Was the Russian Soldier Always Cruel to Civilians During Wartime?
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 18 окт 2024
- Was the Russian soldier always cruel to civilians in occupied territories? In this video we're gonna explore some case studies: the Russian invasion of East Prussia (1914), the Russian occupation of Eastern Galicia (1914-15), the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland (1939-41), the Soviet conquest of Eastern Germany (1944-45) and the Soviet occupation of Hungary (1944-45).
History Hustle presents: Was the Russian / Soviet Soldier Always Cruel to Civilians During Wartime?
SUPPORT ME ON PATREON ► / historyhustler
SUPPORT ME ON PAYPAL ► www.paypal.com...
SUBSCRIBE ► / @historyhustle
INSTAGRAM ► / historyhustle
FACEBOOK ► / historyhustler
TWITTER ► / hustlehistory
RUSSIA DURING WW1:
• Russia during World Wa...
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION:
• The February Revolutio...
OCTOBER REVOLUTION:
• The October Revolution...
MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT:
• Why Germany and the So...
SOVIET OCCUPATION OF EAST POLAND:
• The Soviet Occupation ...
GERMAN INVASION OF HUNGARY:
• The German Invasion of...
BATTLE OF BUDAPEST:
• The Battle of Budapest...
SOVIET BRUTALITY IN EAST PRUSSIA:
• Why Were the Soviets s...
SOURCES
- Russia in Flames. War, Revolution, Civil War 1914 - 1921 (Laura Engelstein).
- Ivan's War. The Red Army, 1939 - 45 (Catherine Merridale).
- Bloodlands Europe. Between Hitler And Stalin (Timothy Snyder).
- Russia's War (Richard Overy).
- Beyond Duty. The Reasons Some Soldiers Commit Atrocities (Walter S. Zapotoczny Jr.).
- Hungary in World War II. Caught in the Cauldron (Deborah S. Cornelius).
- The Battle for Budapest: 100 Days in World War II (Krisztian Ungvary).
- www.theguardia... (19-09-2022).
IMAGES
Images from commons.wikimedia.org.
VIDEO
Video material from:
• Teacher Resource: Worl...
Teacher Resource: World War 1-The Eastern Front
"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."
MUSIC
"Division" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons...
"The Descent" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons...
SOUNDS
Freesound.org.
E-MAIL
historyhustle[at]gmail.com
RUSSIA DURING WW1:
ruclips.net/video/3iE4NSiZtIQ/видео.html
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION:
ruclips.net/video/muITdbxCLVE/видео.html
OCTOBER REVOLUTION:
ruclips.net/video/QGxR1sanyyU/видео.html
MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT:
ruclips.net/video/yuXMR8RDFow/видео.html
SOVIET OCCUPATION OF EAST POLAND:
ruclips.net/video/ER1AYnOFTEg/видео.html
GERMAN INVASION OF HUNGARY:
ruclips.net/video/jfkoAfMm14Q/видео.html
BATTLE OF BUDAPEST:
ruclips.net/video/5Ehr9HAu9xk/видео.html
SOVIET BRUTALITY IN EAST PRUSSIA:
ruclips.net/video/KK8zOhTDzvU/видео.html
(ʘ‿ʘ)ノ✿ 🇧🇷 ✅
So, you've forgotten to mention, that 1945 in Czech Republic there were no atrocities. So simple it is, it was prohibited
In russian army there is unwritten rule since at least 300 years - if the town is taken 2 days for looting, afterwards - court martial. Fair enough
@@dimarusanov6107 interesting to learn.
Another set of nonsense, false gossip and Goebbels propaganda, the purpose of which is to denigrate Russia and the Soviet Union. Your ancestors were maniacs and Nazis who killed millions of women and children. You're trying to whitewash your own and denigrate the Russians. And put their actions on the same board. The alleged (only in their own words) rape of several thousand women in Germany and the murder of millions of women in the USSR are not the same thing. All your lies are not confirmed by any documents. Women hungry for sex were floundered with Soviet soldiers. And when it came time to give birth, they told their neighbors and relatives that they had been raped.
@@HistoryHustle russian soldier killed by machine gun without any hesitation and reason on morning 21 8 1968, in downtown of Prague - she had baby at home and she was 21 years she was walking to the school
in 1990s president Boris Jelcin visited that place and tried to apologised.... and similar things are happening again on Ukraine...
I’m glad you mentioned the chechen war cause the atrocities that came out of that one from both sides were insane. Russian soldiers knew fear well before ever reaching grozny or wherever else. It seemed like the entire army in the 90’s to 2000’s was a penal battalion on steroids.
A video about the chechen wars would be welcome. 🇧🇷
It is better to talk about how the Chechens expelled and massacred the entire Russian population of Chechnya, and then used this territory with impunity for bandit attacks on the territory of the rest of Russia. The topic of slavery and robbery of trains passing through Chechnya is particularly interesting.
@@АлександрИванов-ч4б3с i’ve heard very little about chechens slaughtering russians right after the soviet union fell but from what i’ve read it’s pretty brutal. I read “Meet the Chechens” on a website cluborlov i think, nasty stuff. Typical jihadist/ wahhabist shit
it wasn't that bad, compared to Phoenix program in Vietnam or torture in Ukraine
@@ddoumeche the youtube comment expert has arrived
A quote from the Boxer Rebellion reads as follows: “The conduct of the Russians is atrocious, the French aren’t much better, and the Japanese are looting and burning without mercy”
That just goes to show that it's not something unique to Russian soldiers. Atrocities will always be comitted in war, especially by countries with totalitarian governments and heavy propaganda influence such as Nazi Germany or The Soviet Union.
Jap brutality was unmatched. There's always an element of sadism that went beyond looting and raping.
@@majungasaurusaaaa Honestly I would rather shoot myself than let myself be captured by the Japanese
Everyone talks about Russia or Germany but never Japan war crimes for some reason, even though they are a NATO ally, people see them as well mannered and respectful people (ignoring their tendency to cover up crimes)
Compared to Germans or Russian people, their younger generations literally have NO CLUE about ww2, and generlaly just told about the atom bombs only
@@comradekenobi6908 Nah because you're in either american or european sphere that why only people talk about germans or russian brutality. Just try to engaged ww2 conversation with chineses or koreans and they won't shut up about japanese brutality which kind of ironic for korean because thier countrymen are just as brutal as thier japanese counterpart when they're in IJA uniform according to my great grandfather.
Very sad that in extremely cruel wars like the ones mentioned in this video the civilian populations suffered so much. Another great video. Thanks Stefan!
Thanks Luis!
My Great Grandmother on my Mom's side before she passed told me a story when I was 10 and was just starting to get into WWII. She was born in and grew up in Latvia. Even though she was young during the time, she remembered the Soviet occupation, the German occupation, and the Soviet re-occupation. She grew up on a horse farm close to Liepāja. And when the Soviets retook Latvia from the Germans in, Soviet soldiers who happened to be passing by her farm, beat one of her horses to death with chains in front of her. Even through she and and no one she closely knew was killed or even harmed by the Soviets, she still lived out the rest of her life regarding Russian soldiers as barbaric.
Personally I have no strong opinions on Russian soldiers, I just think this is an interesting story.
Funny she never considered the German soldiers as barbaric while they were rounding up her Jewish neighbours in Latvia onto trains and sending them to Auschwitz.
You grandmas family were with the nazis. They were lucky that only their horse died, considering all the crimes the Nazis and Latvians did to the Jews and Slavs of the region
Sometimes I wish I could enter the minds of all these barbaric "soldiers" just to find what sort of poor excuses they have for such horrendous actions as the one which you just described.
@@AlreadyTakenTag Indeed, it is very difficult to try to understand strange stories could retelling for the many time and distorted. It's even harder to understand people who have been through hell if the biggest problem in your life was diarrhea.
@@AlreadyTakenTag Rage, resentment, a feeling of power and a constant haze induced by vodka drank every 3 or 4 hours.
If these action were done by American and other western soldiers, people going to scream to top of their lung.
The Germans were well aware of the atrocities they inflicted on Russians during the war, so it was no accident that the Germans were desperate to surrender to the Americans if they could, they knew exactly what they had done and that Russians would be out for their blood in the same brutal and indiscriminate way.
EIK PO VELYNIU RUSIJA
The only good communist is a Dead communist ALWAYS
@Steiner 01 Not sure what point you are exactly trying to make, atrocities are atrocities whether motivated by ideology or revenge. No doubt the Wehrmacht were staffed with normal 'soldiers' not sadistic killers/rapists - they found their calling in exterminating millions of Jews, the non-racially pure, dissidents etc. One can argue about the stats but both sides, normal soldiers, murdered/slaughtered other soldiers, and yes during a war brutal unjustifiable acts of heinous violence were committed - one could further argue that the Soviets were massacring long before the war broke out, did they just continue with the Germans with easier hearts?. Where do you place the atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers during WW2 - ideological , vengeful or ? Both the Germans and the Japanese were supposedly motivated by a sense of racial superiority. In the end it was politics, how to rule the world and to achieve those ends, you have to justify the unprovoked violence to subjugate a neighbour.
@Steiner 01 After what the Germans had done in Russia, Soviet soldiers had the right to do anything to the Germans. But judging by the fact that Germany and the German people still exist, they should be eternally grateful to us Russians and forever be in our debt.
@@АлександрИванов-ч4б3с Bull shit
There will always be those who seek to use wartime chaos to cover their disgusting and cruel acts, just because they can. That doesnt mean an entire nation is bad, or good for that matter. Thank you for providing a grounded historical perspective for all of us to view the war in Ukraine from!
Attaching any conclusions about current claims of atrocities to crimes in the distant past by people long dead makes about as much sense as accepting as unquestionable the conclusions of a primary school teacher with a RUclips channel.
@@alswann2702 I would like to point out that I made two separate points here, one that bad men will always use war to justify cruel acts, and two that I appreciate having a more historically grounded viewpoint to view the war in Ukraine from. I simply did not separate the two points with a paragraph break. Did not at all intend to tie the two thoughts together. My apologies!
@Kaisuke Ok? I fail to see how this relates at all to what I had commented, but sure, whatever makes you happy...
What about the rape of almost every woman in berlin?
@Kaisuke your existence upsets me not at all, funny youre so weak minded that an image of a stranger online has upset you at all!
the "soviet" soldier implies the soviet union was just 'russia' or some 'russian imperial army'. the soviet's red army was of multiple nationalities
It's always a bit tricky. If I would've only used the word 'Russian' people would state I had to use the word 'Soviet'. Can't satisfy everyone.
majority is russians and other nations were forced to be in it, so it is fair to call it russian
one of my grandfather was forced to fight, and he fled at first chance (he was old fighter/partizan before that) and just knew how to do it, desert properly and left to Austria
@@yuriyseliuk4120 "and other nations were forced to be in i' -ahahaah
@@yuriyseliuk4120 Ukrainians soldiers fought against Poland just to get into Russia a lot of the times, they forced themselves into that
@@krak8978 fighting against Poland does not equal fighting to be part of russia. They fought for independence.
I work in a museum. We have an exhibit, that shows that between April and July 1945, in St. Pölten - now 56.000 inhabitants, back than about 40k - 2430 cases of rape were reported. The true number probably much higher.
that would be the red rape army doing what it does best -- after all, the German army kicked the tar out of the russians in 2 world wars, so what could be easier than torturing civilians -- like the mongoloid russians are doing in Ukraine. mongoloid russians never change.
Well the numbers of German and Italian Hungarians comited rape and atrocities on the eastern front was triple the amount what Soviets did. I'm not justifying them but facts are facts.
@@PavelAVasilevich show proof, troll
@@PavelAVasilevichSounds like Russian propaganda. It was mostly the Russian soldiers who raped civilians. I'm sure others did too but not on the same scale.
@@acosorimaxconto5610 материалы Нюрнбергского процесса почитай, нацист
My grandmother is stil around, she was thirteen when the Soviet army "liberated" her little village in Southwestern Hungary. Fortunately, that particular outfit didn't hurt anyone, they just barged into people's homes to sleep there. Grandmother was worried. His father had a nasty temper and she feared that he'd get visibly pissed off at the Soviets, provoking them to shoot him or take him away. She also said that despite all of this, she felt pity for them. They looked like homeless people with guns; they were hungry, filthy, tired and knew that they could die any moment. Fortunately, after about a week they packed up and went West and a Bulgarian infantry unit replaced them. Now, the contrast between the Soviets and the Bulgarians was striking; the Bulgarians looked like and behaved like an actual military. The Bulgarian soldiers were very polite, friendly even. They set up a field bakery in the village to support their army, but made sure that enough bread is diverted to the townsfolk. It seemed that they wanted to make sure that the children are especially well-fed. Also, some of the Bulgarian soldiers were even capable of courting the local girls, but like they were in their hometowns and their mothers were watching. God bless them...
People always look dirty and exhausted when they are right out of combat. For obvious reasons.
If they’re clean and well fed - that probably means they’re just guarding the rears.
What your grandma saw was a unit that went through h ell.
Hungary was never liberated. You got the be an opponent of the Nazis for that.
As a bulagarian i habe to tell you that we never had our army fight for extensive periods of time and we were not in the war since the begining nor did we launch any big military operations. So our soldier and army as a whole were very fresh and ready for battle. After our tsar passed away ,,mysteriously" the tsars government took power for a while when the soviets got close there was a coup and the communist took over.
The soviets went to hell and back they have been enduring this for days months and years by this point. Those soldiers who can be killed any moment do everything and horde everything they can do when they are still alive.
Also lets not forhet there were a lot ukrainians in the red army as well
As a Russian, I am really sorry that we interrupted the Liberation of Eastern Europe by Germany
@@darthzourr1361 I would rather be liberated by the Western Allies than by the Soviet hordes.
With that kind of history with Russian occupation, it is no surprise why alot of East European and some Central European countries joined NATO.
I can imagine yes.
Right. Because NATO has no history of occupation. 🤪
🤡 everywhere
@@sullathehutt7720 not really. Nato invaded lot of countries but occupation was very brief like they occupied it till a new government is formed. Like in iraq and Afghanistan.
@@ShubhamMishrabro
Oh, so occupation doesn't count if it's "brief." How long is "brief?" 20 years? 😄
How long has NATO occupied Japan, Germany and Italy? Has NATO actually left Iraq? What about Syria?
@@ShubhamMishrabro NATO tried to destroy Serbia. But we had never surrendered.
Oral history from my great aunt, who survived both world wars and the Russian occupation of their village, the Russians looted their farm in East Prussia (the village was called Grosswohnsdorf) during 1914, but the farm was still intact. Although the family fled the village late in the Second World War, the Red Army caught up with the civilian refugees. My great aunts youngest daughter was gang raped and then murdered in front of her. Great aunt Augusta then spent about two years in a Russian gulag, I suppose lucky to have survived the experience. Late in life she travelled to Poland and she said she could actually see her old home across the border in annexed territory the Russians now call Kaliningrad, with some Russians presumably living there now.
So wie man in den Wald hineinruft, so schallt es heraus
After what you did in Russia, you should be very grateful that the entire German population was simply not slaughtered. The Americans, by the way, offered to arrange a genocide of Germany. Read about the Morgenthau plan. And you certainly should kiss every Russian in the ass in gratitude for the fact that Russia pick up only such a small piece of land as the Kaliningrad region. Stalin gave almost all the eastern German lands to Poland. I wonder what for?
@@ronyobry898 warum haben dann die Russen schon in Polen, Ungarn und Rumänien vergewaltigt und gemordet?
Barbarism and savagery of Germans doesn't have match in history of modern warfare! Things Germans and Croats (and others, just to be fair) did in Balkans, Russia and Belarus can't be comprehended by sane person. Payback time is bad for civilians, soldiers and regime fled the scene and poor civilians are left behind. We, current generations, should know better and prevent wars at any cost - war is source of all evil and all the soldiers are getting infected by the same evil!
@@jayklink851 One problem with these "gold crowns". First, they are not gold. Secondly, the local dentist admitted that it was his collection stolen from the dentist's office. In general, another Ukrainian fake.
And what do you whine about the atrocities of the Russian soldier? We haven't even taken you seriously yet. Look forward to what's to come. Will reply have to for the murder of the women and children of Donbass.
I mean i wouldn't wonder why the Soviet Soldier being cruel to it's enemies due to what the nazis did to the Soviet civilians and POWs.
Revenge did play a huge part.
Soviets acted similarly even before the nazis attacked them.
I think of Soviet actions in occupied Germany at the end of WWII like this. Imagine if the Nazis had invaded the United States, conquering half of the country before being pushed out. Now imagine the Nazis had murdered millions (including every Jew they encountered, and especially other minority groups), and also raped hundreds of thousands, and pillaged and destroyed countless Americans towns and cities during their occupation. When American soldiers eventually managed to fight on all the way to Berlin, do you really think those soldiers would have behaved towards German civilians the same as American forces usually conduct themselves in times of war? I tend to doubt it. There would have certainly been a mentality of exacting retribution against German civilians for the crimes German forces committed against American civilians, not all that different from how Soviet soldiers behaved against Germans.
Also interesting that Japan did play a role (albeit small one) during WWI. In that war, Japan was an Allied power. Japan captured quite a few German prisoners during the course of that war, but they treated them very well/humanely. This is in stark contrast to their treatment of prisoners (seeing them as non-persons) during WWII. I suspect a lot of this has to do with the intensity of WWII for their side compared to WWI. In lower intensity, less bloody conflicts, war crimes are inevitably going to be lessened.
boo fukn hoo
Right, and now face that it wasn't the German soldier but the American soldier who conquered North America and eradicated the vast majority of its native population.
In general 9 out of 10 is the officers to be blamed for their men actions
With state policy being a major catalyst as well
Excellent video again, Stefan. War is the ultimate obscenity and it makes pornography look like a Disney movie. Great job. Cheers.
Thanks for watching, Paul!
Already saw your video in dutch but again good video. I like these types of videos
Awesome 😁
From Wikipedia.
"After the victory of Battle of Storkyro, Mikhail Golitsyn was appointed the governor of Finland. Finns began waging partisan warfare against the Russians. As retaliation, the Finnish peasants were forced to pay large contributions to the occupying Russians (as was the custom at the time). Plundering and raping was widespread, especially in Ostrobothnia and in communities near the major roads. Churches were looted and Isokyrö was burned to the ground. A scorched-earth zone several hundred kilometers wide was created by the Russians to hinder Swedish counteroffensives. At least 5,000 Finns were killed and some 10,000 taken away as slaves, of whom only a few thousand would ever return;[5] according to more recent research, the number of the casualties would have been closer to 20,000.[6] Recent research also estimates the number of enslaved children and women to have been closer to 30,000.[7] The worst of these massacres took place on September 29, 1714, when during one night, the Cossacks killed about 800 inhabitants of the Hailuoto Island with axes.[8] Thousands, especially officials, fled to the (relative) safety of Sweden. The poorer peasants hid in the woods to avoid the ravages of the occupiers and their press-gangs.[9] Atrocities were at their worst between 1714 and 1717 when the Swedish Count Gustaf Otto Douglas, who had defected to the Russian side during the war, was in charge of the occupation."
Thanks god sweds were civilized people (cry in polish)
@@G0TIMAN Deluge flashbacks?
@@mdokuch96 yes
@@G0TIMAN I know that feel, bro, I know that feel...
You should also investigate how soviet army behaved in occupation of baltic states in 1940 and then re-ocupying them in 1945. Also a look into Finland war (so called winter war) would be also interesting.
Probably they behaved pretty much in the same pattern....
after baltic states joined SS troops I wonder why they were left alive there and not all slaughtered.
@@kirilld6206 Kindness. Not every Soviet was heartless. And I like to believe most were good people, their legacy tainted by evil men.
@@Foreign0817 who told you about evil russians lol. If you are not a german or italian nazi, you should be thankful to russians who were the bulk of soviet army especially 41-43, for destroying Nazi Germany. Otherwise we all would be slaves for germans.
@@kirilld6206 They joined SS , because Russis's NKVD have commiting genocide in that region. Before you are step up to conclusions, llways ask yourself WHY ?
@@kirilld6206 pretty sure not everyone in the Baltics joined the SS
I think an underdiscussed example of the Red Army committing war crimes would be the Soviet war in Afghanistan. People tend to forget just how brutal of an occupation it was, and will instead focus on the American support of the Mujahadeen. Literally half the population became refugees, and over 1 million people were killed. The military knew that the insurgents were being given shelter by their support base in local villages, so their solution was to REMOVE that support base by any means necessary. Villages would regularly be bombarded by helicopter and shelled by artillery, until all the civilians were killed or fleeing. Rape was also commonly used to "shame" and "dishonor" Afghan women and their families.
Tbf had the US not funded every vile species of terrorist from the beginning the entire Soviet afghan war and civil war would have been averted saving numerous lives with Afghanistan becoming a secular socialist state with sprawling soviet apartment blocks and extensive public transport and rise of every quality of life indicator vs the below rock bottom conditions the US left Afghanistan in.
@@ernestkhalimov1007 that's not true. Most of the population of Afghanistan was already in revolt against the DRA long before any US aid reached the rebels. And even though the US did fund the Mujahadeen, how is it America's fault if that the Soviet Army was killing so many civilians? The Soviet Afghan war was one of the most, if not THE most destructive conflicts since ww2. Why is your first instinct to blame America? Tankie Brain.
@@robfl100 the US funded the revolt from the outset and created the entire scenario that worsened to where the DRA govt pleaded for Moscows assistance numerous times until they finally responded.
Had America.not showered them in money it would have all been prevented and Afghanistan would be secular country like the now former Soviet.central Asian republics thus also preventing the foundation of Mujahideen and Al Qaeda that would sting America in the ass years later
@@ernestkhalimov1007 Dude, you're still wrong! First off the DRA wasn't some nice government that just wanted to bring reforms to the people. There was already a secular reformist government until 1978. The "Democratic" Republic of Afghanistan was established by a coup in 1978, and there was a period of severe political repressions that followed. Up to 27,000 people were executed in the first 2 years, and this made the regime extremely unpopular especially with the peasantry. It is true that Jimmy Carter approved about 500,000$ (which is barely anything) worth of aid in July 1979, but this didn't actually get received until after the Soviet invasion. There were already multiple uprisings in the country before the US approved that any aid be given to the rebels. The Herat uprising for instance, happened in march 1979, without any US aid whatsoever. The US obviously would later ramp up aid to the Mujahedeen as part of Operation Cyclone, but the vast vast majority of the aid was given after the Soviet Invasion.
You also floated the Idea that the DRA regime was "begging" for the USSR to intervene. This is also BS. The initial Soviet invasion - operation storm 333 - was an operation to remove the current leader of the DRA - Hafizullah Amin - with another leader who the Soviets thought they could more easily control. They justified this at the time with the conspiracy theory that Amin was working with the CIA. So the crazy, paranoid communist dictator, apparently wasn't communist enough for the Soviets. This was basically what the US did to Ngo Dihn Diem, except he at least he lasted 8 years, Amin didn't last one.
Also, not all of the Mujahedeen were crazy Islamic terrorists. Some of them definitely were, but they were a diverse bunch. Some believed in Islamic democracy, some were Shia, some were just Tajik tribesmen protecting their village, and some were even Maoists! Even the some of the more Islamist oriented Mujahedeen didn't subscribe to the same interpretation of Islam as the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Ahmad shah Masoud for instance - one of the most influential Mujahedeen leaders, would go on to fight the Taliban during the civil war.
At the end of the day even if everything you said is 100 percent true, guess what? It doesn't matter. The Soviets chose to invade the country, and over a million died because of it. Claiming the US made them do it is just cope on the highest level from crypto-tankies like yourself.
@@robfl100 wrong on all counts again.
As I said it would have all been averted had the US stayed away from the beginning but they didn't and the monster they created bit them in the ass later on.
I grew up with the testimony of my godfather who was hold in a disciplinary camp for people working in Germany during the second WW in Silesia and had to flee the advance of the Red Army ,it's a pity, but what he told us,is the same as what is told in this video: murder of innocent civilians,systematic looting an rape.There is no "civilized" war,only the dark side of humanity which has no restrains once it has a weapon and the "licence" to kill.
disciplinary camp
your grandfather was burning jews in furnaces and Soviet men came and liberated millions who would have otherwise been gassed or starved
and he lied to you to cover up his own crimes btw, very classic tactic for criminals
yes I robbed a grocery store but they gave me wrong change, thats why I shot cashier and 4 witnesses
this is your grandfather
Great video as always as very interesting to look at this topic the way you did
I also think some (top ?) officers clearly encouraged their troops to behave the way they did (and not just let them take the ‘initiative’). Knowing that even the Soviet POWs freed by their colleagues were regarded as traitors and sent to labor camps I would not be surprised if there had been such orders
and likewise, any German POW who had renounced nazism while in soviet prison camps was knifed and beaten to death by their own countrymen on the trainrides home, often times
Only examining WW1 and WW2 seems like to light a touch to reach any conclusions. More recent conflicts deserve scrutiny.
In Lithuania during wwII there are a lot of testimonies about german soldiers giving chocolates to children when germans were retrieting they mostly came to the villiges politely asking local to let them use wells for washing or asking can they give them some food, and when.russians came they were going to houses like to their own taking everything they found
Those testimonies were actually common all over the Baltic.
What about 200.000 Yews that had been killed by Lithuanians in 1941? The most intensive Holocaust in Europe was in Lithuania and Latvia.
@@adastra7842 Source?
Well it’s expected their poor as hell and considered them the enemy for aligning with the Germans after all they went through it’s messed up but everyone was hungry for revenge
Because they were retrieving, normally they would exterminate you
"It is difficult to make killers , it is impossible to unmake them "
Interesting quote.
Cony I think
I think if you go back even a hundred years and certainly two hundred years ago, the sad truth is most of this was considered pretty normal and acceptable conduct for most soldiers in war time. The trouble is that the Russian people and society have simply never been allowed to advance since then. They have never had a say in their government or a government that values their own lives, ever. They went from feudalism to a left-wing dictatorship to criminal kleptocracy and oligarchic despotism of Yeltsin in the 90s to now the neofascist far-right dictatorship of Putin... all along the people never having a say and being treated like chattle.
It is hard to value others when you feel like no one values or cares for you, even in your own home. This is NOT at all an excuse for any atrocity or war crime or imperialism- just a political and psychological explanation; fundamentally many of them still hold the values of a medieval society.
Hundreds of thousands of British and US troops and intervention in the Russian Civil War didn’t help.
It is actually accusation.
@@rilrahoneybee9621 Never heard of the Nazis and fascists
Ah, yes, the power of big words. So few understand. They just click the thumbs up as a natural response, having no idea what they're reading, assuming the author must be intelligent. Unfortunately, I'm not one of those people. I can read "big words" and not be wooed by the person writing them. 200 years ago is 1822. Wars back then were very musch still in the vein of "gentleman's wars." The idea of acts of barbarity by one's soldiers was a stain on the reputation of the officers/leaders, and thus, happened rarely. Complete hatred between two sides, like that shown between the Soviets and Germans (or Americans and Japanese), was rarely, if ever, seen prior, and thus, you very rarely hear of the atrocities committed during WWII being perpetrated prior to that conflict.
On the current Russia-Ukraine War, there's so much going on behind the scenes. To make a statement like, "the neofascist far-right dictatorship of Putin" is somehow at fault for all of the war crimes the Russians are committing is simply a joke. Firstly, Putin is not a fascist. I know it may be hard for people to understand, but the word "fascist" is thrown around so loosely by the corporate media these days, it's almost lost all meaning. Clearly, Prism is just regurgitating that corporate mediaspeak, and has forgotten what the word actually means (for those interested, look up the definition of facism by Mussolini, the man who, you know, actually created it, as opposed to the corporate media of 2022, who use it whenever they want, to push whatever agenda is relevant). Putin is, in his own words, a USSR sympathizer, and, by his actions, a clown who would like nothing more than to bring the USSR back from the dead. A fascist, he most certainly is not. The Russian people as a whole have a deep-seeded hate for fascists, which obviously hearkens back to the days of ACTUAL fascists, namely, Hitler. The harsh reality is, the Russia-Ukraine War goes far beyond Putin being a "neofascist far-right dictator."
@@rodafowa1279 Let's not debate the semantics of fascism, it never leads anywhere. And don't tell me Russians hate it. For them, fascism is just a propaganda term vaguely referring to the West. They would have loved Hitler had he beem Russian.
Looking sharp Stefan.
😎
The subject of Poland and the cruelty of the Red Army also returned in 1944 and 1945, where the Soviets treated ordinary Poles as brutally as Hungarians, despite the fact that Poland was an enemy of the Third Reich.
@carm-nice 1. Soviet soldiers were the first to attack the Polish army in 1919 in Belarus - the Soviets from the very beginning of their existence conducted warfare against Poland, against which Poland defended itself
2. Poland and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact in 1932, which has never been terminated. The Soviets broke it in 1939 by attacking Poland in cooperation with the Third Reich, again being the aggressor.
3. Polish civilians were citizens of an Allied state, i.e. one that was in the same camp as the USSR - the Soviets should not even treat this population badly for their own purposes, and they treated it on an equal footing with the population of the Axis countries
Brutality is one of the weapons in their armoury.
The worse they do the more brutal they get.
History is about details and nuances. Please watch the video if you haven't and let me know what you think of it.
Thanks for covering this
👌
And just an hour ago the Ukrainians struck the Antonovsky bridge with missiles, killing civilians including children who were escaping the Kherson area.
You might ask yourself, are Ukrainians savage by nature? The answer is yes. Look up the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
First, my video is about history, not what's going on today.
Second, I never stated Russians were savage by nature. In the tumbnail is a question mark and I reject the theory in the video.
Third, I guess you haven't watched the video. Why do I reply?
@@HistoryHustle its difficult to think otherwise, especially in our times, when there is a din, noise, around 'war crimes' and subtle efforts to demonise the Russian nature/character.
Makes me extremely thankful that my great-grandfather left East Prussia in the 19th century
I can understand.
One thing that many people forget was that, yes, there were Ukrainian soldiers in the Red Army. Ukraine was a republic of the USSR, and was the country’s main breadbasket for most of its history. The Ukrainians, not just the Russians, also went through immense hardship at the hands of the Germans. Because, no Putin, Ukrainians cannot just be labeled as “Nazis”. Ukrainians, just like Belarusians and Russians, are an East Slavic people (Polish, Czech and Slovak are West Slav) and so were viewed as Untermenschen by Hitler. The Nazis only claimed to support Ukraine in order to divide and conquer, but intending to give them even less freedom than the Soviets. Yet this divide and conquer strategy is dictating Russian government policy to this day, not realising this is what Hitler would have wanted anyway.😭😭😢😢🇺🇦🇺🇦🇷🇺🇷🇺
@lati long Yes I agree. In the West, Ukrainians and certainly Belarusians were seen as just Russians really. In fact, “Belarus” literally means “White Russia”, and the German name for it is “Weißrussland” which means the same. Of course, these two nations do have distinct cultures and languages to Russia, but there are many peoples in Russia now (like the Karelians for example) who we may consider Russian but they may not, and who are in fact more distinct to Russia than Belarus and Ukraine.
Something quite telling is when Phoebe’s boyfriend in Friends tells her that he is “Going to Minsk in Russia”, whilst the Soviet Union had fallen by that point but the scriptwriters obviously didn’t realise where Minsk was 😂😂😂. I don’t blame them to be perfectly honest
Thanks for this context!
1) The difference between Nazi Germans and Soviet Russians is very simple. Germans killed around 16 mln Civilians in the Soviet Union. Soviets - around 0.5 German Civilians.
2) Situation in Nemersdorf is very bad. But just imagine - the Germans had done the same with THOUSANDS of Russian, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian villages. Hundreds of villages had been burned together with their inhabitants. In Vitebsk before WW2 lived around 167.300 inhabitants, after liberation - 118 inhabitants (one hundred eighteen persons).
3) Ilya Ehrenburg was a Yew. Knowing what German Nazis were doing with the Yews, no surprise that he had written poems in which he called "To kill German when You see him. How many Germans You have seen - so many Germans You have to kill". In the other poem, he is asking Soviet Solder "to destroy, to smash German honor".
4) Talking about Hungarians - they were almost the same cruel invaders as the Germans. Therefore the Soviet soldiers tried not to take Hungarians in captivity.
5) Actually talking about the cruelty against civilians between the Soviet soldiers was the such classification of invaders:
1. The cruelest were Germans (BTW, no big difference btw SS and Wehrmacht. Despite very popular myth - almost the same shit. SS was used more often against civilians - yes, that is true).
2. On the second place - Hungarians, Finns, Russian and Ukrainian traitors, Estonian and Latvian police battalions.
3. Romanians. Plus/minus normal attitude to the Civilians. They have done war crimes - but incomparable less than Germans.
4. Italians, Hispanics, Slovaks - no complaints at all. They just fought with the Soviet Army, nothing more.
The German occupation of Eastern Europe was a lot like anglo imperialism in South Asia, its just that the anglos were classy shopkeepers and nowhere did they face the opposition as the germans did in the Soviet Union, the anglos too South Asia one region at a time, there never was a real fightback until the resistance that of the Naval Ratings of Mumbai in 1946.
Lol, somebody has been fed Russian propaganda 😁
Lol dude doesn't believe the truth because he just hates Russians for no reason.😶🌫️
just a note , 80% of ther german civilians fatalities were caused by the allies mostly in the carpet bombing of German ities , however the soviets killed 80 % of the axis armies
That is not where this episode is about.
My great grandparents when they were stll living said that the Germans were actually nicer to their village than the Red Army. The Germans stole all the food and R-worded a lot of women and shipped off the younger men (like my great granddad) to work in the Reich while some got forced to join the German army to fight or be support or translate. The Russians just came and summarily executed all remaining men later in 1944 when they retook the village and the women were amost all sent to work camp. My great grandmother had previously been sent to Pomerania to keep house at a rich couple's home. She reunited with my great grandpa in 1947 when they discovered they were still both alive. Of COURSE they had gone to bed with others. That's adult life and that's war. But they married and stayed together for almost 60 years before they pst away within 18 months of each other.
Um how is that "nicer"
@@comradekenobi6908 superior german genes for the offspring
@@matiasdiaz8913 shouldn't superior genes should win 2 World wars then?
Love your work, so interesting. Don't stop.
Thanks for your reply!
That’s an interesting…thumbnail you got there
👍
Every tool has it´s purpose, a saw for cutting wood, an ax for chopping wood, a spoon for eating, so to the soldier has it´s fundametal purpose...too kill and die on the battle field. The problem with such a tool is that they are human with emotions that can be bent to the positive or negative, he is affected by the group, "The Band Of Brothers" who fight for each other, and the few who can get the group to do evil. War brings out the worst in man kind, thus it is so in all armies.
Apparently they ripped the taps out of the walls believing if you put them in the wall the water would come out, in WW2 - told to me by a Lithuanian
the still do it today in the ukraine.
@@adler1964 probably
When you still believe in Nazi propaganda,70 years after the war.Goebbels would be pround of Europe.
War is brutal, it brings out the worst in mankind.
True.
An appalling subject but one that needs to be remembered but so much does depend on circumstances and the willingness of command to enforce discipline on the troops.
War always brings out the worst in some people.
And the best sometimes...
there are a lot of terrible things about war, but the assault of civilian women is one of the worst. women are raped in every war and that is yet one more reason that they should never, ever happen.
Communists have always rejoiced whenever their own soldiers committed rape. What can you expect of totalitarian thugs?
Its almost like the Russians have never thought "Maybe we should not be complete assholes".
They are not that different from the rest.
I always wondered about this question.
Good to hear a answer to this question.
I always thought that it was because Russia had historically treated their soldiers like crap form the napoleonic wars and especially during the Soviet era.
Misery loves company after all.
"Remember, misery loves company", from Metallica on My Friend of Misery song 🎶 Thanks! 🇧🇷
Thanks for your reply.
Great video. Tough if you look into any army throughout history you will pretty much see extreme form of brutality in all forms from all sides. Like Romans were extremely violent an barbaric and could erradicate entire groups of people through their conquest (carthage, Gaul, parthians etc) as well as using extreme execution methods like cruzifiction, Bronze bull, the boat etc. Later on countries like the spain and portugal would also become notorious against their campaigns against their religious minorities during the reconquista (deporting/mass murdering jews and muslims) while later waging violent colonial wars against native americans during the colonializations where they would burn their prisoners alive or using torture methods such as; the wheel and Strappado to force them to convert or submit to their rule while the natives also were notorious against the colonizers and against themselves (tribal wars, scalping, human sacrifices etc). Besides the spaniards, we also had the Swedes that developed a notorious reputation during the thirty years war after their intervention where they got ranked as the most violent and merciless army throughout the war (Schwedentrunken, sacking of Bohemia etc). The mughals in india were so murderous and violent that the indians prefered the british colonials over them while britian caused mass starvations all over their colonies as well as exploiting their subjects for maximum of profits. The Dutch did the same in their colonies and we should not mention the Belgians in congo under Leopold the II.
And like if you look at recent history (Napoleonic war, ww1 and ww2) The french was first viewed as monstrous warmongers during Napoleon while Russia at that time was viewed as the saviour of Europe against Napoleon's tyranny while later the Germans and Germany would be viewed as the most notoriuos and the main villain alongside the Russians.
At pre ww2 and during the war everyone made atrocities from all sides; like Italians in Libya and slovenia, abyssinia (gas, concentration camps) , Japan in east asia (Nankin, unit 731, baatan death march), Ustashe, Romania (iron guard), Germany (holocaust, generalplan ost, blitz), USSR (kaatyn massacre, purges, holodomor, rape of Europe, gulags), western Ukraine, UPA under Bandera (Volhyn massacre), Britain (colonial atrocities, bomber Harris, bengal famine)
Even if look today, we still have memories from the balkan wars, iraq Iran wars, congo wars while US just years ago also did warcrimes (Abu Ghraib, intentional drone strikes at civilians, supporting Saudi arabia). Now we see Russia doing atrocities (Bucha, execution at Staryi Bykiv, bombing of kharkhiv, Iziummassacre etc). Lack of equipment, morale and training do have an effect on an armies discipline but humans overall share the same brutal nature and weather ethnicity or nationality, anyone can snap and commit atrocities. Nothing excuse anything and those acts are against humanity but generilizing a people for being "worse" or "more brutal" is very misleading and can bring fourth an biased "facts" caused by personal feelings over what we now see as "the enemy".
Overall well done.
Mughals were murderous? By the time the anglos had started taking over, Mughal rule was restricted between red fort and palam in delhi. Mainly the Marathas in the South and the Punjabis in the North had destroyed the Mughals, after their ineptitude allowed a series of debilitating invasions, starting with Nader Shah Afshar and culminating with Ahmed Shah Abdali. The Afghans even took Mughal Princesses as their war booty.
But it wasn't the Mughals that the anglos 'liberated' Indians from, it was the Marathas, Tipu Sultan, The Lahore Durbar. Since I am from the North West, I can tell you a bit about how the Lahore Durbar of Maharaja Ranjit Singh fared, when compared to the Anglos. Punjab had 100% literacy during the reign of Lahore Durbar, and spent more money on female education than the anglos would spend, in terms of the percentage of their budget. The Anglos did a good job of dividing the country, making Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims fight each other, hatred which dwelt on Anglo propaganda, such as "murderous mughals" and the rest.
@@effendi77 I wasnt defending the UK, when I refered to the Mughals I meant the period of Akbar . I might have gotten it wrong on the Mughals (sorry if that is the case) but from what I know, they did persecute Hindus and forced people to convert to Islam (Madurai Sultanate).
I do acknowledge the brutality of the Brits but every nation from all over the earth have turned violent and bloodthirsty throughout our existance.
You'll see Incidents of brutality, but professionally run armies generally don't act barbaric as a matter of routine. With the Russian army and the Red Army before them, brutality is part of the military culture. We grow up hearing stories about shooting down a plane or fighting off an attack. They grow up hearing stories about wiping out civilian villages and raping anything female.
@@hamletksquid2702 Какие-нибудь доказательства про наше патриотическое воспитание будут? Иль сегодня только ложь в почёте?
@@Философ - We've all watched the way the Russian army fights and the Red Army before them. If you don't want the world to think you're a horde of barbaric peasants, stop acting like barbaric peasants.
There's a movie based on archived documents about the Soviet occupation of Bulgaria. It wasn't as rare as you say for them to rape and kill people. They looted and pillaged, they ran over children, they sent the Bulgarian army to fight the Germans after killing off its commanders, then later killed more soldiers. Overall in 3 years of occupation Bulgaria spent 1.3 billion BGN to support a total of 600 thousand thugs, thieves and rapists from the Soviet army. Here's a link to the movie. ruclips.net/video/AE6lGVqZkmo/видео.html It has English subtitles
NATO launched more than 10,000 air raids on Libya in 2011 with over 500,000 Civilian Casualities. When they were questioned about civilian Casualities they insisted that it was collateral damages and that it happens in wars.
Whataboutism.
@@HistoryHustle "um, pointing out my hipocrisy is whataboutism." westoid clown
NATO bombs are good bombs. They bring freedom and democracy
@@HistoryHustle still doesn't change the fact
@@HistoryHustle More Like Double Standards
Interesting topic Stefan.
👍
0:31 Yes they did, greetings from Poland, the country that is not without reason doing everything to ensure that Russia loses this war.🇵🇱
As always the truth is more nuanced, please watch the rest of the video if you haven't.
Perhaps poland needs referendums too?
@@josephkush1032 Kaliningrad needs it for sure. Ahoj!
@@josephkush1032 No, but Królewiec.
Poland is one of the most reliable foundation of defence against russia! Thanks from Finland
Tough subject. Good and fair job.
Thanks!
A "tradition" of cruelty. Teach a generation honor, and they hill bear it for the generations to come.
and Ukrainians served in concentration camps as germans were not so cruel and recruited them massively. Tradition as well.
@@kirilld6206 They recruited Russians as well. And people of many nations. Some Poles served as guards too, as their own people suffered.
@@Foreign0817 there was little to no russians in camps or poles especially. But a LOT of ukrainians mainly from western Ukraine ofc. They hated russians and poles and wanted to use them to somehow gain independence later. They served in camps and as SCHUPO. But Hitler didnt care about Ukraine and just used them so later they were fighting both soviets and germans (crazy to be honest). Russians were in РОА - russian liberation army. Because there were a lot of russians after civil war who hated communist party and Stalin and they joined it. But however a lot of people hired in such units were fighting inside against them secretly, as a famous tatar poet for example.
@@kirilld6206 Ok.
...
So what was that jab at Ukrainians earlier? You want something to come of it or...
@@Foreign0817 I mean people with little to no knowledge of history always blame russians after being saved by them. Overall russians never were slavers or murderers. We never had 2 or more classes of citizens can't say about other nations. Poles blaming russians always forget about thousands and dozens of thousands of them murdered just because they are poles by banderites and millions by germans. I didnt watch this vid btw but already see lies - russians didnt not occupy eastern poland. Eastern poland is called in history western Ukraine and belarus. For that useless territory poles got much better Silesia and other lands in the west. So instead of fighting ukrainian and belorussian nazis they now have polish lands in the west taken from germans and a good economy.
You missed an important point from the start: the two wars you cite involve an imperial army, an army focused on acquiring territory and destroying and decimating populations.
The Red Army wasn't imperial. Imperial means you serve a royal (emperor, tsar) which wasn't the case as Tsar Nicholas II wasn't in charge anymore since 1917.
what you need to understand about Europe is that we don't like each other all that much
Sounds like a very big oversimplification.
@@HistoryHustle it is but it rings true
we're sharing a drink one day and the next we wake up like "y'know, that Russian looked at me funny, I should start a war"
Modern day Europeans are probably the most friendly towards eachother in European history ever
Really important and fascinating episode. Thank you
Thanks 👍
Another Wonderful Video Shared By ( History Hustle) channel & Sir Stefan ...Your evaluation & Explaining of This Denounced Phenomenon during wartimes was utterly correct & accurate about Russian -Soviet army ...its occurring Every where & Every times with difference of Victims Numbers around world countries ...I think Soldiers Behaviors are embodying Political & Economic behaviors -out looks (policies) of Their own authorities in outside(occupied territories +How much they suffered in their Personal lives in their Homelands before they becoming occupiers ...Allot thanks ...Good luck
I heard stories from older people who lived in ww2 (czech) and they mostly told things like - german behave way better than soviet - when germans (ocupants) came , they put their people on posts like police etc but that was mostly it , but when soviets (liberators) arived , they just steal , demanded free stuff, food ..... gestapo tortured you but only for things you knew , nkvd tortured you to just admit to things you dont/can not know
What anecdotal rubbish. You should be ashamed of yourself letting to the murderous Nazi scum and Wehrmacht off the hook. Tell that to the to the relatives of the 5,000 Czechoslovaks murdered after the just assassination of Heydrich the mastermind of the SS Final Solution.
I believe Czech Legion fought with the Red Army in the capture of Kiev.
German army was far more disciplined than the red army. They were still capable of doing awful thing to civilians though.
Ask the jews in Ukraine how googly the german behaved in Ukraine
@@rjames3981 wasn't Czech legion in WW1?
When you create a moral and legal vacuum you should not be surprised if nasty people take advantage. There is good research about people’s behaviour in war time. About 5% initiate cruelty, only a third will actively try and prevent it. Internationally, all countries show similar results.
That’s why war always leads to atrocities because you create these legal and moral vacuums.
Thank`s for your video!
👌
Thanks for another great video. BZ.
Wanting revenge is human nature. Very few people having seen and endured what the Soviets experienced and given the opportunity to exact revenge without consequences on the Germans for what they had done during their unprovoked invasion of WWii, would show restraint.
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brutality against innocent civilians should always be condemned. Same as the allied bombing campaign on German cities during WWII. Russia lost 20 million people in WWII as a result of the German invasion, by far more than any country. I think nobody can imagine what those numbers and devastation means. It would be like the whole population of the Netherlands wiped-out. Unimaginable.
I mean let's say the same about the Germans.
Or any other western country but they still view the Eastern Europe and all other parts of the world as "inferior".
It's a fact, even if you ask someone from the west he might say that but he does not mean that they always viewed other parts of the world as inferior.
History is about details and nuances. Please watch the video if you haven't and let me know what you think of it.
I'm not trying to deny anything in this video it's just that people never cover the western crimes/views/actions that were straight up inhumane, but when it comes to the East it's full of 'terrorists' 'savages' and 'extremists'
It's weird. Russian, Pole, German, French, they all look the same to me. Why all the fighting?
Yeah... why fighting at all..
@@HistoryHustle the US has developed the same kind of divisions Europe has had for centuries. We're heading towards catastrophe. A Rwanda with AR-15s instead of machetes.
You can do an entire series on it 40 years from now. Take notes.
@@claudermiller Hopefully it's not going to happen...Once you are gone the world is going to turn into dictatorship and that's not something the most of us are looking for...Just get into the size of the shoes that fits the best at the moment and don't go Alpine climbing wearing the sandals 👍
You are wrong. No, they look different. They are all different inside too. Russians literally have nothing in common with Europe.
Interesting video and the question it brings up. All war so terrible and has the potential to bring out the worst in men. We desperately hope that civilians and the innocent will be untouched. Sadly this rarely happens. There’s no justification for how the Germans and Soviets treated each other’s peoples in the war. The reality though is that with the brutality of Operation Barbarossa, the Einsatzgruppen etc. Germany was sowing the wind and ended up reaping the whirlwind
"Germany was sowing the wind and ended up reaping the whirlwind" this pro soviet mantra/excuse really has to die. Its oversued as an excuse to silence the critics.
Soviets behaved (read as, "raped", "pillaged" and "killed") same with German women as they did with Polish , Estonian Finnish, etc etc....they even raped women in Serbia and Belgrade during ww2 , it was that bad.
Titos partisans were shocked by the way Soviets treated their "slavic brethren" and treated their women as war booty.
The "Soviet spirit and glory" that Putin is desperate to revive is seen even in current Russian propaganda, portraying his invasion of Ukraine as both a national and anti fascist struggle...go figure...
This shouldnt come as a shock to anyone as Stalins propaganda claimed that the occupation of Poland in 1939 (other half going to Nazi Germany) was a "struggle against polish fascism" ...similar can be seen by the constant media attacks on Ukraine due to Azov battalion, but barely any when it comes to Russias "Wagner group".
If anything ww2 gave the Soviets and later Russians a cheap "jail out of free card" every time someone dared to criticize them "because we are the victors of ww2, we defeated fascism and if you dare to say something bad about us, you are a fascist as well".
Thanks for watching! :)
to quote a great Roman: "No shiticus shelockticus"
Name an army that has not behaved disgustingly during warfare. War itself is an obscene crime, that's the point!
History is about details and nuances. Please watch the video if you haven't and let me know what you think of it.
I would say it mostly depends on the soldiers' leadership. The nazi regime for example with their racist, murderous ideology had a great interest in killing as many soviet civilians as possible, to free "Lebensraum" in the east and to wipe out the "weaker race".
I think it comes down a lot to some severe factors which has always plagued Russia.
1. Authoritarianism (like you said)
2. Wars of hate
3. Poor supply
Authoritarian governments tend to overlook atrocities by their enforcers. Nevermind how in a lot of regimes the officers installed aren't always competent or good to their troops. The Imperial Japanese Army also committed horrific atrocities and it's been theorized it may have been because of the poor treatment soldiers got from their officers. Kind of like how school bullies are usually abused at home. And Russia has been, aside from brief moments, been an extremely authoritarian nation.
You mentioned the hatred the Russians had for Jews in WW1 but there were also attempts to portray the war by the Russian elite to their soldiers as "a war for slavic unity and against the vile teuton" or something like that. And considering how the Balkan Wars saw countless atrocities on their own fuelled by national hatred I'd imagine a similar festering would have taken place in the Russian Army. Needless to say if a soldier views an entire group of people as being evil they're more likely to abuse prisoners and, should the war extend that far, enemy civilians.
As for poor supply it's kind of simple. If you're starving and you see someone with food, you're gonna mug em. And if you're an officer and you've lost the soldiers pay, somehow, and there's a village full of enemy civilians if you're unscrupulous enough to get that far one could let the soldiers loot that village as a sort of payment. I'm not sure how bad the Russian logistics were in WW1 but I'm not sure if they'd be in anyway acceptable. The Russian Army of WW1 wasn't exactly good so I doubt the pay trains would be in working order. As for the initial occupation of Poland it would explain why Soviet soldiers generally behaved since they were well payed. (Of course the NKVD didn't because when do secret police behave?) And I think the cruelty of the Soviet soldier would have been fueled by poor pay since the Soviet soldier may not have been getting much in the way of pay, and since the Soviets were constantly pushing I'm not sure how much they would have gotten paid.
Thanks for sharing your insights.
"Wars of hate" lol
@@anon2034 I suppose I could have worded it better. But by "wars of hate" I mean "war fuelled by the very idea of the citizen of the other nation." The wars in the Caucuses, the first World War, WW2 (obviously), the Chechen Wars and now Ukraine are in part fuelled by the idea that the (insert race, religion or political system of the enemy nation's citizens) by nature makes them an existential threat to Russia. So, during the Chechen Wars, when the soldiers of Russia go into a Chechen village they're already going to view every single soul there as an enemy.
If you already hate someone you feel less bad killing them, torturing them, burning their home down. Hell, sometimes ya might be called a hero.
@@gasmonkey1000 Thank you for the clarification. Dehumanization of the enemy is part of every country's war effort though. I don't find anything unique about Russia.
@@anon2034 The difference is that it's usually not the enemy soldier, which is where I understand most of the dehumanization stops. It's more like demonization. As cruel as it sounds, soldiers are one thing civvies are another
My grandmother who was born in 1939 in Austria and is still alive today. She told me how the soviet occupiers in austria until 1955 kept plundering, violating and raping the civilian inhabitants. She has seen russian woman in military uniforms who demanded and took clothing up to the point where even their already worn out shoes weren't enough. She witnessed her own aunt been beaten and raped by russian soldiers multiple times. And she herself as a child and many women, were forced to work hard labor since all the men were either dead or imprissoned. My grandmother is a tough old beast and she is very much not a person anyone would call politically correct and i have plenty of disagreements with her, but she never resorted to hitting her grandchildren. She hates stealing and indecency and what she is most proud of is her work in an iron factory where she worked for over 30 years. If there is one thing i learned from my grandmother it's the fact that acting out on revange will never lead to any satisfaction and is grounded in pure delusion and selfishness.
Great comment! God bless old lady!
@Kenzovich: thanks for sharing.
I think the question that should be asked is not whether the Russians are barbaric in nature, but whether they are more barbaric than other nations. Unfortunately, in order to promote a narrative that Russians are savages, people ignore the crimes committed by others, whether it's completely ignoring the destruction of Kalish or the rape of Belgium by the Germans in WWI or even claiming that the average German soldier in WWII was highly civilized (13 million Soviet citizens died of what?). And what about the massacre that the Ukrainians committed against Jews and Poles? And the Hungarians were not very nice to the Serbs in World War II, nor were the Croats. The Japanese are not even worth talking about, the South Koreans were also quite brutal in Vietnam. My point is that if you compare Russia to the rest of the world, you suddenly realize that its soldiers are no more barbaric than any other nation. Russia has always been an imperialist country so it had many wars and thus more atrocities, but the average Russian soldier is no worse than the average German, Italian or Serbian soldier.
(And just in case someone asks a stupid question - no, just because others committed atrocities doesn't mean the Russians are allowed to do it too, but it does mean all nations are equal).
Have you seen the video?
@@HistoryHustle Yes, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just adding a more relative perspective. If in World War II everyone had acted according to the Geneva Convention and only the French had behaved the same, they would have been considered barbarians, but compared to what almost all armies did in this war, no one even mentions the French war crimes, because in the end, everything is relative.
Как там поживают миллионы мирных иракцев ?
"How are millions of peaceful Iraqis doing there?"
Whataboutism.
There is no rebellion, just when you are looking for a speck in someone else's eye, you do not notice logs in your own, and you do not shoot such videos about your countries. And so you can all NATO continue to bomb Afghan weddings and invade foreign countries
Hi, Im from Poland. When so called Soviet "liberation" came Soviet soldiers tried to assault my grandma and her sisters ( they were home alone and in their very early teen years back then), but fortunately door of their house was to hard for those drunken bandits to overcome. One of man from their village stole one of the cows from German herd being driven to the Soviet Union because he was extremely poor and Soviets shoot him without any trial. You should expand your subject when in area of Russian soldiers in partitioned Poland ( especially atrocities that they commited when they supressed our national uprisings) and other Imperial/Bolshevik Russian war crimes against nations who tried to earn their freedom like Circassian genocide or Tambov rebellion.
Don’t cry pshek
This explains away the loss of my Grandmother and Aunt in Serbia during Post WW2
No it doesnt. Josip Broz Tito and his Croat Communists were the ones who ethnically cleansed (and murdered) the German minority living in Yugoslavia after world war two (Bačka in northern Serbia and Slavonija in Croatia).
The Soviet Army was already in Berlin when Titos communists began their campaign against the local German population (knowns as VolkDeutchers to us)
And what does it have to do with this video? Just be grateful that Yugoslavia was lucky enough to liberate itself without "help" of soviet rapists.
Well… It has made my Father and my Father’s Family dysfunctional at best. It’s created a hard life for me. Although l’ve learned to love being different. I’ve had to help my Father put this to some kind of rest before he had lost his mind and was killed while crossing the road one evening. Things are very different these days now that I’m educating myself more on how different my Father’s life was for him. I know seeing his Mother and Sister pass on effected him all of his life. He never could shake off those horrible memories. I’ve grown to love him more over the years since his passing.
@Nikola S. yeah the tanks which they got by western military aid🤣
@@katholischetheologiegeschi1319 source? only 14,102 Allied tanks were shipped to the Soviets in the whole war
Compare that to 84,070 T34s produced. This is not counting the number of assault guns, heavy tanks, light tanks produced by the Soviets
A very good video with the necessary nuance to try to understand history.
There are almost always war crimes during a conflict because there are almost always men who are inclined to gratuitous violence in armies. They are controlled in peacetime and go on the rampage once the war begins.
However, it seems to me that the existence of massive war crimes depends very much on the intensity of the conflict and also on its duration. The Eastern Front is the most intense conflict in history and the living conditions of the Russian soldiers were unparalleled: a proximity to death that no one can imagine. Add to the ideological conditioning, the leadership of criminals like Stalin and Beria and the alcoholism. There was little humanity left.
If we look at the contemporary wars conducted by Western countries since the 1990s by the United States in particular (Iraq, Syria etc.), we can see that the crimes are very few because the conflict is short, unbalanced and therefore has little intensity. But this is not the case of Vietnam: we remember the burned villages, thousands of civilians shot with machine guns from helicopters...
The current conflict in Ukraine is the most intense that has taken place in a long time, and it is bound to last. So it doesn't surprise me that crimes are taking place everywhere.
We have the impression that the Russians are particularly violent and it is probably a bit true. But that's because the history of the country for more than a century now is a real disaster. I mean, there is a reason why the life expectancy of men fell to 57 years old in the 1990s. Violence seemed to diminish over the generations, but unfortunately it's happening again. This war has to stop soon.
Its actualy the opposite an insurgency is not high intensity conflict while conventional war is high intencity and ohh boy there were a lot of crimes you just dont see them being mentioned or recorded but they happend
@@Silver_Prussian I am not a specialist so I want to believe you. But which wars are you referring to when you speak of insurgency?
@@Gropaquey well insurgency us drawn out conflict where the battles are taking place between long period of tine where one opponent fight unvonventionaly aka guerilla warfare. While a conventional conflict is one where battle take place every day with higher number of csualties dew to both sides using conventional arms and doctrines thus high intensity and thus more casualties.
Insurgencies are impossible to fight because you often dont fight a military force but a the whole nation aka all of the people and their national ideal its like trying to kill the ideology if n*zism by killing n*zis its impossible because there will always be people who will rise up to fight you. While in conventional conflict you beat the enemy army thry dont have any wY to resist you exept soem sh*tty partisan groups and thats it you defeatrd them end of the war.
Now let me make the comparisin between ukraine and iraq. Iraq fell not only because its military used old equipment but because it faced a foe who was in all ways supiruor with decades ahed. Air power, grpund forces, navy the united states used every asset of it smilitary to raise the nation to the ground.
What has russia done in ukraine ? Have they used their bombers like the tu160 to rain clusters on ukraine ? Have they used all of their cruise missiles to level ukrainians cities ? Have they used a sufficient number of forces ? No no and no. The russian entered in ukriane with only 200.000 men with help of lets put them at 30.000 militia and a few thousand wagner members.
Ukriane meanwhile had a profesional really well triamed army of above 200.000 men,115.000 paramilitary forces, numerous volunteers some highly skilled, it began mobilisation on the first day. Ukraine had a very skileld and profesional army with relatibely modern equipment.
The truth is the russians didnt want to destroy ukraine thats why they didnt just deploy 500.000 men right from the start and use all of their assets at their disposal to level the country. Because the differnce here is that the iraqis didnt had sh*t to fight with they had as i said old cold war era equpment that wasnt even modernised.
American NATO propaganda
As known fact the allies in WW2 were savages still to this day Iraqi Africa South America
No western world is the worst example of human behaviour
Dear Scott, could you please watch the video and check the sources I provide instead of posting this triggered reply filled with whataboutism.
It's hard to stomach this topic, without having to look away
Please explain.
@@HistoryHustle My Oma was 4 in 1945, her mother fled with her two young children from German Silesia under the threat of the Red Army's advance. When war becomes personal I suppose.
Thanks for sharing.
@@HistoryHustle 🙏
@@markmooney9416 did any of your family serve in the military
As far as Eastern Poland is concerned, I want to inform you about what Ukrainian Nationalists did to the Polish citizens during 40-45 around Lviv, which was Polish territority back then.
They were every bit as bad as the Russian soldiers and commited widespread death by torture. They didn't just kill their neighbors: they got creative. And they were just Ukrainian civilians themselves! Not soldiers! They were called the Banderista, after Stefan Bandera, who is still being revered in Western Ukrain by today's Ukrainian Nationalists.
Then and now Bandera Gang is protected by CIA.
How are Polish People putting up with the Ukrainian thugs. Is it time to kick them out without the Zyd Govt. approval ?
Probably the answer to your question lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of information you have on the topic you gain through consumption of propaganda, created by sides openly hostile to whatever state at the time was fielding those Russian servicemen.
Please watch the video.
@@HistoryHustle I did and this still doesn't disprove my argument, in regards to the Tsarist army you didn't make any relevant point as they didn't appear to be anything outstanding in the matters of occupation compared to their contemporary counterparts like Germans, Austrians or white Czechs. As for the Red Army you were trying to rationalise a picture painted by biased narrative sources, blatant propaganda, half-truths and exaggerations.
Thanks for watching.
"biased narrative sources, blatant propaganda, half-truths and exaggerations."
This surely isn't the case. I use multiple sources you are now dismissing without providing any alternatives.
@@HistoryHustle well I do dismiss them because narrative sources cannot be the sole foundation of a historical research, especially in studies concerning a relatively recent past. Narrative sources must be approached with criticism which means that firstly we have to keep in mind a possibility of bias and secondly, in best case scenario, they have to be corroborated by documental or material sources at least to some degree.
Given that you didn't cite a single document be it reports of the Soviet military police or internal personal surveillance service (many of those are public), various orders regarding measures to prevent misbehaviour of the Soviet servicemen on German soil (well you actually mentioned one of them briefly but then dismissed it as insignificant without providing any factual base for such treatment) or even statistics from German clinics of that time, I assume the sources you used didn't have them either which should completely remove them from the field of actual historical science due to them being purely narration based.
And even then your treatment of the narrative sources you have is strange, you without any doubt take words ascribed to Stalin by God knows who despite the fact that they contradict with his actual words in the order dated January 19th 1945 "Regarding behaviour on German territory", when you mention Ilya Erenburg and his anti-German writings you omit the fact that as the Soviet army was approaching Germany he was criticised in the Soviet press for being unable to adapt his propaganda works to the new conditions and later was ordered to alter his rethoric completely.
@@egorkoshevoy6694 I wonder why the author stopped replying to your comment.
Great 👍🏼 video very informative and entertaining.
Thanks!
i know that in the poland - soviet war the Tukhachevsky red army was very barbaric at least with the polish prisoners
I think during this war both sides committed atrocities.
In the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn went into detail about the descent from civility to cruelty. It should also be noted that the Japanese practically wrote the book on good practice in the handling of POWs during the Russo-Japanese war, and also deferred to a state of barbarism in the way POWs and foreign civilians were handled.
It's quite striking as well as being an object lesson in what evil humans can do despite their experience and development. In both cases it was down to "over-motivation" through an excess of propaganda about the enemy and excessive demonization of the enemy.
In other terms, It's all down to "total war" and the militarization of civil society, because will that, the conscience gets erased or at the very least is muffled.
Gulag Archipelago is a fairytale and complete lie, even author himself admitted it.
Believing in the Gulag Archipelago is like being blind fr. That book is still looking for anybody to confirm anything that is written on it.
Can you really make a difference between Ukranian Soldiers before 1991 and Russian/Soviet Soldiers?
Ukrainians were a part of Soviet cruel army but their society has changed they embraced values of western world and started a long way to enter free civilized nations. Russia is still mentaly in XIX century.
@@ThePawcios
Yeah, western values like nazism, fascism, and genocide. 😂
@@ThePawcios in what way? Ukraine since 2014 has been under a nationalist regime that has banned Russian. ostracised the eastern oblasts .. Zelinsky is a corrupt clown controlled by oligarchs. he recently spend $8mill on a villa for his parents.. is that the act of a president whose country is in a war? meanwhile he has jailed opposition leaders. shut down critical news outlets and disappeared journalists. he is no different to Putin. USA and EU want to make Ukraine out to be a Utopia , but its not. far from it.
There was always a difference between Ukrainians and Russians.
@@Vic-on5ic
I see. And when exactly does "always" start? Because if I go back even just 200 years, there is no "Ukrainian people." 😄
You mean like the Germans in the Eastern Europe-Soviet Union or the Americans in Nagasaki-Hiroshima, Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne... Korea-Vietnam?
Whataboutism. The video focuses on Russia. In other videos I talk about Vietnam, Dresden, etc.
@@HistoryHustle
American Soldiers are brutal savages from Nature.
@@HistoryHustle War is always cruel to everybody but politicians and elites, they are the real butchers, the ones with the suits.
Very interesting subject that others would try and skirt around Stefan but you have done a very good job. The Russian soldiers were/are treated worse than animals by their officers and that leads to discipline problems as we have seen/are seeing.
Exactly. And this didn't just happen in WW2 or WW1, this was the way the Russian Armies have been organised historically, as such they have never really won a war without incurring a horrendous amount of casualties, often much more than what their adversaries would, and in the wars which the Russians have lost, they have lost huge, an exceedingly disproportional number of men, to their opponents. Putin is nothing but a Stalinist. And its a pity, post-communism, here was an opportunity to make amends with their neighbours, especially Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states, to accept the role of Moscow, not necessarily the ordinary Russian people, in causing grief, for the past few centuries, but Moscow, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union wasn't Russia, it was the residual toxins of the Soviet period, the rulers as well as the Oligarchs, the descendants of the Nomenklatura took everything and left the ordinary Russian poorer and more destitute than ever!
@@effendi77 Putin is anything but a communist
@@effendi77 you're just straight up corrupted.
@@effendi77 To make amends to the baltic states and Poland? Why and for what? They both hated the russians and will continue to hate them, I see no reason to somehow cooperate with them. At least until they want to. And with Ukraine, territorial issues have been predictable since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The borders of the soviet republics did not take into account the resettlement of the russian people because of the russophobia of the bolsheviks. Thus, Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Odessa, Nikolaev, Kherson, Kharkov shamelessly handed over to the ukrainian elites.
@@negotive4303 you are making the same points under the light of which, as facts, I made my point. The Bolsheviks were the worst offenders in the history of the Slavs, they divided them, by using violence against them, at different periods, in different places. The desire to control Poland, by waging war against it in 1920 was the work of the Bolsheviks, the Holodomor was the work of the Bolsheviks, the slicing up of Eastern Poland as part of Nazi-Bolshevik Pact was the work of the, well... Bolsheviks. And Russian state narrative, even today, is essentially stuck with the surviving narrative of the Bolsheviks. And the Bolsheviks' spawn, their descendants, have been the beneficiaries of the loot and plunder of post-soviet Russia, as well as Ukraine and they have also engineered this fratricidal conflict.
"He lacks any true religious or moral balance, and his moods alternate between genuine kindness and bestial cruelty. Alone he can be friendly and generous. As part of a mob, he is full of hatred and utterly cruel". From, F.W. Von Mellenthins "Panzer Battles". I know that this is a strange statement from a man who fought for Hitler, but I still find it to be interesting. Another excellent documentary. Thank You
Russian soldiers are shaped by their culture as are all soldiers.
True.
@@HistoryHustle and the mask of fairness falls
As a Turk who's grand grand parents village invaded by Russian army, they didn't tell us anything wrong about ordinary Russian soldier. (İn eastern Anatolia not so much to plunder anyway) but Armenia soldiers in the Russian army. They were so barbaric that at the end nearly all the people run away to the mountains to hide.
I wonder why the Armenians were so barbaric...
I think it's that the Soviet soldiers were a bit mad at the Germans for trying to exterminate them so they retaliate how they saw fit. Kinda like in Vietnam were American soldiers would be a wee bit mad at the Vietnamese soldiers for trying to fight back so they carried out a gigantic genocide campaign on foot and later with chemical weapons. No army in the history of ever hasn't brutalized populations of opposing forces especially when that opposing force was systematically wiping out their population. Soldiers of countries did horrible things but it doesn't mean you should hate everyone because blind hatred leads to dehumanization then off the slippery slope to horrible crimes against humanity.
This Ukraine war is turning out bad with atrocities on both sides.
True. Although the Russians behave worse.
@@HistoryHustle they have worse pr.
That also but it doesn't mean they behave good.
"WAR IS HELL, BUT PEACE IS A MOTHER F _ _ KER"❗
...ok?
I read somewhere that the Soviets did the same when they went into Manchuria and later North Korea. They went after Japanese Women there after over running Japanese held Territory.
Disgusting title. It is absolutely deplorable to even suggest such a fantasy.
You can check the video, check the sources instead of being triggered by the title and write an angry comment.
@@HistoryHustle “Why is the Dutch teacher always racist towards to eastern europeans?”
@@konplayz Average Dutch person
They steamrolled places which were considered unfriendly, there were no issues when the Soviets came through Serbia, as Serbs and Russians had good relations always, against the volksdeutsche and Hungarians in Serbia, they were not friendly..
Could be true. Another person in the comment wrote that in the Banat region they were very unfriendly. Interesting how this differed.
@@HistoryHustle yes.. banat.. which is in Serbia, Romania and Hungary.. Ethnically huge chunks of Hungarians and Germans lived in Serbian Banat during the Royal Yugoslav days, when WW2 came around they sided with Hitler for the most part.. You can guess what happened when the tide of war changed when the Soviets and Partisans went through those areas.. So in terms of barbarism, the Soviets were seen as liberators by Serbs.. So if you got any war crimes committed by the Soviets against Serbs, post them up..
It wasn't nonsense Stefan. There were little parades celebrating our arrival back in 1939...
You can't just claim that without any evidence. This sounds like a propaganda video...
As for WW1, I did sadly hear about that, and we Russians condemn all those crimes committed by our soldiers. But this was done on an even worse scale to our own people. You will never mention that though will you?
"little parades " I've seen the photos, these were organized by the authorities.
"You can't just claim that without any evidence"
I've provided my sources below the video.
"But this was done on an even worse scale to our own people. You will never mention that though will you?"
If you would take the time to check my channel you would find out I did in several videos.
@@HistoryHustle
How would you know that? You do need some sort of organisation because they wouldn't know otherwise. When your Holland got liberated, the Dutch authorities organised celebrations. There's nothing wrong with that...
I haven't watched your video in full yet. But I guess I shall... Sorry if I got it wrong then... I'm at work now. And so will do so in a few hours.
"How would you know that?" Sources with description. Also in the books I used as a source.
Lemme know what you thought of the video.
You take a young, poor man with no real concept or understanding of the greater world, give him a gun then feed him propaganda before shipping him off to a different part of the world he knows nothing about to watch his friends die to some foreigners he's never met, yeah guys tend to develop a bad attitude on the battlefield pretty quick.
I live in east europe. My family house stands here for generations and it stands maybe 50 meters from very significant railroad crossroads. So during WW2 we had flak emplacement on our garden. My grandparents loved that, cos they got a lot of interesting food from german soldiers, like chocolate, their parents got coffee. When germans left, one soldier was crying, he said: you (my granddad) remind me of my son so much. When Russians liberated us, our village got rape and mass robbery. Rear echelon troops was nicer, no chocolate and personal stuff but also no problems with them. The worst were hungarians. They just shot civilians here randomly in 1919. I guess it depends on specific unit, what they have been through already in that war, on specific soldier. Cos germans did terrible things in my country, but on our backyard, that specific AA unit, they were so nice
Interesting to read. Thanks for sharing. Which country you live?
@@HistoryHustle Slovakia, eastern part
So your family collaborated with germans and got punished for it
They were serfs. Reason why Swedish army was not so cruel was that it simply needed people in Karelia and elsewhere to feed it. Torpare was not that much different of a serf even if it could go where it wanted and even better rise up after military service in the ranks.
The Swedish Army sacked and destroyed most of Poland during the Deluge. Get a clue.
Most Germans were serfs and the Swedish army which invaded Germany in the Thirty Years War behaved exceptionally genocidal, no matter what colourful fairy tales may be dished out in Swedish history classes.
It’s crazy the similarities between then and now, even like you said in ww2 the soldiers scrambled to send packages home to their families. They were doing the same thing outside Kiev even as they were retreating and being pushed back soldiers were literally going to Ukrainian post offices to send loot home that they weren’t able to carry, even things like washing machines and toilets. Infact washing machines seem to be the go to favorite loot item of the Russian soldier in ukraine at the moment and it really gives you an idea of what life is like back home in Russia that such simple amenities are seen as luxury items. I forget the exact numbers of the statistic although I’m sure it would be easy to find but I remember reading that despite being one of the largest if not the largest exporter of natural gas only like a third or less of Russian homes have gas hookups for heating.
Actually, 40 million russians still live in wooden houses without plumbing and gas.
@@janurbanovic67 where did you know ?did you know everyone of these 40 millions of russians?
It's impressive how Ukrainians managed to convince West that Russia is poorer than Ukraine. And you don't need to see something as luxury to loot it.
@@aykaykalash From same source, Putin knows, that all ukrainians are nazis, Ukraina building biological weapons, NATO is planing to attack Russia. ( Russian source. )
@@janurbanovic67 well thats something that I didn't knew I don't watch russian sources :-) stop spreading lies
I honestly think you are asking the question the wrong way round. Raiding and terror was a normal form if warfare in the early and middle ages. Napoleonic times were not exactly kind to soldiers or civilians. Things only changed in western europe in the mid 19th century. But even then European soldiers were incredibly cruel to their respective colonies. E.g. Belgium cut off the hands of roughly half the population of their colony in the Congo!