The frightened women huddled in a dormitory in the German town of Bunzlau listened to the sounds of battle getting nearer – with rising hope in their hearts.

They were all Soviet citizens, seized by Hitler’s forces when they swept through their home towns and villages in the early stages of the war and packed off to the Reich to work as slave labourers.

But now the tide had turned and, with the Red Army at the gates, their ordeal seemed almost over.

It was not to be. The entry of the Third Guards Tank Army was the start of an orgy of drunkenness, looting, random killing and, above all, indiscriminate rape.

On the night of March 5 1945, a group of 60 officers and men, most of them drunk, broke into the women’s refuge. When their commander showed up and tried to order them out, they threatened to shoot him. Then they forced themselves on the terrified women, many just teenagers. That their victims were the very people whom they were supposedly fighting to free made no difference.

‘I waited for the Red Army for days and nights,’ recorded Maria Shapoval bitterly. ‘I waited for my liberation and now our soldiers treat us worse than the Germans did.’

Neither this incident nor any of the countless similar stories which stain the history of the Soviet advance into German-occupied territory during the last months of the war were mentioned in the lavish Victory Day celebrations which took place in Russia and occupied Ukraine this week.

Vladimir Putin was determined that the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s triumph in its ‘Great Patriotic War’ would be long remembered.

Two Russian Red Army soldiers grin with amusement as they grab at a girl in Leipzig in 1945-46

Two Russian Red Army soldiers grin with amusement as they grab at a girl in Leipzig in 1945-46

Historian Patrick Bishop says the conflict in Ukraine has taught us that though 80 years have passed, Russia still wages war in much the same way

Historian Patrick Bishop says the conflict in Ukraine has taught us that though 80 years have passed, Russia still wages war in much the same way

Vladimir Putin (pictured here at Friday's Victory Day military parade) was determined that the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s triumph in its ‘Great Patriotic War’ would be long remembered

Vladimir Putin (pictured here at Friday’s Victory Day military parade) was determined that the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s triumph in its ‘Great Patriotic War’ would be long remembered

A welter of events to vaunt a ‘sacred feat of valour’ included re-enactments of the iconic moment when Red Army soldiers planted a hammer-and-sickle flag high on the Reichstag building in the centre of Berlin on the evening of April 30, 1945, with a battle-scarred life-size copy of the parliament erected in a Moscow park for the purpose.

The high point was a mass parade in Red Square. The rumbling tanks and phalanxes of goose-stepping troops sent an unsubtle message of brute military strength to Putin’s own people and the world at large.

But the spectacle is also designed to reinforce a historical narrative which is central to the way that Putin and most Russians see the world – and which shapes their attitude to their neighbours and the West.

This view states that it was they, not us, who saved the world from Nazism and that without the heroic sacrifices of the Red Army, we would all be speaking German.

In this telling of the Second World War saga, it is the Soviets who are overwhelmingly the good guys, with the British, Americans and the rest of the Western Allies playing a secondary and often cynical and duplicitous role. This legend has been force-fed to the people of the former Soviet Union since 1945 with considerable success.

Yesterday, side by side with his fellow dictator and ever-closer buddy, Chinese president Xi Jinping, Putin gazed proudly at the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles lumbering across the square and offered a few gracious words of appreciation for the contribution of the Western allies. But he reiterated that the Soviets were ‘the true victors over Nazism’. The event was larded with symbolism and rhetoric to link the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of 80 years ago with his so-called ‘Special Military Operation’ of today. Some 1,500 of the marching soldiers were veterans of the current conflict and among the military kit on display were Lancet, Geran and Orlan drones used to batter Ukrainian cities and positions.

Putin painted the current conflict as a continuation of Russia’s historic role as ‘an indestructible barrier against Nazism’ – an unsubtle reference to the Kremlin’s false claims that President Zelensky and his government are neo-fascists. Then, as now, he said, the ‘entire country, society and people’ were united behind the war effort.

While no historian denies that the more than eight million Soviet soldiers who died defeating Hitler made an enormous and decisive contribution to victory, the Kremlin’s retelling of the Second World War is a ludicrously simplistic and one-sided presentation of events.

Military vehicles and soldiers parade through Red Square as part of the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War at Red Square in Moscow, Russia on May 9, 2025

Military vehicles and soldiers parade through Red Square as part of the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War at Red Square in Moscow, Russia on May 9, 2025

For one thing, it makes no mention of the fact that for the first 22 months of the war Hitler and Stalin were effectively allies. For another, it shamelessly ignores the appallingly savage conduct of the Red Army towards the civilian populations who lay in their path – be they Germans, Poles or even their own people.

The Germans knew that retribution would be harsh when ‘Ivan’ arrived seeking vengeance for the atrocities perpetrated by the SS and Wehrmacht wherever they had set foot in Eastern Europe. Just how terrible it would be was made clear when the Red Army entered East Prussia in force in mid-January 1945, fired up by propaganda issued by their political officers urging them: ‘Soldier, remember, you are now entering the lair of the fascist beast!’

They needed little encouragement. Emma Korn detailed what happened when the frontoviki – frontline troops – found her and two other German women hiding in a cellar: ‘They pointed their weapons… and ordered us into the yard,’ she said. ‘Twelve soldiers in turn raped me. Other soldiers did the same to our two neighbours.’ The next night, ‘six drunken soldiers broke into our cellar and raped us in front of the children’.

All this was well known to the Soviet authorities, from Stalin down. This particular story was recounted by an officer of the NKVD secret police to his boss Lavrentiy Beria and was discovered in the state archives by the historian Antony Beevor while he was researching his 2002 book Berlin: The Downfall 1945.

The meticulous reports of mass rapes and the resulting suicides were passed on to Stalin. ‘You can actually see from the ticks whether they’ve been read or not,’ Beevor revealed.

These thuggish troops had little to fear from their superiors. When a staff officer told Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front, about the widespread looting and vandalism carried out by his men, he replied: ‘I don’t give a f***.’ Now that they had entered Germany, said Vasilevsky, ‘It is time for our men to issue their own justice.’

The German military could expect no mercy after the horrific cruelty they had inflicted on Soviet soldiers and civilians.

But the Red Army were equally ruthless in their treatment of German women – who had played no direct part in the atrocities.

Russians flooded on to the streets of St Petersburg on May 9, carrying portraits of people including Red Army soldiers, to celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany in World War 2

Russians flooded on to the streets of St Petersburg on May 9, carrying portraits of people including Red Army soldiers, to celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany in World War 2

In April, they finally reached the German capital. Estimates from Berlin’s two main hospitals put the number of women raped at between 95,000 to 130,000. In total, as many as two million German women may have been raped, according to one study.

Few females escaped. According to historian Roger Moorhouse ‘pre-pubescent girls, nuns, grandmothers, pregnant women and nursing mothers were subject to the campaign of rape. Even fugitive Jews and liberated forced labourers received the same treatment.’

When dusk fell, the ‘hunting hours’ began. Every woman in Berlin faced the same nightmare as Soviet soldiers, drunk on looted alcohol, went from house to house looking for victims.

‘Throughout the night,’ one woman wrote, ‘we huddled together in mortal fear… a horde of Soviet soldiers returned and stormed into our apartment house. Then we heard what sounded like a terrible orgy with women screaming for help, many shrieking at the same time.’

On finding the women, the soldiers would shine torches in their faces before making their selection then ordering in German: ‘Frau, komm!’ [‘Woman, come!’] To resist was to risk a beating or death. Husbands and sons who tried to intervene were liable to receive a bullet in the head. Many of the victims were subjected to multiple violations. ‘Red Army soldiers don’t believe in individual liaisons,’ wrote one Soviet officer in a bitter jibe at the Communist way of doing things. ‘Nine, ten, twelve men at a time – they rape them on a collective basis.’

The physical and psychological cost of the Red Army’s rampage is incalculable. Many of the soldiers were diseased and conquest was followed by an epidemic of syphilis and other venereal diseases. Clinics were inundated by requests for abortions but five per cent of children born in Berlin in 1946 were believed to be the result of rape.

Some found the ordeal unbearable. In Berlin alone, it is reckoned that one in ten rape victims killed herself. Everyone would carry the mental scarring of the ordeal throughout the rest of their lives.

Not every Soviet soldier was an offender. Some showed kindness and made friends with families, delivering desperately needed food for shared meals. There are accounts of officers stepping in to rescue women and diary entries which record the disgust of some at what was happening. But official attempts to control the troops were limited to limp exhortations by commissars of the importance of troops upholding ‘the honour and dignity of the Red Army warrior’.

The sexual violence of the Red Army was not only limited to German women, but could often be directed against their own nationality too. Pictured: The Red Army's commander-in-chief Joseph Stalin

The sexual violence of the Red Army was not only limited to German women, but could often be directed against their own nationality too. Pictured: The Red Army’s commander-in-chief Joseph Stalin

What drove such grotesque violence towards women? There have been attempts to justify or at least contextualise it as a predictable reaction to the horrendous war crimes committed by the German occupiers, which also included the rape and murder of Soviet women.

But as Beevor points out, this argument is undermined by the evidence of Russian rape of women who had been taken forcibly from the Soviet Union and brought to Germany.

All war brutalises but the war on the Eastern Front was in a dark class of its own, with both Germans and Russians behaving like beasts. Both sides were serving ideologies that dehumanised the enemy, soldier and civilian, and validated cruelty and killing. The Red Army was militarised Communism. ‘Stalin’s regime waged war in the same spirit as it prosecuted peace,’ wrote historian Catherine Merridale in Ivan’s War, her definitive work on the Soviet rank and file. ‘The first rule was that human life counted for little… compared to interests of state.’

Commanders seemed to care nothing about the cost in blood of their operations. Their men spoke of being fed into the ‘meat grinder’ – a term used to describe Russia’s methods in Ukraine today. If a soldier believed his life meant nothing, then why should anyone else’s?

Soviet officialdom never acknowledged the soldiers’ crimes. Putin’s ever-more autocratic rule has snuffed out any further investigation. Under current law, anyone who denigrates Russia’s record in the Second World War faces steep fines and up to five years in prison. Last month, Putin made it clear that anyone attempting to cloud the rosy propaganda picture was wasting their time. ‘No matter how hard they try, no one can distort or overshadow the feat of the Red Army soldiers who saved the world from Nazism,’ he declared.

The lavish scale of the celebrations is his attempt to link the memory of the glories of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ to his own war in Ukraine. There are indeed many similarities between the two conflicts, but perhaps not ones that Putin would enjoy.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, there has been a steady stream of evidence, often recorded on smartphones by the perpetrators themselves, of the murder of Ukrainian civilians, the cold-blooded killing of captured Ukrainian soldiers and the torture, mutilation and mistreatment of prisoners of war.

And then there is the rape. Ukrainian prosecutors have registered 344 cases of sexual violence in areas that were temporarily occupied by Russia but have since been liberated.

The conflict in Ukraine has taught us that though 80 years have passed, Russia still wages war in much the same way.

In March, testimony published in a report to the UN’s Human Rights Council carried a grim echo of the spring of 1945. ‘A civilian woman who had been raped during confinement in a detention facility held by Russian authorities stated that she pleaded with the perpetrators, telling them she could be their mother’s age,’ it read. ‘But they dismissed her saying: “Bitch, don’t even compare yourself to my mother. You are not even a human. You do not deserve to live.”’

Patrick Bishop is the author of Paris ’44: The Shame And The Glory, published in paperback next month

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