1945 The Savage Peace Atrocities Against Germany | BBC Documentary

This is an old BBC documentary. Being a mainstream production there are some inaccuracies of course. But even then they admitted how horribly wronged the people of Germany were...

“Enjoy the war, for the peace will be savage,” was apparently a macabre joke circulating in the German military towards the end of World War Two. Peter Molloy’s searing documentary, 1945: The Savage Peace, showed us just how prescient it would prove, charting the cruelties that would follow the end of conflict. Man’s inhumanity to man would continue long after the war itself had formally ended.

It showed itself in many different forms of vengeance and reprisal. Soviet troops advancing on Berlin raped German women of all ages on an almost unimaginable scale, not something that’s mentioned in histories of the Red Army, nor a memory to be associated with the grandeur and pathos of Moscow’s Victory Day commemorations. “It was over quickly, thank God,” we heard Christa Ronke, a Berlin girl who kept a diary through 1945, remembering how she was raped. Except it wasn’t, of course: these were violations repeated almost ad infinitum, gang rapes carried on around the clock, with the full knowledge of the army commanders. In a ghastly overlapping of imagery, the troops who had defended their own occupied Motherland at such a heavy price wreaked their unsated lust for revenge on the female population of their erstwhile occupiers."