Rape during the Soviet occupation of Poland

[1] The lack of research for nearly half a century regarding the scope of sexual violence by Soviet males, wrote Katherine Jolluck,[2] had been magnified by the traditional taboos among their victims, who were incapable of finding "a voice that would have enabled them to talk openly" about their wartime experiences "while preserving their dignity.

[3] Among the factors contributing to the escalation of sexual violence against women, during the occupation of Poland, was a sense of impunity on the part of individual Soviet units left to fend for themselves by their military leaders.

In search of food supplies and provisions – wrote Dr Janusz Wróbel of IPN – the marauding soldiers formed gangs ready to open fire (as in Jędrzejów).

In a letter to his Voivode, a Łódź county starosta warned that plunder of goods from stores and farms was often accompanied by the rape of farmhands as in Zalesie, Olechów, Feliksin and Huta Szklana, not to mention other crimes, including rape–murder in Łagiewniki.

According to Prof. Chwalba of Jagiellonian University, this behavior reached such a scale that the Polish communists installed in the city by the Soviet Union, composed a letter of protest to Joseph Stalin himself.

In March 1945 near Racibórz, 30 women captured at a linen factory were locked in a house in Makowo and raped over a period of time under the threat of death.

[3] One letter from the Recovered Territories claimed that in the city of Olsztyn in March 1945, practically no woman survived without being violated by the Soviet rapists "irrespective of their age".

[9] There is evidence that a loophole in the Soviet directives might have contributed to even greater number of rapes committed on Polish women by the Red Army soldiers, according to Jerzy Kochanowski from the University of Warsaw.

A 52-year-old victim of gang rape from Pińczów testified that two Soviet war veterans returning from Berlin told her that they fought for Poland for three years and thus had the right to have all Polish females.

The local Militia report stated that on June 25 near Kraków a husband and child were shot dead before a woman was raped in one village, while in another, a 4-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by two Soviet males.

Eye witness Gertruda Buczkowska spoke of a labor camp near Wielka Żuława employing two hundred ethnic Belarusian women.

In May 1945, at the conference of delegates of various repatriation offices, the final resolution stated: "through Stargard and Szczecin, there is a mass movement of Polish people returning from forced labour in the Third Reich.