When humans get together in large numbers, bad things happen. Couple that with fear and hate, and
you've got Hell right here on Earth. War is all fear and hate, and World War II remains the worst
war ever. I don't think any belligerent state was without its atrocities and war crimes — even the
kindest of us can devolve into monsters — but it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to you
that the Soviet Union was right up there with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. In this video,
we're going outline the atrocities of the USSR and its blood-Red Army in the Second World War.
The Soviet Union engulfed a whole lot of land before, during, and after the Second World War,
and one of its favourite things to do with the people living in that land was to boot
them out of it. The Soviets deported hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and countries
in those war-torn years, and many of those unfortunate souls were thrown deep into the USSR,
as far as Siberia, which was basically a death sentence. Between 1939 and 1941, for instance,
some 1.5 million people were deported out of Poland by the
Soviets. The majority of them were Poles, and very few of them made it back home after the war. This
particular deportation was on a massive scale, but it happened elsewhere too. In Estonia,
for instance, almost 11,000 people were deported by the Soviets in just three days,
mostly in train cars designed for moving cattle. The Soviets deported people from their
own territory too — such as farmers who owned anything over eight acres of land, whom they
considered a threat to Bolshevism; well-off Greek minorities, of which some 50,000 were booted out;
and persons of Finnish descent living in the part of the USSR known back then as Ingria,
of which some 67% had received the boot as early as 1939. On this latter example, after the end
of the Continuation War, the Soviet Union was supposed to send the Ingrian Finns back to Ingria,
but instead, they forced them to settle in Siberia and Central Russia and Asia.
While many deportees were simply ejected from their homes and countries, others were thrown
into prisons, forced to carry out manual labour, or forced into military service.
Prisoners — especially political prisoners — all through the Soviet Union and its occupation zones
were tortured to death for intelligence purposes, and sometimes just for "entertainment." We'll get
to military prisoners of war soon, but for now, we're mostly talking about civilian prisoners,
of whom many were women and children. From Poland, for example, the Soviet NKVD took hundreds of
thousands of political prisoners to camps in the USSR, where they cut off their fingers, ears,
and noses; scalded them with boiling water; bound them together with barbed wire; and shot them to
death or simply left them to die of starvation and exposure, among other things. Others were
delivered to Gulags, which were Soviet forced labour camps. Gulags were torture in themselves,
and few deported to them ever made it back home. In the years immediately after the war,
hundreds of thousands of German civilians were deported to Gulags in the Soviet Union, where
it's estimated that more than 200,000 of them perished due to starvation and disease. Instead
of being imprisoned or worked to death, others still were forced to spill their blood in the Red
Army throughout the war. In 1941, around 34,000 Estonians were added to the ranks of the Red Army,
and only about 30% of them survived the war. Between 1940 and 1941, some 150,000 Poles were
sent to war under Soviet flags against Finland and Germany. These are just a few of many examples.
For other European civilians, death came more swiftly. Sometimes,
the NKVD and their Red Army muscle found it easier to execute political prisoners on the spot,
while other civilians became casualties of Soviet scorched-earth policies. In Kautla,
Estonia, on the 24th of July 1941, for instance, Soviet destruction battalions set civilian farms
and farmhouses on fire with their occupants still inside, and tortured other civilians to death,
reducing the village's population by 30 in just one day. On the 26th of January 1945,
in the Polish village of Przyszowice, the Red Army massacred some 70 civilians, including women,
children, and infants — some simply for trying to put out their burning homes. In Nemmersdorf,
East Prussia, on the 21st of October 1944, the Red Army massacred 74 German civilians and some
50 French and Belgian POWs, though not before torturing them for their own "entertainment."
According to a Wehrmacht officer who later discovered the scene,
the Soviets had nailed some civilians to barn doors in cruciform positions. Again,
these are just a few of many examples. Generally, Soviet destruction battalions plundered, murdered,
and razed civilian settlements to the ground, just as high-up command had ordered them to do.
This brings is to our next, and most vulgar, point — the Red Army raped hundreds of thousands
of women and young girls before, during, and after the Second World War. In Poland alone,
it's estimated that more than 100,000 females were raped by Red Army soldiers, leading to a
country-wide STD pandemic which affected about 10% of the population after the war. In Hungary,
rape victim estimates vary from 5,000 to 200,000. Of course, this occurred all throughout Germany
too, and especially in and around the Battle of Berlin. The number of German women raped by Soviet
soldiers has been estimated to be as high as 2 million, and it's also estimated that some 240,000
of these victims were killed in the act or after it. In the words of British military historian
Antony Beevor, it was the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history," and no women from "eight to
eighty years old" were spared. Similar atrocities occurred after the war in Europe,
during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, in which Red Army soldiers raped and massacred thousands
of Japanese women and children. As one witness reported it, the soldiers were permitted by their
commanders to carry out, in his words, "three days of rape and pillage" on a newly captured city.
So far, we've mostly covered the atrocities inflicted by Red Army soldiers on civilians.
But what about military personnel? All in all, the Soviets tortured and murdered hundreds of
thousands of enemy soldiers, many after they had been taken as POWs, and many almost immediately
after they had surrendered. It's estimated that as many 3 million German soldiers, for instance,
were captured by the Soviets throughout the war, with more than 380,000 of them perishing
in captivity. Others report the German death toll as high as 1 million, which is more than
33% of all German soldiers captured. Many of these POWs succumbed to starvation, disease,
exposure, previously inflicted wounds, and Red Army violence. The Soviets carried out soldier
massacres too, with the Katyn massacre being among the most infamous. Between April and May 1940,
the NKVD executed some 22,000 Polish military personnel, purported spies and saboteurs,
land and factory owners, and other — in quotation marks — "undesirables" in Katyn Forest in Russia,
and Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons in Russia and the Ukraine. What makes this massacre so scandalous
is that the USSR first blamed it on the Nazis and then, in 1990, admitted to it. As it turned out,
Stalin himself had approved the massacre. While not quite on the same scale as Katyn,
between the 29th of December 1941 and New Year's Day 1942, the Red Army executed up to 160 German
soldiers in the Crimean port city of Feodosia. Here, the Soviets mutilated the helpless soldiers,
threw them out of windows, and soaked them in cold water so they would slowly freeze to death.
Across several Ukrainian towns in February 1943, the Red Army took 596 Axis personnel prisoner, of
which 508 were military and 88 were civilian — not just Germans, but Italians, Romanians, Hungarians,
and fellow Ukrainians too. Just like in Feodosia, the Soviets mutilated them horrifically,
cutting pieces off their bodies and stuffing them into their mouths, before killing them.
Pretty atrocious, right? What we mustn't forget is that the Soviets
weren't the only ones who did stuff like this, and this video, of course,
doesn't detail what the soldiers of other nations, namely Germany,
did to the soldiers and civilians of the USSR. Not to say that revenge is an excuse; it isn't.
But what do you think? Was this a fair overview of Soviet atrocities in the
Second World War? Can you think of any other atrocities the Soviets committed?
Please share your thoughts in the comments.