World War II example essay topic

More than fifty years have passed after the World War II was over, but we can still hear a lot of debates taking place on different issues. One of the hottest debates involves the occurrences of terrorist acts conducted by the Soviet Red Army against the civil citizens and government on the territory of the conquered Germany at the end of war and in the postwar period. The issue is really a controversial one, because the Second World War was the most horrible of all the previous ones, and had the rate of human casualties much higher than in all the other wars in aggregate. Soviet soldiers were always regarded to be as saviors, but numerous facts indicating the great number of crimes committed by them stress a lot of ambiguity in the minds of all those who had a close relation to that war.

The Red Army was recruited exclusively from among workers and peasants and immediately faced the problem of creating a competent and reliable officers corps. Trotsky met this problem by mobilizing former officers of the imperial army. Up to 1921 about 50,000 such officers served in the Red Army and with but few exceptions remained loyal to the Soviet regime. Political advisers called commissars were attached to all army units to watch over the reliability of officers and to carry out political propaganda among the troops. As the Russian Civil War continued, the short-term officers training schools began to turn out young officers who were regarded as more reliable politically. In 1946 the word Red was removed from the name of the armed forces.

Thus, a Soviet soldier, hitherto known as a krasnoarmeyets (Red Army man), was subsequently called simply a ryadovoy (ranker). Discipline in the Soviet forces was always strict and punishments severe; during World War II, penal battalions were given suicidal tasks. In 1960, however, new regulations were introduced making discipline, and certainly punishments, less severe. Officers were to use more persuasion and were charged with developing their troops political consciousness, thus ending the dual control of military commanders and political commissars. The era of the revolutionary Red Army ended in fact as well as in name. A great number of books have been written about World War II and specifically, about what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) waged by the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.

However, this topic is far from exhausted: the deeper one delves, the more unexpected discoveries one makes, the more frank revelations one comes across, and the more acute issues arise. This is quite explicable as the importance of an event grows more evident only when it has become a part of the past. Hollywood and the establishment media amuse us endlessly with war crimes stories from World War II. Almost always, it's the inhuman Nazis oppressing Jews.

That's only one appalling aspect of the war and has been thoroughly explored. We should not disregard, however, that there were other crimes, by other perpetrators. Among these were the purposeful extensive rapes and brutalities inflicted by the Soviet Armies on Germans civilians, but also on Poles and others, even recently freed inmates of the Nazi internment camps. With all due respect to the soviet soldiers, many of which really were heroes and made an irreplaceable contribution to the liberation of Europe, there are too many evidence that the crimes were really committed, and the number of the crimes was horrifying. The heaviest and common crime among the soldiers was rape.

Most of military historians never stress the issue of the war rape, the practice of which has been accepted since the dawn of our history. The brutal conduct of the Red Army at the time of the war is vividly described by the famous British historical writer Anthony Beevor in his book Berlin: The Downfall, 1945. In an interview he said, that the controversy stems in part from Russia's failure to come to terms with its Soviet totalitarian past. Germany, the wars loser, has long dealt with its Nazi crimes. Germany really started to face up to the horrors of its past after it had an economic miracle, he said. "Russia hasn't had an economic miracle yet and it will take quite a long time even after it does before it starts to see things less in terms of the heroism of the Great Patriotic War.

When youre economically humiliated you hang on to that moment of great pride even more so and refuse to contemplate any dark side to it. Alongside the rape of an estimated two million German women, more than half of them gang-raped, by Soviet soldiers, Beevor research shows thousands of Ukrainian and Polish women were raped as the Red Army advanced westwards to end Hitlers reign. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin, rape had evolved into treating women as carnal booty, Beevor said. "For me, the most striking or horrific discovery from a Russian point of view was that Soviet troops raped young Russian and Ukrainian women, because that undermines any justification of Red Army behavior on the grounds of revenge, he added. Josef Stalin deployed 2.5 million troops, 7,500 aircraft, 6,250 tanks and 41,600 guns in the Battle of Berlin. The war victory - at a staggering cost of 27 million dead - is perhaps the only part of Soviet history that all Russians see with pride.

Their May 9 Victory Day anniversary of the end of the war remains a major national holiday. Beevor received many letters from German rape victims saying they were glad their story was being told at last. All of them say in relief: None of us dared tell our story because we didn't think anyone would believe us. You " ve now told the story. That was extremely encouraging, he said.