So, as most Russians, all of my family served in World War II, it being what you might call a "people's war". And throughout my childhood, I always considered it a war in which we were indisputably "in the right", authoritarian political repression not withstanding.

Henceforth it came as a tremendous shock to learn of the mass rape that occurred during liberation, something not at all reflected in the mainstream media (Russian or otherwise). It was overwhelming (first and only time that a historic event had a significant emotional impact on me) reading the various, intricately detailed accounts, and swallowing the Wikipedia cited figure of an estimated 2 million victims. I had longsince been numbed to accounts of mass executions carried out by various organizations, genocides, famines, but this was heavy.

A friend assured me that "rape is a part of war" and that there's nothing surprising about that figure. The explanation, as posed by my friend, was that there were simply more bodies involved in the Eastern front than in the West. As with the body count and severity of the destruction, everything that occurred on the Eastern front was an up-scaled reflection of what occurred in the West.

So what I'm curious about is some statistics: one in how many servicemen in the Red Army were involved in rape? In the liberation force of Berlin, etc? ...and some further details about the liberation process such as: how quickly did the leadership crackdown on the perpetrators of the mass rape? How quickly were basic needs met in Soviet liberated areas (food, water, electricity, public services)?

I'm also somewhat interested in how female servicemen reacted to the mass rape.