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When the Red Army advanced through eastern Germany in the early months of 1945, they were finally beating the Nazis.

They drove the enemy before them, liberated concentration camps and restored the pride of a motherland ­devastated by Adolf Hitler’s forces.

But, in one of the most horrifying ­chapters of modern warfare, those same soldiers raped approximately two million German women.

Natalya Gesse, a Soviet war correspondent, said: “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to 80. It was an army of rapists.”

A decade ago this shame of the Red Army was highlighted by British historian Antony Beevor in his book Berlin: The Downfall 1945.

Russia was not impressed by his tarnishing of this golden moment in their history. And ow they are banning Beevor’s book, alongside titles by fellow British historian Sir John Keegan.

(Image: Edward Moss)

Schools and colleges in the Ural region of Sverdlovsk will be stopped from giving students or teachers access to the books.

During the Second World War, the Soviet Union suffered like no other country, with as many as 25 million people killed by military action, famine and disease.

They suffered terribly when the Germans invaded in 1941, both sides committing atrocities. The Nazis deliberately starved to death millions of prisoners of war and raped ­thousands of women.

So when the five million-strong Red Army swept across Europe, vengeance was in their hearts. German troops were annihilated and the country’s women punished by mass rapes.

Only last year, Margot Woelk, who was one of Hitler’s food tasters at his Wolf’s Lair HQ, described the ordeal she suffered at the hands of the Red Army in the final days of the conflict.

(Image: Eyevine)

Now 98, and her eyes misty with tears, she said: “If I knew then what was to follow in Berlin, I’d probably have killed myself.

“I was sheltering in an air raid shelter when they came for me. They held me for 14 days and nights and raped me constantly, one after another.

"They were drunk, dirty and smelled of damp hay and the farmyard. The first one who took me beat because I resisted. I didn’t resist after that.

“They gave me liquor and I drank it to blot out the memory of what happened. I remember hearing terrible high-pitched screams as I was violated and I knew it was the cries of other women having done to them what they were doing to me.

“After they finished with me I was never able to conceive. My husband and I wanted children so much but those pigs destroyed my insides.

"I wanted to die. Thank God I didn’t become pregnant, but I knew many who did. Many died from abortions they performed on themselves with coat hangers, screwdrivers. It was a time of hell.

“I later learned that the men who were doing this were not the elite first wave of combat troops that took Berlin, but the vast army of conscripts from the ­backwaters of Russia – people who had never seen a flushing toilet, knives and forks or running water. They were primitives.”

It turned out Margot was lucky to survive – a soldier she met told her: “The Russians shot all the other girls. They are all dead.”

Relatives of violated women suffered the same fate if they tried to protect them.

A 13-year-old boy called Dieter Sahl tried to stop Soviet troops attacking his mother.

Neighbours wrote afterwards that he “threw himself with flailing fists at a Russian who was raping his mother. He did not succeed in anything except getting himself shot”.

Once they had vented their thirst for sexual vengeance, the Red Army soldiers started to select victims more carefully.

Gangs patrolled Berlin looking for girls, often shining torches in bunkers to see if potential targets were pretty enough.

“By the time the Russians reached Berlin, soldiers were regarding women as carnal booty,” says Beevor.

Zakhar Agranenko, an officer of the marine infantry in East Prussia, wrote in his diary: “Red Army soldiers don’t believe in ‘individual liaisons’ with German women. Nine, 10, 12 men at a time – they rape them on a collective basis.”

Many of those spared by the Soviets did not want to live. In Berlin alone, one doctor reported that out of 100,000 women raped, around 10,000 died – mostly from suicide.

Back in Russia many war veterans refused to acknowledge the atrocities, while others owned up, unashamedly.

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One tank commander said many women were willing. “They all lifted their skirts for us,” he said, boasting that in Germany “two million of our children were born”.

Others said the men were so sex-starved they were entitled to rape. They claimed many of the victims were grateful. Talking of women aged 60 to 80, a senior Soviet said it was “much to these grandmothers’ surprise, if not downright delight”.

When Beevor carried out his research he discovered that it was not only German women who were victims. Polish, Jewish and even Russians, who had been prisoners of the Nazis, were raped indiscriminately.

He said: “I was shaken when we came across this in the archives. All of those young Soviet women who had been rounded up at gunpoint by the Germans and brought back for slave labour, they raped them as well.

"There was a very detailed report from General Tsygankov. But his chief concern was not about the women, it was that they might repeat negative stories about the Red Army when they returned home.”

Some senior officers did try to stop the attacks. In East Prussia the commander of a rifle division killed a lieutenant lining up men before a spreadeagled woman.

But when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was told, Beevor says he essentially said: “The boys should be allowed to have some fun. It’s been a hard war.”

(Image: Getty)

When his book was published in 2002, Beevor says he was accused by the Russian ambassador in London, Grigori Karasin, now deputy foreign minister, of “lies, slander and blasphemy against the Red Army”.

Mr Karasin explained the horrors that the Soviet people had undergone over at least three generations – the First World War, the revolution and civil war, the famines, the purges and the Nazi invasion – meant even those opposed to Stalinism saw the victory in 1945 as “sacred”.

He told Beevor that including the rapes “would be causing great offence”.

Yet it is only now as Russian President Vladimir Putin uses the Soviet victory in 1945 to cement patriotism, and as propaganda during the civil war in Ukraine, that they want to bury the truth.

(Image: Getty)

Beevor says: “Putin is not rewriting history but redirecting history. What he’s trying to do is revive the old Soviet myths, the idea that it was the Red Army that won the whole of the Second World War.

“It tends to be a question of ignoring inconvenient facts so as to bolster the central myth and obviously ignoring a million facts includes what they’re attacking me for having written.”