‘The Soviet War Memorial to the Rapists’ Is Located in Berlin
I stood at the Brandenburg Gate and tried to figure out if Russian society offered anything good to humankind.
Not far from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate is one of the largest Soviet war memorials in Germany. There are 1000 such memorials preserved by the German government today. The one near the world-famous gate is infamously called by locals “The Gate to the Rapists” or the “Tomb of the Unknown Rapists.”
Having lived in Russia for so long and knowing so well the evils committed by the German army, a part of me struggles to condemn the soldiers of the Red Army whose atrocities were acts of revenge. Please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying the rapes were okay. The rapes were horrific. The violence committed by the occupying army after the fall of Berlin was criminal, sadistic, and immoral. But Germans also have no moral high ground from which they can dare pontificate that they were somehow better. The Germans killed well over 10 million Soviet citizens during their three-year occupation of Western Russia.
As I stood under the gate before which Ronald Reagan stood and dared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” I tried to imagine such a moment by a Soviet leader. There has never been an inspiring speech, let alone an…
