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The Serbs had rape camps. Women and girls were kidnapped and repeatedly raped over and over until they killed themselves or became pregnant by Serbian soldiers. Then they were released. But in their culture that is a great discrase. Many did commit sucide, or were rejected by their families, or abandoned babies. You can question weather the culture was being too harsh with these women, but the fact is the Serbs were aware of what was going to happen and did it for that reason.
Rape as a punishment is torture and there is no other term for it. And this is much more comparable to the Nazi genocide than a street thug grabbing a woman off the street. This was planned and carefull exectued based on ethnic identity and with the intent to destroy families. The Serbian agenda was called the new fashion term, ethnic clensiing, but its still genocide. The women who were raped were intented to be set apart where the children they had would not be a part of that culture.
And pity the surviving children. I suspect most ended up abandoned, killed or in orphanages surrendered by the mothers hoping to find some way to get back their lives.
Bosnians too killed all Serbian families (not Muslim) ......
Bosnians too killed all Serbian families (not Muslim) ......
Which does not make what the Serbs did justified or acceptable. Serbia had been one of the more influencial states in Yugoslavia and still regarded themselves as "better". The camps were not just something that sprung up unplanned.
That the Bosnians also retaliated is not a justification for either side, but a fact of how things work. Nor does it make the trauma for the victums any less.
What we all need to remember is the victums of such crimes, including systematic rape, are people who are hurt and damaged and in some cases destroyed. They are not numbers in a count of victums or examples but *people* who did not deserve to be treated as they were.
I am sorry if I sound crass but I would rather be a raped woman than a dead man.Men bear the lions share when it comes to the horrors of war for the simple fact that they do most of the fighting.How many countless men have been forced to fight in some stupid war and end up dead from something they wanted no part of.That kinda sounds like rape only you end up dead with your guts plastered over some battle feild.
here is how hitler came to power, threw the SA open gun battles in the streets, he overthrew the government
When using the word “overthrow” in regards to a government, the implication is that force was applied to seize power. In the instance of Hitler, his ascendancy to the post of Chancellor was completely legal and in line with the Weimar Republic constitution. The constitution gave the Reichspresident, in this instance Paul von Hindenburg, the right to select whoever he wanted to serve as Chancellor. He didn’t have to choose Hitler, but he did for a very specific reason. And that reason was von Hindenburg’s own political leanings.
Von Hindenburg was an authoritarian at heart who despised Communists, Socialists and Catholics fairly equally. To counter these forces that he felt were a threat to Germany, his preference was for right leaning governments to rule the republic. While he abhorred the tactics and ideology of the Nazis, they stood as the largest, most viable right wing party around which a government could be formed. When his favorite former Chancellor, Franz von Papen, approached him with the idea of a coalition government comprised of the Nazi Party and the ultra-nationalist German National People’s Party, von Hindenburg gave his approval. And with that, Hitler legally became Chancellor. Similarly, the “Reichstag Fire Decree” which suspended the civil rights of German citizens and the “Enabling Act” that gave Hitler dictatorial power, were legally passed by the Reichstag and signed into law by President von Hindenburg.
So in reality, there was no overthrow of the Weimar Republic. Instead, the inherent weaknesses of the Weimar constitution and von Hindenburg’s political beliefs were successfully exploited to give Hitler what he sought; transfer of power to him directly by legitimate means.
I am sorry if I sound crass but I would rather be a raped woman than a dead man.Men bear the lions share when it comes to the horrors of war for the simple fact that they do most of the fighting.How many countless men have been forced to fight in some stupid war and end up dead from something they wanted no part of.That kinda sounds like rape only you end up dead with your guts plastered over some battle feild.
You've obviously never been raped and thus cannot fathom the horror, brutality, and pain it causes. And those sufferings go on for years.
I am sorry if I sound crass but I would rather be a raped woman than a dead man.Men bear the lions share when it comes to the horrors of war for the simple fact that they do most of the fighting.How many countless men have been forced to fight in some stupid war and end up dead from something they wanted no part of.That kinda sounds like rape only you end up dead with your guts plastered over some battle feild.
I have to agree with this. Even if you don't get killed. Even if you don't get maimed or permanently disabled. Even if you don't end up a prisoner of war (Soviet POWs were treated little better than Jews and most of them died in captivity, either worked to death as slave labor or simply killed in a gas chamber). The stress and the psychological trauma of combat is probably the worst thing one can possibly live through. Seeing your comrades turn into ground meat daily. Killing other people so often that it becomes routine for you and you feel nothing afterward. Smelling burnt human flesh and seeing decomposing bodies all around you. Not knowing if you will meet similar fate that night, they day after or next week or next month. War is hell on Earth.
I have to agree with this. Even if you don't get killed. Even if you don't get maimed or permanently disabled. Even if you don't end up a prisoner of war (Soviet POWs were treated little better than Jews and most of them died in captivity, either worked to death as slave labor or simply killed in a gas chamber). The stress and the psychological trauma of combat is probably the worst thing one can possibly live through. Seeing your comrades turn into ground meat daily. Killing other people so often that it becomes routine for you and you feel nothing afterward. Smelling burnt human flesh and seeing decomposing bodies all around you. Not knowing if you will meet similar fate that night, they day after or next week or next month. War is hell on Earth.
War is horrible and we should never ever clothe it in glory and sacrifice so fully that we make it sound any less. It damages and changes everyone who is part of it. My father was on the second wave of most of the island landings during WW2 and never once said anything about it except during a movie where a massacre was occuring, when he commented, rather out of the blue, that there is a lot more blood than that when you shoot someone.
But the point here is that soldiers are sent to war. They go knowing what they will face and have training. Yes, nothing will ever *really* prepare them, but it is a known thing. Rape during war except for a some cases during our current wars involves civilians. They are victums who do not have the guns to fight with. Nor are we talking about grown women alone. Rapes of civilians in wars start with small girls and extend to elderly women who are raped simply becase they are female and they are the target nationality. Both are horrible things, but they are different.
We have long had this dismissal of rape as a "lesser" thing because it has victums who cannot explain. Culturally, even in the United States, for a long time women withdrew into themselves rather than tear apart their families from the shame. And often the payback was private and personal. So we only in the last decades have come to see it as the horrible crime of violation and violence it is.
It is used as an instrument of war, and except for those servicewomen who have been targeted at capture, it has been an instrument primarily used against civilian populations as one of the methods of torture, abuse and control. And punishment for losing. But when nine year old girls are raped by soldiers, how can anyone *blame* them for their punishment?
Maybe instead of saying one form of depersonalization and abuse is worse or better we should think of ways for them not to happen instead.
War is horrible and we should never ever clothe it in glory and sacrifice so fully that we make it sound any less. It damages and changes everyone who is part of it. My father was on the second wave of most of the island landings during WW2 and never once said anything about it except during a movie where a massacre was occuring, when he commented, rather out of the blue, that there is a lot more blood than that when you shoot someone.
But the point here is that soldiers are sent to war. They go knowing what they will face and have training. Yes, nothing will ever *really* prepare them, but it is a known thing. Rape during war except for a some cases during our current wars involves civilians. They are victums who do not have the guns to fight with. Nor are we talking about grown women alone. Rapes of civilians in wars start with small girls and extend to elderly women who are raped simply becase they are female and they are the target nationality. Both are horrible things, but they are different.
We have long had this dismissal of rape as a "lesser" thing because it has victums who cannot explain. Culturally, even in the United States, for a long time women withdrew into themselves rather than tear apart their families from the shame. And often the payback was private and personal. So we only in the last decades have come to see it as the horrible crime of violation and violence it is.
It is used as an instrument of war, and except for those servicewomen who have been targeted at capture, it has been an instrument primarily used against civilian populations as one of the methods of torture, abuse and control. And punishment for losing. But when nine year old girls are raped by soldiers, how can anyone *blame* them for their punishment?
Maybe instead of saying one form of depersonalization and abuse is worse or better we should think of ways for them not to happen instead.
Mostly agree, especially with the last part but still, 3 points:
1. Yes we should keep military casualties separate from civilian ones but this leads down a dangerous slippery slope towards suggesting that they are somehow par for the course. Not saying you said that but it happens too often imo. Example being 9/11 victims getting almost religious reverence, being called "heros" and their families receiving millions of dollars vs the much more numerous but avoidable casualties of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. The difference between military personnel and civilians is not as great as it seems. In the Soviet Union during WWII, for example, you could be a civilian one day and be shoved by the military police onto a train heading for the front the next. Many of them were only 17 years old, barely old enough to shave.
3. Since the thread is about an aspect of the Soviet-German war, it should be pointed out that most (more than 2/3) of the Soviet casualties were civilians.
PS - its really hard to drum up any sympathy for Nazi Germany despite knowing that members of the German resistance and pro-Soviet german women were brutally mistreated by Soviet troops.
It's really hard to figure how that statement contradicts anything in the OP, which indicts the Soviets rather than evaluating anything at all about Nazi Germany.
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