"A Woman in Berlin", By Anonymous

[Dogdaddy]

Nobody in the 20th century suffered as much as the people of Russia and the Soviet Union...first under Stalin, then the Germans and then back to Stalin again. There is a part in the book and the movie both where a Russian Soldier talks about what happened in his village when the Nazis came through it. The Germans raped and killed the women, then turned on the children. They held the small children by the ankles and then swung them around, bashing their heads against the buildings. If that had happened to my family I think I would have wanted to kill Germans until there was no more Germans left to kill. Most everybody in the western world knows about The Holocaust and the murdering of 6 million Jews, but not that many know of the magnitude of the atrocities the Soviet people suffered under the German occupation during WWII, which contributed to the retaliation by soldiers of the Red Army in 1945. I think the Cold War contributed to the lack of concern for the Russian people. Most of us including myself, grew up thinking of all of them as our natural enemies until the fall of communism. The more I learn about what happened to the people in other countries the greater my understanding of WWII in general. So many million innocents, from the people of Leningrad to the women of Berlin had their lives altered forever due to the greed of Hitler and the cruelty of Stalin! I have sympathy for all of them today.