Ilya Ehrenburg’s Soviet wartime propaganda turned Germans into subhuman monsters to be wiped out.
German soldiers were called “wild animals,” “beasts with eyeglasses,” “trained beasts,” “pigs from Schweinfurt and Swinemünde,” “rabid wolves,” “carriers of venereal diseases,” “dying scorpions,” “German monsters,” “starving rats,” and “poisonous snakes.”
Ehrenburg told Red Army troops: “These creatures are not human beings… They are horrible parasites. They are dangerous vermin… must be exterminated.”
German soldiers were “rats carrying the plague” who “behave everywhere like beasts.” “A wild beast must not be pitied, it must be exterminated.”
This wasn’t aimed only at “fascists.” It targeted all Germans. The same propaganda that described torturing children, raping girls, hanging people, and burying children alive also urged soldiers to “wipe them off the face of the earth.”
The result was predictable: mass rape, torture, murder, and destruction of German civilians in 1944-1945.
From: Stalin’s War of Extermination by Joachim Hoffmann p. 231-233
drive.google.com/file/d/1Dr6…