I don’t always like The History Channel, but tonight I tuned in for their special about Hitler and the Third Reich. At one point in the special it was noted, briefly, that at the end of WWII some German citizens recalled hearing the screams of women being raped by Red Army soldiers.

I’m just so disgusted every time I hear defenders of communism, and then hear stories like this one. So I thought I’d Google “red army raped german women” and see what I could find. There were almost a quarter of a million results, but two caught my eye.

The Guardian: They raped every German female from eight to 80 (But it wasn’t just German women they raped.)

Calls to avenge the Motherland, violated by the Wehrmacht’s invasion, had given the idea that almost any cruelty would be allowed. Even many young women soldiers and medical staff in the Red Army did not appear to disapprove. “Our soldiers’ behaviour towards Germans, particularly German women, is absolutely correct!” said a 21-year-old from Agranenko’s reconnaissance detachment. A number seemed to find it amusing. Several German women recorded how Soviet servicewomen watched and laughed when they were raped. But some women were deeply shaken by what they witnessed in Germany. Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent. “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty,” she recounted later. “It was an army of rapists.”

Drink of every variety, including dangerous chemicals seized from laboratories and workshops, was a major factor in the violence. It seems as if Soviet soldiers needed alcoholic courage to attack a woman. But then, all too often, they drank too much and, unable to complete the act, used the bottle instead with appalling effect. A number of victims were mutilated obscenely.

That report when on to note that perhaps the Soviet soldiers were such animals due to the fact that their communist leaders tried to suppress sexuality.The theory goes that they wanted the people to have no allegience or love for anything other than the state. Apparently, those leaders weren’t familiar with the writings of Antonio Gramsci. I guess they were pre-occupied with the war. Regardless, there is no excuse.

And there’s this story, estimating that as many as two million German women were raped by the Soviets.

It was the end of July 1945, when 19-year-old Ruth Schumacher was raped by four Russian soldiers, a fate shared by an estimated two million women in Germany who, at the end of the Second World War, suddenly found themselves confronted with the Soviet army. For decades many of these women didn’t talk about what happened – in the post-war years, faced with the crimes of the Nazis, nobody dared focus on German suffering.

“In West Germany the topic was taboo because the Germans were seen as guilty for the war,” says Sibylle Dreher, a member of the Association of German Expellees. “And in Soviet-occupied East Germany, people weren’t allowed to talk about the abuse committed by the Soviet soldiers.”

However you slice it, when it comes to atrocities, the communists went out of their way to outdo the Nazis when it comes to violating human rights. Anyone today who defends or promotes communism defends this history. It’s no different than defending Nazism. When it comes to “isms,” whether it’s communism or Nazism, devaluing the individual is at the core of their philosophy.

One other thing to keep in mind is that prior to the war President Franklin Delano Roosevelt admired the policies of both the Nazis and the Soviets because he believed they knew how to get things done.