PARTISAN REVIEW
women. Multiple rape reached mass proportions; the junior officers
not only failed to restrain their subordinates, but very often partici–
pated in the orgies, and sometimes instigated them. Looting of towns
was often accompanied by arson, and many places (such as Lands–
berg on the Warta, and Stolp and Lauenburg in Pomerania) were
destroyed not during but after the fighting.
Confronted with this elemental outbreak, the military and par–
ticularly the political authorities of the Red Army were completely
at a loss. On the one hand, it became evident that the army was
beginning to change, or perhaps already had changed, into an unruly
mob. (It frequently proved impossible to reassemble a unit after it
had reached a town; on one occasion, a colonel who had distinguished
himself at the front was killed by a shot in the back while trying
to restore order on the march.) On the other hand, the army com–
mand was unwilling to apply radical measures to curb such mani–
festations of the "sacred" lust for revenge, because the chief political
directive from above, from Moscow, continued to be: ''Kill the
German."
The active effort to check disintegration began only after the
cessation of hostilities. The stages in the change of the political line
were approximately as follows. First, the concept of "sacred" revenge
was defined "more accurately": the soldiers were told that the best
way of taking revenge was not to indulge in individual acts of re–
taliation, but to compel the Germans to rebuild everything they had
destroyed. After some time, the term "revenge" was dropped entirely,
and the political instructors began to explain that the army's business
was not to take revenge but to help the Germans create a democratic
regime, and that the best thing the army could do was to impress
the Germans by its own exemplary behavior. Later, intensified dis–
ciplinary and repressive measures were introduced.
When conditions had become relatively peaceful and stable, the
political propaganda centered on the struggle against "bourgeois
influence," the main carriers of which were German women. "Co–
habitation with German women" (the official term) became the
principal target of attack. There was sufficient reason for this. Future
historians will some day give the German woman the first place
among the factors that demoralized the army of occupation. Despite
the strictest bans and the various penalties instituted by the army
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