Miriam Gebhardt: Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War

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.

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 subject of sexual aggression by the German Wehrmacht has been studied increasingly in recent years. One of the latest articles is Regina Mühlhäuser, ‘Eine Frage der Ehre: Anmerkungen zur Sexualität deutscher Soldaten während des Zweiten Weltkriegs’, in: Wolfgang Bialas and Lothar Fritze (eds.), Ideologie und Moral im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen 2014), pp. 153–74.