Do you think Soviet atrocities on German civillians during WWII have been ignored by scholars?

Answer 1

The crimes of Communism as a whole are overlooked by the majority of scholars, writers, etc. There are a number of exceptions but the German Holocaust against the Jews sells books, movies, and gets your name in the papers. Additionally, it is easy to research. The Allies captured all of the Nazi documents related to the Holocaust. Whereas the Russians after initially making available their archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union to researchers have now largely shut access to NKVD, KGB and related archives.

There is also the culpability of the so-called intelligentsia, the many writers, scholars, artists that from the 1930's thru the 1980's that intentionally ignored or down-played Stalinist-communist crimes. In their minds mass-murder, sham-trials, and mass arrests were all part of the "revolutionary process."

However, one must be honest Germans committed their share of crimes and they are the loser. No one pities the loser.

In any case it is a pity for the world that there was no Nuremburg trial for the Communist mass-murderers.

I might add mass rape was committed in the European and Italian theaters by French-Algerian troops during the second world war. It is another "overlooked" story from the last war.

Answer 2

I don't think it has been ignored, in fact there has been some excellent research and writing about this since the wall came down.

There are a few issues of "context" here for lack of a better term. What Stalin did to his own people far surpasses what happened to German civilians; the horrors of the concentration camps will (I pray) never be exceeded, so they put the atrocities against the Germans in an unusual light; and we've yet to really address that the German people -- almost as a whole -- were onboard with what Hitler was doing.

It's troubling that there seems to be inclinations towards revisionist history taking place in Germany. I'm still stunned that the Japanese have yet to even remotely come to terms with the sweeping atrocities they committed in WWII.

Answer 3

What the Soviets did was really payback time for what the Germans had done to their civilians. Actually in the US we are taught little about the war on the Eastern Front, which is where most of the fighting took place. So to answer your question it is largely ignored. As are the Japanese atrocities against the Chinese and Koreans.

Answer 4

No, I don't think they've been ignored.

From what I learned in my World War II classes, the violence that the Soviets inflicted on the Germans was "justified" because of the horrors that the German armies performed when they were on Soviet homeland. Of course, two wrongs don't make a right, but granted they were helping the Allies and no one liked the German's ( I know, huge generalization and understatement there) , it does get pushed aside often.

Just how society goes, I suppose.

Answer 5

For sometime after WW2 - yes. In more recent times - no. Read “Berlin: The Downfall 1945” by Antony Beevor.

Answer 6

Scholars??!! Let's just say politics is a nice way of calling somebody an animal.

Answer 7

most of it was revenge, as they had seen what the germans had done to russian civilians.