Rape scenes

Yes agree...this was one of the most admirable features of the movie the fact that the storyline is also about the horrors faced by the civilians whose homes were caught between the battle lines.

Thought the handling of the rape scenes were very well done - shocking and horrific but not gratuitous. They were shot, acted and edited with complete docu-style authenticity and reminds us that casualties in warfare are just as much 'a young conscript looking for his blown-off arm on the beaches of Normandy', as well as, 'a young girl gang raped by soldiers on a front line roadside'.

Highly admirable war film / anti-war film.

The Red Army raped a lot of women on every territory they were passing through, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, etc. Soviets were true internationalist and they did not discriminate any nationality. However they were focused on German women indeed.

The Soviet propaganda ministry and the Commissars (political officers) encouraged their soldiers to rape, and specifically in Germany. They told them they'd not be punished and in official communiques literally told them to do it. They also played especially on the issue of 'race' saying things like "rape the pride out of the Aryan German women".

What struck me as authentic in the film was how the first soldiers who rape her are 'frontline' combat troops and whilst it was very brutal, with a beating and what appears to be an anal-rape, they somehow seemed to be detached from the crime - she was more of a nuisance to them and the gang rape occured as an extended act of the general violence while they were clearing the village - their focus was very quickly back to being professional soldiers and moving-out, they had no interest in her before or after. Later on the road, the next lot of soldiers were 'second wave' troops, less professional and they actively pursue her on-sight picking her out amongst the refugees. Their only focus was on catching her (the 'war' could wait!) and it seemed as though they took huge pleasure in raping her, akin to the scenes in "A clockwork orange".

The Soviet propaganda machine which spouted these kinds of communiques also knew that their seond-wave military units were purposely made-up of the dregs of the Soviet nations and Central Asian troops, whose understanding of conquest had changed little if at all from the times of Ghengis Khan - basically meaning rape, pillage, slaughter. The widespread mass raping of German women was very well orchestrated by the Soviet authorities, it wasn't left to chance.

I thought the film depicted this subject and the second-wave troops very authentically, and for those viewers whose perception of WWII comes purely from the BBC and Hollywood, then the contrast of the pigtailed blonde earlier in the film enthusiastically seig-heiling at a Nazi youth rally only to be gang-raped later by a baying mob of dark-skinned allied-soldiers, should surely do what the best films do; make you think.