12,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies - American, French and British - as by the members of the Red Army. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 446
Ähnliche
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Seventy years too late
Wrong victims?
How many were affected
Sexual aggression against men
A word about method
Notes
2 Berlin and the East – chronicle of a calamity foretold
The great fear
The Red Army comes
Berlin
One year on
A different perspective
Notes
3 South Germany – who will protect us from the Americans?
No one’s time
Moderate indignation
A ‘feeling of great insecurity among our soldiers’
Discussion
A ‘sexual conquest of Europe’?
Unbroken assertion of power by the occupiers
Parallels and differences
Notes
4 Pregnant, sick, ostracized – approaches to the victims
Victims twice over
Fraternization
The abortion problem
No one’s children
‘The other victims are also taken care of’
First the French, then the public authorities
‘I love this child as much as the others’
Notes
5 The long shadow
The effects of the experience of violence
The myth of female invulnerability
‘Anonymous’ and the censorship of memory
Duties of loyalty
First feminist protests
Helke Sander’s ‘BeFreier’ and the German victim debate
The past today
Notes
Sources and selected literature
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
iii
iv
vii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
29
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
79
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
Crimes Unspoken
The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War
Miriam Gebhardt
Translated by Nick Somers
polity
First published in German as Als die Soldaten kamen. Die Vergewaltigung deutscher Frauen am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs, © Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, Munich, Germany, 2015
This English edition © Polity Press, 2017
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1123-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gebhardt, Miriam, author.Title: Crimes unspoken : the rape of German women at the end of the Second World War / Miriam Gebhardt.Other titles: Als die Soldaten kamen. English | Rape of German women at the end of the Second World WarDescription: Cambridge, UK, Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016021691 (print) | LCCN 2016022335 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509511204 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509511228 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509511235 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945–-Women--Germany. | Rape--Germany--History--20th century. | Rape victims--Germany--History--20th century. | Soldiers--Sexual behaviour--History--20th century. | Women--Crimes against--Germany--History--20th century. | Single mothers--Germany--Social conditions--20th century. | Soviet Union--Armed Forces--Germany (East) | United States--Armed Forces--Foreign service--Germany--History--20th century. | France--Armed Forces--Germany--History--20th century. | Germany--History--1945–1955.Classification: LCC D810.W7 G3913 2016 (print) | LCC D810.W7 (ebook) | DDC 940.53082/0943–-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021691
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful for the assistance provided to me while researching this book from Martina Böhmer, an expert in dealing with traumatized rape victims in geriatric care, and Jürgen Klöckler, city archivist in Konstanz. My thanks go also to the staff of the archives mentioned in this book, particularly Gerhard Fürmetz from the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv. The discussion and essays by students who attended my course at the University of Konstanz in the summer semester 2013 were a great inspiration.
I thank the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt for suggesting and handling this book, particularly Thomas Rathnow and Karen Guddas, and my agent Rebekka Goepfert and social media adviser Oliver Rehbinder.
Finally, I should like to mention my husband Anthony Kauders, to whom this book is dedicated, for his personal encouragement and professional support during the burdening research work.
The author can be contacted through www.miriamgebhardt.de and www.facebook.com/gebhardt.autorin.
INTRODUCTION
A book project on the rape of German women at the end of the Second World War and during the occupation has first to confront certain prejudices. It is as if a single frame in a film has been frozen in our collective memory. It shows a Russian with Asiatic features yelling ‘Urri, Urri’, but demanding not only the watch but also the woman. We have all seen it on television: blonde woman, played by Nina Hoss, amid the rubble, with a slavering Mongol waiting in the shadows. Is there still anything important to say on this subject? The war is long over, the victims are very old or dead, and later generations find the war stories from Hollywood or Babelsberg more exciting. And then rape – is that not a relic, an archaic crime that always proceeds along much the same lines whether in Germany then, or in Iraq, Syria or South Sudan today? At best the subject offers a cheap platform for the eternal moralists and nationalists with their clear ideas about good and evil. Then it was the Russians who were the wrongdoers; today it is others – in any event, evil men once again.
While working on this book, I frequently asked myself why the wartime rape of German women was still of interest to me today, more than seventy years later. The simple and half-true answer is that the lens through which we look at this time is in urgent need of cleaning.
We historians neatly talk of a ‘gap in research’ when we find very little reliable information about a topic. But the historians’ demand for full accountability is not a sufficient argument for me. There must be more important reasons for descending into such a dark valley.
One such reason could be the demand for fair treatment. The legitimacy of the recollection of the events that took place after the arrival of the Allies is still questioned. There are still voices that say that the investigation of the mass rape of German women is inevitably designed to make up for the crimes committed against victims of German aggression and hence to relativize the Holocaust.1 Others contest the relevance of the subject itself, claiming that German society is just deluding itself into thinking that it has a blind spot in this regard. It is a pseudo-taboo, they say, that is repeatedly broken so that it can be erected again.2 And there are those who doubt the credibility of the victims, as the recent discussion of the diary by ‘Anonymous’ entitled A Woman in Berlin has shown.3
But for me the main reason for addressing this fundamental mistrust is that a considerable number of those affected have never been recognized as victims. According to my calculations, at least 860,000 women (and a good number of men) were raped after the war. At least 190,000 of them, perhaps even more, were assaulted by US soldiers, others by British, Belgian or French. Nothing has ever been said about these victims. Just as the misdeeds of ‘big brother’ were swept under the carpet in East Germany, West German society also kept silent about the attacks by its democratic liberators. The women raped by Russian soldiers were at least afforded some recognition, even if it was manipulated for ideological ends, being used to point a finger in the East–West conflict. The women violated by GIs, British and French soldiers, by contrast, were, if anything, punished with contempt. Under the Sword of Damocles of the public condemnation of ‘fraternizing women’ – i.e. women who allegedly prostituted themselves to the ‘enemy’ and thus stabbed their own nation in the back – it was practically impossible for the victims of Western sexual aggression to have their stories told. The same applied to the women in the Soviet occupied zone and East Germany. In those cases, too, the experience of violence, if mentioned at all, was put down to their own character weakness.
There have been only two books to date that have reached a wider audience: the diary by ‘Anonymous’ mentioned earlier, which was made into a film in 2008, and the first study by the feminist and film-maker Helke Sander in 1992. Both projects had the same setting – Berlin – and the same perpetrators – members of the Red Army. However worthy these two studies were, they reinforced the belief of most Germans that the wartime sexual violence was a problem of the Soviet soldiers, whereas the other Allies had rather to be protected from lovelorn German women. Thus Sander and ‘Anonymous’, and also the journalist Erich Kuby with his series ‘The Russians in Berlin’, which appeared in the German news magazine Der Spiegel in the 1960s, helped confirm the stereotype. As a consequence, the way people recall the mass rape at the end of the Second World War has become a right–left question: on the one hand, the revisionists and right-wing functionaries representing the German refugees from Eastern Europe, for whom the suffering of women was part of the dream of a Greater Germany, and, on the other hand, the left-wingers, who wanted to defend the reputation of the Soviet ‘liberators’ by playing down the rape by the Soviet army. This remains the greatest prejudice in dealing with this subject today.
But ignoring the crimes does not make them go away. There are still women (and possibly men as well) living in old people’s and nursing homes who remain haunted by their painful memories. They only need to hear a word in English or to be washed roughly by their carers for the memory to return. For that reason, Martina Böhmer, a specialist in geriatric care and trauma therapist, has been touring Germany for years in an attempt to raise the awareness of the staff of those institutions that they might be dealing in their daily work with victims of traumatizing wartime sexual violence.4
Even if this problem will soon cease to exist because the last victims will have died, will it have been resolved? Psychologists have discovered that Germany’s history still has an impact, generations later. This is easy to understand in the case of women and men who as children were witnesses, or even the product, of the rape of their mothers. But it is also important for their children to be aware of what happened and of the fate of the victims, and to form an idea of the wounds that many of the supposedly sturdy and resolute ‘Trümmerfrauen’ (‘rubble women’), today’s grandmothers and great-grandmothers, carried with them from the war. It is also essential to look again at the moral and sexist prejudices that women were confronted with at the time. They were denied any recognition not only because what they had suffered was considered shameful, but also because female sexuality was basically viewed with suspicion. They are accused of somehow having asked for it.
In the beginning, they probably kept quiet because of numbness and shock, and the inability to put their experience into words. Then other things became more important – above all, the economic and social reconstruction of the country and the re-establishment of the conventional patriarchal family model. Then, their own painful experiences had to take second place to political considerations and to the desire to take advantage of the assistance offered by the Allies. There was also the justified priority of dealing with the crimes committed by the Germans. But at some point, the reasons for continuing to ignore the mass rape dry up.
Even today there is an impenetrable barrier of silence, the social opprobrium, moral condescension, political instrumentalization, official chicanery, patronizing compensation, feminist partiality and lack of recognition causing raped women (and men) to be repeatedly hurt, humiliated, ignored or preached to. Experts give the name ‘secondary victimization’ to this cruel experience on the part of the victims of violence, who then become victims of social exclusion.
One further aim of this book is to show the degree to which raped women after 1945 were made into victims again by doctors who arbitrarily approved or refused abortions, by social workers who declared pregnant women to be ‘wayward’ and put them in reformatories, by neighbours who self-righteously gossiped about the supposedly bad reputation of these women, and by unfeeling jurists who refused compensation because they didn’t believe the women’s statements.
Many detailed studies will still be required to make a complete reconstruction of the post-war rapes – in other words, to do justice to all of the circumstances inside and outside East and West Germany, to the legal and administrative consequences in all four occupied zones, and to communications between the Allied armed forces and the German authorities, and to follow up the traces of the fathers of the children of raped women throughout the world. For the British occupation zone in particular, I found only very few sources. Were the British soldiers the only ones to behave decently at the time? Many questions remain to be answered. Nevertheless, the sources I was able to study provided such concurring and convincing answers that some of the crassest misconceptions about wartime sexual violence against German women can be refuted:
it was mostly Russians who attacked fleeing German women in particular, so as to take revenge for their own suffering;
the Western Allied soldiers did not need to use force as they got everything they wanted for a Lucky Strike;
the rape victims got over the experience ‘incredibly quickly’ because they formed part of a community in which everyone had suffered the same fate;
when they returned from the war or imprisonment, the husbands of the raped women rejected their ‘dishonoured’ wives and children;
the women raped by Russian or black soldiers aborted as quickly as possible for racist reasons;
the rape problem was suppressed after 1949 on account of injured male vanity, and reinterpreted as a metaphor for the rape of the nation as a whole.
These are all misconceptions and generalizations that this book would like to dispel. My aim is to cast a new light on this difficult subject and to untangle the half-truths and traditional prejudices. Above all, I would like to correct the image of monstrous Asiatic Russian or Moroccan rapists as compared with white Western liberators, who, as has now become clear, followed precisely the same script of plunder and rape. Fantasy, prejudices and reality can be quickly separated if we reconstruct the events of the time from the victims’ perspective, rather than turning them into malleable material for the rewriting of history as both conservative and liberal representations have tended to do in the past. It is time for the victims themselves to speak and for them to be rehabilitated, without their being exonerated from the crimes committed by the Germans under the Nazi regime. It is important to recognize the ambiguity of the victim and perpetrator roles in order to provide relief to their children and grandchildren from the traumatic after-effects of what their mothers and grandmothers experienced seventy years ago. This can be done by continuing to heighten the awareness of our own history that has been gradually developing in Germany in the last few years.
Notes
1
. See Atina Grossmann, ‘A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers’, in: Robert G. Moeller (ed.),
West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era
(Michigan 1997), pp. 33–52.
2
. Laurel Cohen-Pfister, ‘Rape, War, and Outrage: Changing Perceptions on German Victimhood in the Period of Post-Unification’, in: Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Weinröder-Skinner (eds.),
Victims and Perpetrators: 1933–1945, (Re)Presenting the Past in Post-Unification Culture
(Berlin, New York 2006), pp. 316–36, here p. 318.
3
. Jens Bisky, ‘Wenn Jungen Weltgeschichte spielen, haben Mädchen stumme Rollen: Wer war die Anonyma in Berlin? Frauen, Fakten und Fiktionen – Anmerkungen zu einem grossen Bucherfolg dieses Sommers’ in:
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, 24 September 2003, p. 16.
4
. Martina Böhmer,
Erfahrungen sexualisierter Gewalt in der Lebensgeschichte alter Frauen: Ansätze für eine frauenorientierte Altenarbeit
(Frankfurt 2011).
1SEVENTY YEARS TOO LATE
In Bamberg
That evening, the engineer’s wife Betty K. was roused by loud knocking at the corridor door. When she opened the door, her eighteen-monthold child in her arms, she was confronted by two huge negro soldiers, who pushed her aside and entered the apartment. After they had turned all the rooms upside down, they assaulted the woman and, according to her own statement, raped her three times. The woman’s father was restrained the whole time by one of the negroes and then shot to death.
Rudolf Albart, author of a war diary1
In a village near Magdeburg
The officer had begun to speak, when a German man came from the neighbouring village and through an interpreter said that a Russian soldier had raped his twelve-year-old daughter. The man pointed to the soldier. I then witnessed for the first and hopefully the last time a man being beaten to death. The high-ranking officer kicked and trampled the man to death entirely on his own.
Liselotte M. recalls the Red Army victory celebrations on 8 May 19452
WRONG VICTIMS?
At least 860,000 German women and young girls, and also men and boys, were raped at the end of the war and in the post-war period by Allied soldiers and members of the occupying forces. It took place everywhere – in the north-eastern corner of the Reich territory by the advancing Red Army, in the south-western corner of the Reich territory with the advance of the French, in the southernmost corner at the edge of the Alps during the occupation by the French and Americans, and in the western part by the British. The perpetrators’ uniforms differed, but the acts were the same. GIs and Red Army soldiers, British and French, Belgians, Poles, Czechs and Serbs took advantage of the conquest and occupation of Germany first to plunder and then to rape. They repeated, albeit to a different degree, what the Wehrmacht had done earlier to Germany’s wartime opponents.3
The question of friend or foe was secondary. On their way to Germany, the Americans raped the wives of allied British and French, and also freed slave labourers and concentration camp inmates – just like the Soviets, who had already inflicted a wave of raping on the countries liberated by them.
War-related rape is a global and traditional problem connected with patriarchal gender roles, in which women (and also men) are seen as the spoils of war. During the Second World War, all armies committed this war crime, and all populations suffered in differing degrees; French women were raped by German and American soldiers, Polish women by German and Soviet soldiers, and so on. It is part of the warrior myth that the victor savours his triumph with a sexual conquest. The Japanese army in the Second World War was a particularly notorious example, enslaving as many as 300,000 women from China and Korea, from other occupied territories in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan, and even from the Netherlands and Australia. It took Japan over seventy years to acknowledge that the so-called ‘comfort women’ had a right to compensation. Even if we extend the time horizon and consider later events, such as the mass rapes in Yugoslavia with up to 20,000 victims, or those in Rwanda with as many as 500,000, the mass rape of German women, although it is difficult to obtain precise figures, remains a historically unique phenomenon.
And yet, even today, these crimes are not talked about, and the women concerned are not officially regarded as victims of the Second World War. They have no memorials, no commemorative rituals, no public recognition, let alone an apology – a state of affairs attacked by Monika Hauser, founder of the women’s rights organization medica mondiale and alternative Nobel Prize-winner.4 Commemorating the rape victims appears to be even more problematic than dealing with the suffering of refugees and those expelled from the East. As many women were raped while in flight and in the context of these expulsions, they suffered from this silence twice over – as displaced persons and refugees, and as rape victims. At the same time, women from the smallest villages in Bavaria, in south-west Germany, in the Palatinate and in Westphalia suffered the same fate, only at the hands of Western soldiers. These victims also kept silent about what happened then.
How can this long silence be explained? Evidently, the German women raped as a consequence of the Second World War were the wrong victims – because they were not men and did not belong to the ranks of those who had been killed, crippled or traumatized; because they were not the victims of the Nazi regime but, on the contrary, might well have been implicated in the Nazi crimes; because they were subject to violence by the victorious powers as an ersatz for the criminal Nazi Germany; and because they were the unheroic victims of a morally charged crime that they were often accused of having brought upon themselves. Those who were not demonstrably ‘innocent’ – virgins if possible – those who did not defend themselves vigorously even when faced with a weapon, were regarded as ‘Yank lovers’, ‘Veronika Dankeschön’ (for venereal disease), who threw themselves at the occupiers for a bar of chocolate or a pair of stockings.
The victims naturally had good reason to remain silent. First of all there were the Cold War alliances. In the East, where many refugee women were stranded and subject to sexual aggression at the hands of Soviet soldiers, the atrocities committed by ‘big brother’ could not be mentioned. In the West, where there were also many refugees, and where women were subject to attacks by American, French and, in isolated cases, British occupiers, the process of westernization or Americanization was an obstacle to dealing with the other side of post-war experiences.5 As the historian Walter Ziegler writes, the subject of rape by Americans ‘was marginalized, like the numerous shootings, because of the later close friendship with the USA and the atrocities committed by the Soviets’.6 The Russians raped, the Americans distributed candy – this was the preconception that prevails to this day. The stories of individual groups of German victims, particularly displaced persons and German prisoners of war held captive by the Soviets, became a central focus in the 1950s in the formation of an identity by the German nationalists and refugee associations,7 but the individual experience of the women victims was appropriated and placed in the service of politics.
There were, of course, women and men who campaigned for the victims of war-related rape and their children, but the motives of these few parliamentarians or veteran association officials were not primarily reparation or compensation, but a criticism of Communism and the reinstatement of the traditional family model. It was for the paternal state to come to the aid of the children of these rapes and to grant these women special status compared with other mothers of illegitimate children.
Apart from the political reasons for the long silence regarding the rapes at the end of the war, i.e. the need to defer to post-war Allies, we can also identify social reasons. For a long time, it was mainly men who dealt with rape victims and their problems, be they members of the administration, charity organizations and parties, doctors or historians. At a time when efforts were being made to restore the traditional family in the 1950s, they had little reason to make the obvious point – that men had not been able to protect their women at the end of the war and that women’s bodies became public property. As society sought to reassert its masculinity, it was not an opportune moment to bring up the question of whether a son or daughter might have been conceived by the enemy.
The years after 1945 were characterized by feelings of moral panic, fear and insecurity. Not only was Germany confronted by the task of economic and political reconstruction, the Germans were haunted by ghosts and spectres reminding them of their loss of self-determination and the prospect of being at the mercy of foreign powers. This was symbolized by the metaphor of the rape of their own nation, specifically their own women, something that society emphatically rejected.8In summary, it was not so much the individual silence of the women after the war concerning the subject of mass rape as the embarrassed silence of a nation whose basic convictions about sex and society had been shaken and who wished to expunge from memory the inherent structural violence against women by re-establishing the traditional patriarchal family ideal.9
It was only decades later, after the reunification of Germany, that this frozen posture slowly thawed. The two main works recalling the mass rapes, Helke Sander’s BeFreier und Befreite, and the German reprint and filming of A Woman in Berlin, were products of the 1990s and 2000s. They were still not completely successful in overcoming the reluctance by society to confront this topic. Sander was angrily accused by historians of falsifying history, and through her calculations of relativizing the number of Holocaust victims. There was still evidently an image of heroic victims of the air raids, imprisonment, expulsion and fatherless children as opposed to the disgrace of sexual subjugation. The discussion that flared up following the republication of A Woman in Berlin in 2003 took a different tack. The book was a bestseller, but the credibility of the author, who had described her experiences in spring and summer 1945 and did not wish to be named, was disputed, an all too common pattern in dealing with rape victims, and this was then followed by the indiscreet revelation of her true identity.
Historians did not cover themselves with glory either in their treatment of rape victims. Professional chroniclers were unable to summon up sympathy for the victims, and their concerns were reserved for those symbolically associated with the male aspects of warfare. The sons of soldiers who grew up without a father, in particular, succeeded in attracting the attention of scholars and the public to their fate.10 Historical studies still shy away from dealing with the rapes at the end of the war. The new Oxford Companion to World War II, a work of over 1,000 pages claiming to be a comprehensive summary, does not even devote a chapter to this topic. The latest books on German history in the twentieth century also devote a paragraph at best to the experience of hundreds of thousands of women. Rape appears still to be tacitly regarded as a by-product of the ‘legitimate’ use of force in wars. And it was only due to public pressure that the exhibition ‘Kriegsende und Vergangenheitspolitik in Deutschland’ at the Haus der deutschen Geschichte in 2005, sixty years after the capitulation, displayed a single exhibit on the subject. The accompanying studies made no mention of rape.11
Academics and society have both failed utterly in dealing with this topic. A small research project at the University of Greifswald on post-traumatic stress in rape victims is a comparatively insignificant effort by society on behalf of the 860,000 women who, on my conservative estimate, were raped by Allied soldiers between 1944 and 1955.12 And even if the ‘unheroic’ and usually female victims of violence are finally accorded some recognition today, it is unfortunately too late for most of them. They are no longer alive to experience it.
HOW MANY WERE AFFECTED
To determine how many women were raped as a result of the war, it is necessary first of all to define the timeframe. When do we stop counting? Which rapes were associated with the war and which were ‘merely’ rapes by occupying soldiers in peacetime? I have restricted my study to the time from the fighting during the advance of the Allies on Germany to the end of the occupation period.13 My account begins in autumn 1944, when the Red Army reached the eastern border of the German Reich, setting off the mass flight westwards. It continues in Berlin, when rape was so common in spring 1945 that women are said merely to have asked one another, ‘How many times have they done you?’ Moreover, the rapes did not end after the fighting had stopped. We then move on to Upper Bavaria, to a self-contained and traditionally rural area, in which priests reported numerous sexual assaults by the French and, above all, the Americans. In Bavaria, as well, the problem was not over in summer 1945. The locals continued to complain of ‘breaches of the peace by US soldiers and the failure by the German authorities to respond’. In considering the consequences for the victims, we move to south-west Germany, where places like Freudenstadt and Stuttgart achieved sad notoriety on account of mass rapes by the French army. We can study these crimes through a particularly disturbing source describing the efforts by raped women to obtain compensation from the authorities for unwanted children.
The current book cannot and does not offer a comprehensive overview of the events after the end of the war but looks at the incidents and their consequences on the basis of individual fates and regions and the problems raised by them. As there is practically no mention in the records of the British as occupying forces, and as the information to be gained from sparse material in archives like the Hamburg State Archive does not differ from that relating to the other occupying powers, British involvement in war crimes receives scant attention in this book.14
We know, however, that members of the British armed forces also committed rape, albeit probably to a lesser extent. Although the civilian population under British and Belgian occupation was greater than in the American or Soviet zones,15 there are far fewer recorded cases in the archives. One known incident took place in Soltau on the Lüneberger Heide. The town was captured on 17 April 1945 after a stubborn rearguard action by the Germans. On the first night, the British soldiers combed all houses for soldiers and arms, and stole watches and other valuables. Rumour had it that the town was to be punished for its stiff resistance. In the first two days of occupation, there were several rapes in Soltau and the surrounding rural communities, one of them committed by an officer.16
The criminologist Clive Emsley also found very few crimes of this nature in the British military history archives and wondered whether the absence of corresponding judicial files was significant. It could be, he mused, that civilian victims remained silent out of shame, and that in any case there was little chance of an investigation of crimes committed by the occupying power, which was generally reckoned to be highly disciplined. Moreover, the victims would have had difficulty in identifying uniformed men, and the soldiers in question could in any case have easily presented alibis for one another. Two British soldiers, for example, were accused in summer 1945 of raping two women near Lübeck and stealing their bicycles. Their superior officer gave them an alibi for the time of the incident, although they were clearly in possession of the women’s bicycles, and the officer had even signed leave passes for them. The bicycles were returned to the two women and they were sent home in tears.17 Cases like this indicate that the British occupiers also have skeletons in their closet and that further research is needed.
The legal situation in post-war Germany made it almost impossible for the German police to investigate rape and prosecute the perpetrators. In the first years of the occupation, a German policeman would not have been able to report anything even if he had burst in on an American gang rape. He could not have intervened, let alone arrested the soldiers, because the military police were responsible for crimes against the German population. Nor, incidentally, would German civilians have been entitled to come to the aid of the victims, as the Germans were forbidden from attacking members of the occupying forces or proceeding against them in any other form. The occupying power had sole responsibility for charges and investigations involving its soldiers, with the result that in most cases no charges were ever brought in the first place. The perpetrators could also not be arraigned before a German court. Here, too, the military courts had jurisdiction.
In 1955, the Paris Agreements came into force, ending the Federal Republic of Germany’s status as an occupied country, even if state sovereignty still remained restricted until German reunification in 1990 and the entry into force of the Two Plus Four Agreement in March 1991. In the East, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany was the effective supervisory and command structure in the Soviet occupied zone until 1949, making way then for the Soviet Control Commission in the newly formed German Democratic Republic. In September 1955, a treaty between the GDR and the USSR formally established the sovereignty of East Germany. The official end of the occupation period set the seal on a gradual easing and calming of relations between Germany and its former enemies. From then on, the Allies were less interested in settling accounts with the German aggressor and more concerned to protect their respective allies in the East–West conflict that was now raging. This changed not only the relationship between the occupiers and the occupied but also the symbolic significance of sexual aggression by Allied soldiers against the civilian population.
The victims of rapes after 1955 – at least on paper – were not part of a population that had just lost the war but the female citizens of an alliance partner (the FRG joined NATO in 1955). These rapes were no longer excesses arising out of a collective group conflict but the isolated acts of individuals. The rapes, committed by men in uniform in peacetime, could now also be better investigated and prosecuted by the German authorities, at least in theory. By 1955, the drawn-out political process regarding the legal status of the rape victims had ended.
In this ten-year period from 1945 to 1955, it is important to visualize the dramaturgy of the events. Without a doubt, most of the rapes took place as the Allies were advancing, no doubt on account of the atmosphere of violence and conquest, but also because of the numbers involved. At the end of the war there were 3 million US soldiers in Europe. By early 1946, there were only 600,000. Criminal acts against the civilian population by the US Army levelled out in 1947 and 1948, although there was a surge every time new troops were stationed, particularly in 1950/51.18 In the early 1950s in particular, Bavarian communities like Würzburg or Aschaffenburg had frequent cause to complain about sexual aggression by US soldiers. The number of British soldiers stationed in Germany also fluctuated. In the closing phases of the Second World War, there were 400,000. Two years later, only 100,000 were stationed there. In 1951 the number rose to 250,000, and in 1952 to 300,000. The number of Soviet soldiers in Germany dropped by the end of 1947 from 1.5 million to 350,000. After 1949 this largest occupying army increased again to 500,000 or 600,000 soldiers. Added to this were over 200,000 civilians and family members.
With the transition from conquest to ordered occupation, not only the army personnel but also the nature of the rapes changed. This new quality can be seen in the case of an American soldier, who in 1945 went on a rampage of violence, possibly as a result of a war-related psychosis. By contrast, the actions of a group of drunken French soldiers, who in early 1951 attacked an elderly woman in broad daylight, dragged her into a military vehicle and brutally abused her, are more in the nature of a demonstration of power.
Apart from fluctuations in the military personnel, the living conditions of the soldiers, from billeting in private houses to the construction of dedicated housing for soldiers and their families, were also a factor in the risk of rape. The victorious powers pursued different policies in this regard. While US troops were encouraged to bring over their families, the Red Army housed its soldiers in barracks on the outskirts of towns and, for much longer than the Americans, forbade them from fraternizing with the civilian population, let alone marrying. The French billeted their soldiers in private houses, resulting in a particularly precarious situation for rape victims, as they had difficulty in proving that they had not provoked the attack themselves on account of the close contact with the perpetrator. Like the Americans, the British attempted to prohibit fraternization – with just as little success – and soon had a reputation in the population for being less casual than the GIs, but more respectful and disciplined.19
Apart from the attitudes of the former enemies, the structure and discipline of the units, and the likelihood of prosecution and punishment, we should also take account of the soldiers’ own political and personal motivation. Their own perception, and that of outsiders, of their status as conquerors, liberators, occupiers and protectors (from the other great occupying power) had an effect on the specific encounters between individual soldiers and the German population and on the crime rate as a whole, as we shall discuss later.
Having established the timeframe, it should be pointed out from the start that it is impossible to obtain even a rough idea of the number of rape victims from the available source material and research. None of the occupying powers has investigated the matter systematically to date, despite some serious initial attempts by American researchers. The Moscow archives continue to protect the reputation of veterans, and little is known as well about the British and French involvement in mass rapes. We are thus reliant on estimates, which in this war, as in all wars, vary considerably. It is in the interests of former enemies to magnify the crimes of the other side. The individual victims and their families, however, often prefer to remain silent.
It is in any case impossible to identify incidents that would be considered sexualized or sexual aggression by today’s standards.20 In 1945 and the following years, rape was defined only as the direct physical overpowering of the woman’s resistance (in some cases at gunpoint) with vaginal penetration and credible opposition by the victim, to the exclusion of all other forms of sexual aggression. Women with even the slightest reputation for easy virtue were not generally recognized as rape victims, and ‘innocent’ girls and respectable wives were more readily believed than young, single women.
The difficulty in estimating numbers is well illustrated by the differences in the estimates. Some put the number of rapes at 11,000 by Americans (J. Robert Lilly); others say there were 2 million by the Soviets (Helke Sander), or 2 to 2.5 million during flight and expulsion (Ingeborg Jacobs).21 Even as the incidents were occurring, there were different figures in circulation. In the battle for Berlin alone, anything from 20,000 to 100,000 women were said to have been raped.22 One eyewitness, the resistance fighter Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, was so overwhelmed by the acts of aggression she saw that she reckoned that one in two women in Berlin were victims. Doctors who treated the victims also cited large numbers, particularly in Berlin, where events were particularly fraught and where rumours spread like wildfire on account of the panic inspired by the Red Army.
In my opinion, the most serious estimate can be obtained by looking at the number of ‘occupation children’ fathered by occupying soldiers. In doing so, I combine two approaches. One is based on the assumption that around 5 per cent of the children of occupying soldiers were conceived as a result of an act of aggression. The other is based on the estimate that one in ten rapes resulted in pregnancy, and that of these pregnancies one in ten was brought to term.23 Obviously, both assumptions leave plenty of scope for error. The incidence of rape was higher among refugees in flight, and the number of abortions lower in rural regions. The official number of rape children is also approximate, as not all mothers admit that their children were conceived in that way, and others claimed rape in the case of consensual sex. Moreover, many of the babies died, particularly while their mothers were in flight, and were thus never registered. Not included in these figures are also rape victims who were too young or too old to become pregnant. There are repeated reports of the rape of prepubescent children, such as a ten-year-old girl in Kitzingen in summer 1946, who was sexually abused by an American soldier.24 The idea that it was mostly women of childbearing age who were raped is also a misconception.
Now to my estimates: according to information from the Federal Statistics Office of 10 October 1956, there were 68,000 illegitimate occupation children in care in the Federal Republic including West Berlin. This figure is known on account of the multiple surveys that have been carried out. One reason the statistics were obtained was for use as an argument in political discussion, not only in connection with financial reparations for women with unwanted pregnancies but also as a kind of moral quid pro quo. The question of whether an unwanted pregnancy could be considered ‘occupation damage’ was discussed for over ten years, both publicly and in parliament. These discussions, which I shall also come back to in detail, have not been studied at all to date.
Of the 68,000 illegitimate occupation children in the West, 55 per cent were fathered by Americans, 15 per cent by French, 13 per cent by British, 5 per cent by Soviets, 3 per cent by Belgians and 10 per cent by other nationalities. According to the mothers, 3,200 children were the result of rape.25 This is approximately 5 per cent. This proportion is also similar for the individual federal states.26
This is not yet the baseline figure for computing the number of rapes. It does not include the children whose mothers were married to Germans but who were made pregnant by a member of the occupying army – in other words, the children of rape within an existing marriage, who were legitimized by the husband. If the figures by the American Provost Marshal for rapes between March and September 1945 are correct, a quarter of the victims were married.27 This would add 1,100 children to the total. The figure also fails to take account of children under personal rather than state guardianship, which I am ignoring in my calculation.
According to this calculation, we have around 4,300 ‘rape children’. These are only the figures for the west and future Federal Republic of Germany, however. As far as the Soviet zone and future German Democratic Republic are concerned, we can only conjecture. As a third of the refugees and displaced persons from the former German eastern territories affected by rape lived in the GDR in 1950, and as there were frequent cases of rape under Soviet occupation and in the future GDR, I assume that at least the same number of cases occurred there, bringing us to a total of 8,600 children. Extrapolating by a factor of 100, we arrive at a total of 860,000 victims of rape. This figure refers to women considered German citizens in 1955 and who had been raped by soldiers or other members of the Allied armies while in flight, in the last stage of the fighting or during occupation until 1955. As many women were raped more than once, the total number of cases is much higher.
My estimate is on the low side. In the latest survey of German history in the twentieth century, the number of rapes in the entire Reich territory by the Red Army alone is put at 1 million, although without new calculations having been made.28 The standard work by Norman M. Naimark, Die Russen in Deutschland, and Helke Sander’s working group both assume up to 2 million victims of the Red Army.29 The American criminologist J. Robert Lilly, who speaks of only 11,000 rapes by the US Army, takes the proceedings before American military courts as the basis and multiplies it by a factor of 20, on the principle that only 5 per cent of cases led to criminal proceedings.30 This 5 per cent quota also applies to rapes following the landing of Americans in Great Britain and France, which appears high compared with Germany, where there were fewer scruples and no organized criminal prosecution during the occupation of the enemy country. Lilly also quotes only the period until September 1945. If we extrapolate his findings, the discrepancy between his estimate of the number of American perpetrators and mine is in fact quite small.
Helke Sander, who was the first person to study systematically the subject of mass rape by the Red Army takes a much broader view. With the aid of the demographer Gerhard Reichling in the 1990s, she put the number of rapes in Berlin alone at 110,000, with a further 1.9 million in the Soviet occupied zone, the former German eastern territories, and during flight and expulsion. This makes 2 million German women victims of war-related rape by the Soviets.31 As the figures by Sander and Reichling for a long time remained the first and only estimate, this assumption has since been accepted as fact. It is constantly cited, usually accompanied by the comment that exact figures are unavailable.32
Helke Sander’s working group, with Ingrid Schmidt-Harzbach, Barbara Johr and Gerhard Reichling, based its calculations on the following assumptions: 20 per cent of the raped women became pregnant, of whom 90 per cent aborted, and around 5 per cent of the children born in Berlin between the end of 1945 and summer 1946 were fathered by Russians. On this basis, arrived at through random samples in Berlin hospitals and taking the figure of 1.4 million women living in Berlin at the time, it determined that around 110,000 women, or 7 per cent, had been raped by Red Army soldiers in early summer and autumn 1945.33 Of these, 10,000 had died or became seriously ill with gonorrhoea – which often made them infertile – or syphilis.
One seeming discrepancy compared with my estimates is the rate of pregnancy as a result of rape. More recent studies have shown that in the USA, where contraception and the morning-after pill are available, 5 per cent of the rapes of young women result in pregnancies, whereas in studies in countries like Mexico or Ethiopia, where these contraceptive methods and the possibility of abortion are less available, the figure is around 17 per cent. The rate therefore appears to be correlated with contraception and the age of the victims (and the number of rapes per woman). As there was no Pill in 1945 and the perpetrators are unlikely to have used contraception, but also as many non-fertile girls and women were raped, I have taken a generally accepted mean conception rate of 10 per cent, which would make my estimate of the total rapes higher than Sander’s.
The main difference between Sander’s and my estimate, however, is the underlying number of rape children. Sander’s estimates are based on random samples from just two Berlin hospitals, without knowing whether they were representative or whether only certain cases of raped women were treated there. I would venture that these patients were probably women who had been severely mistreated, injured or infected with an STD, or whose menstruation had stopped after the rape. Even in a large city like Berlin, it was by no means a matter of course at the time for people to go to a hospital.
Gerhard Reichling estimates a somewhat higher rape quota of 7.5 per cent for German refugees, displaced persons, deportees and inhabitants left behind in the East. He claims that they were raped more frequently because they had less protection outside the cities. Based on this assumption, he arrives at a total of 1.9 million rapes.34 The obvious problem here too is that Reichling, unlike us today, had no official figures for the number of occupation and rape children. Moreover, his supposition that rape was more frequent in the East than in Berlin, where women also had scant protection in the bombed-out houses, is tenuous. Above all, an extrapolation on the base of a fixed rate has the disadvantage that it does not reflect the dynamics of war and flight. The war situation meant that different numbers of soldiers were on the move at different times and were in varying mental and material states.
In my opinion, the excessive figures in the project by Helke Sander, Barbara Johr and Gerhard Reichling are due to the still-existent latent bias in the East–West conflict and the impetus of the initial revelation and scandal surrounding the mass rape of German women. Sander’s approach in the early 1990s in particular was still influenced directly by the feminist struggle against sexual aggression by men, which since the mid-1970s had given great stimulus to the movement. Before Sander, no one had bothered to research this topic systematically. She deserves recognition for this. Nevertheless, I consider my estimate of 860,000 rape victims to be more realistic – once again pointing out, however, that these are only cases of vaginal penetration. In the absence of data and source material, other forms of sexual aggression, including acts perpetrated on male victims, cannot be included.
I cannot even speculate on the relative weighting that should be given to the individual occupying armies. I should like nevertheless to mention one way of estimating the ratio. If we assume a 5 per cent quota for the American occupation zone, we arrive at around 5,000 rape children among the 37,000 occupation children. This would suggest that around 190,000 women living in the Federal Republic were raped by Americans, 50,000 women by French, 45,000 by British, 15,000 by Soviet and 10,000 by Belgian occupiers. This estimate would only be anything like accurate if the 5 per cent quota applied equally to all occupying armies.
