were usually punished to some degree, ranging from arrest to execution.[12] The rapes continued, however, until the winter of 1947–48, when Soviet occupation authorities finally confined Soviet troops to strictly guarded posts and camps,“[13] completely separating them from the residential population in the Soviet zone of Germany.
There is dispute in Russia concerning these claims.[14] They have encountered vast criticism from historians in Russia and the Russian government.[15] Critics argue that the numbers are based on faulty methodology and questionable sources. It is argued that although there were cases of excesses and heavy-handed command, the Red Army as a whole treated the population of the former Reich with respect. In his review of Berlin: The Downfall 1945, O.A. Rzheshevsky, a professor and President of the Russian Association of World War II Historians, has charged that Beevor is merely resurrecting the discredited and racist views of Neo-Nazi historians, who depicted Soviet troops as subhuman "Asiatic hordes." [16] In an interview with BBC News Online, Rzheshevsky admitted that he had only read excerpts and had not seen the book's source notes. He claimed that Beevor's use of phrases such as "Berliners remember" and "the experiences of the raped German women" were better suited "for pulp fiction, than scientific research." Rzheshevsky also defended Soviet reprisals against Germans, stating that the Germans could have expected an "avalanche of revenge".[14]
Richard Overy, a historian from King's College London, has criticized the viewpoint held by some Russians, 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."[14]
In postwar Germany, especially in West Germany, the war time rape stories became an essential part of political discourse.[2] The rape of German woman (along with expulsion of Germans from the East and Allied occupation) had been universalized in an attempt to situate the German population on the whole as victims.[2] This discourse became wholly discredited by the late 1960s; since 1970s on German leftists conducted politics focused on critical investigation of the Nazi past, the older generations’ unwillingness to face that past, and their tendency to portray themselves as victims rather than as perpetrators, particularly of the Holocaust.[17] Therefore, the frequently reiterated claim that the war time rapes had been surrounded by decades of silence[8] is simply not correct.[17]
The way the rapes have been discussed by Sander and Johr in their "BeFreier und Befreite"[8] has been criticised by several scholars. According to Grossmann, the problem is that this is not a "universal" story of women being raped by men, but of German women being abused and violated by an army that fought Nazi Germany and liberated death camps.[7] Such attempts to deemphasize the historical context of the rape of German women is a serious omission, according to Stuart Liebman and Annette Michelson,[18] and, according to Pascale Bos, is an example of ahistorical, feminist and sexist approach to the wartime rape issue.[17]
According to Pascale Bos the feminist attempt to universalize the story of the rapes of German women came into a contradiction with Sander's and Johr's own description of the rapes as a form of genocidal rape: the rape of racially superior German women by racially inferior Russian soldiers, implying that such a rape was especially harmful for the victims.[17] By contrast, the issue of the rapes of Soviet woman by Wehrmacht soldiers, that, according to some estimation amounted hundreds of thousands, if not millions cases [19] [20] is not treated by the authors as something deserving serious mention.[17]
