Four years after the Soviet Army fought its way into Berlin in 1945, Moscow built a huge memorial in Treptower Park to the 80,000 Russian and other Soviet soldiers who died taking the city. (5,000 of them are actually buried in the park.) And Berliners instantly took to calling it the "Tomb of the Unknown Rapist".
As Soviet troops fought their way into the eastern half of Nazi Germany in the winter and spring of 1945, a great atrocity took place. "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty," wrote Natalya Geese, a war correspondent with the Red Army. "It was an army of rapists."
Russian film director Zakhar Agranenko, who fought in Germany in 1945, wrote in his diary that "Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women. Nine, ten, twelve men at a time -- they rape them on a collective basis." Historian Antony Beevor estimated that up to two million German females were raped, many of them multiple times.
