Soviet troops reportedly raped German women and girls, with total victim estimates ranging from tens of thousands to two million. During and after the occupation of Budapest, (Hungary), an estimated 50,000 women and girls were raped. Regarding rapes that took place in Yugoslavia, Stalin responded to a Yugoslav partisan leader’s complaints saying, “Can’t he 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?”
In former Axis countries, such as Germany, Romania and Hungary, Red Army officers generally viewed cities, villages and farms as being open to pillaging and looting. For example, Red Army soldiers and NKVD members frequently looted transport trains in 1944 and 1945 in Poland and Soviet soldiers set fire to the city centre of Demmin while preventing the inhabitants from extinguishing the blaze, which, along with multiple rapes, played a part in causing over 900 citizens of the city to commit suicide. In the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, when members of the SED reported to Stalin that looting and rapes by Soviet soldiers could result in negative consequences for the future of socialism in post-war East Germany, Stalin reacted angrily: “I shall not tolerate anybody dragging the honour of the Red Army through the mud.” Accordingly, all evidence of looting, rapes and destruction by the Red Army was deleted from archives in the Soviet occupation zone.
According to recent figures, of an estimated 4 million POWs taken by the Russians, including Germans, Japanese, Hungarians, Romanians and others, some 580,000 never returned, presumably victims of privation or the Gulags, compared with 3.5 million Soviet POW who died in German camps out of the 5.6 million taken.
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