A statue created in memory of the thousands of German woman raped by advancing red army soldiers has been torn down and scrapped by Polish officials.
In Poland even decades after the war the idea that Germans were in any way victims is actively discouraged so when the artist erected his statue showing a Soviet soldier raping a pregnant German woman – it was speedily dismantled, and the artist arrested.
Artist Jerzy Szumczyk a graduate from Gdansk’s Academy of Fine Arts said he had decided to make a statement after reading how the Red Army’s orgy of rape in the dying days of Nazi Germany was conducted on a much greater scale than previously suspected.
The statue, entitled Komm Frau (Come Here Woman), was installed on Gdansk’s Avenue of Victory (Aleja Zwyciestwa)
In Germany alone the scale of rape is suggested by the fact that about two million women had illegal abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.
Advancing Soviet troops raped millions of German woman – but in essence all women were targeted – and that included large numbers of Russian and Polish women held in concentration camps.
Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, began the most genocidal conflict in history. Perhaps 30 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union are now thought to have died during the war, including more than three million who were deliberately starved in German PoW camps.
The Germans, having shown no quarter, could expect none in return. Their casualties were also on a vast scale. In the Battle of Berlin alone more than a million German soldiers were killed or died later in captivity, plus at least 100,000 civilians. The Soviet Union lost more than 300,000 men.
Against this horrific background, Stalin and his commanders condoned or even justified rape, not only against Germans but also their allies in Hungary, Romania and Croatia.
The rapes had begun as soon as the Red Army entered East Prussia and Silesia in 1944. In many towns and villages every female, aged from 10 to 80, was raped.
The rape of Germany left a bitter legacy. It contributed to the unpopularity of the East German communist regime and its consequent reliance on the Stasi secret police. The victims themselves were permanently traumatised: women of the wartime generation still refer to the Red Army war memorial in Berlin as “the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist”.
Yet the Polish artist’s attempt to give a proper tribute to the victims was short lived, it was removed Monday morning.
“The artist was detained and released after questioning,” police spokesperson Aleksandra Siewert told Polish Radio.
“The matter will now be taken up on Monday by the prosecutor’s office,” she confirmed.
Jerzy said he had read extensively on the subject of rape by the Red Army as it advanced across Eastern Europe towards Berlin from 1944-45, and “was unable to cope with it” and so had created a statue to express his feelings.
Prior to the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Gdansk was a free city called Danzig. Over 95 percent of the inhabitants were German.