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

Other groups of victims also shared this bad reputation in the churchmen’s eyes. There is no doubt that the petty theft committed by released camp inmates, evacuees and refugees without means was a problem (apart from the property crimes by fellow Germans). It is difficult for us to understand today, however, how little compassion most priests and pastors had for Jews and other victims of persecution and enslavement. Their fate evidently aroused no sympathy but only annoyance and anger when they didn’t behave as they should. Even after the end of the war, those groups who had been marginalized from the Nazi society were still seen as outside the moral mainstream and therefore unworthy of sympathy. [20] See Anthony D. Kauders, Democratisation and the Jews: Munich 1945–1965 (Lincoln, NE 2004).

As mentioned, I believe that there was a much larger number of acts of sexual aggression in the archbishopric Munich-Freising than the number reported, not least because it is evident, reading between the lines, that the Catholic ministers trivialized the occurrences or even blamed the women for them. They evidently felt capable of distinguishing between ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ – in other words, between consensual and non-consensual sex. Thus the parish minister Josef Forster from Eichenried does not find it objectionable that women in his congregation landed in prison before the end of the war because they had relations with French prisoners of war. He found it much worse that now that war was over women ‘made themselves available to Americans’ without consequences. [21] Pfister, Das Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs , p. 626.

It would be anachronistic to apply present-day standards of what constitutes sexual aggression to the situation at the time. It is nevertheless legitimate to ask what the priest from Schellenberg near Salzburg meant with a sentence like: ‘Serious molesting of women took place in only two or three families.’ [22] Ibid., p. 502. An involuntarily comical but significant lapse was committed by Josef Gruber from Taufkirchen an der Vils when he wrote: ‘Civilians were not injured or killed. In the first days of May, however, there were serious breaches of morality mainly by negro soldiers through the rape of several (eight serious cases) of girls and women.’ [23] Ibid., p. 563. Rape in those days was not considered an injury. The point is that that the main problem in Taufkirchen – in the eyes of the churchmen – was the breach of morality.

It is thus highly likely that there were more rapes in the archbishopric of Munich-Friesing; many sexual aggressions were probably not regarded or perceived as such. Exaggerations must also be taken into account, depending on the political viewpoint of the reporter. Were 200 women in Bad Reichenhall really ‘defiled’ by ‘Gaullists, Turks and foreign workers’, as parish priest Matthias Kuhn from St Nikolaus parish reported on 25 July 1945? Some of the victims killed themselves, and one of the women was even granted a church burial. In this case, ‘defilement’ excused suicide, which was prohibited by the church. [24] Ibid., p. 489. Even if 200 rapes in Bad Reichenhall appears a little exaggerated, it was not completely invented, however, because Kuhn’s colleague Eugen Abele from St Zeno also reported three days of looting and ‘horrendous excesses; they also did terrible things of a moral nature to women and girls; for example, coloured Moroccans, who forced their way in at gunpoint at night’. [25] Ibid., p. 491. The recurrent reports of marauding Frenchmen in Upper Bavaria, which was occupied by the Americans, can be explained by the fact that for a short time the French army were the occupants, before being replaced by the Americans.

For some pastors, a narrow view of morality clouded the distinction between good and evil. What is behind the following report, for example? Ludwig Axenböck from Schönau parish wrote on 21 July 1945: ‘An evacuated woman from Munich consorted with the Americans, caroused with them, was dumped from a car in the forest near Mailling, run over, fracturing her pelvis in five places, obliging her to spend around ten weeks in Aibling hospital.’ [26] Ibid., p. 437. Is it possible that the occupiers just ran her over and nothing else?

Jakob Engl from Obertaufkirchen also has a strange understanding of right and wrong: ‘Women and girls were also raped. Unfortunately, the girls themselves were to blame in some cases. They went out unnecessarily onto the streets, smiled at the blacks and begged for chocolate until the calamity occurred.’ [27] Ibid., p. 556. A like-minded minister, Matthias Kern from St Wolfgang parish in Dorfen, wrote:

There were terrible and shocking occurrences in the first two weeks, when vehicles with black and white soldiers from Dorfen appeared almost every night, forced their way into houses under the pretext of looking for soldiers and attacked girls and women. Rape occurred unfortunately in perhaps five to ten cases. A few women without conscience, particularly from Munich, might have been to blame for showing a friendly attitude to the arriving Americans. [28] Ibid., p. 568.

Pastor Anton Kreutmeier from Moosach bei Ebersberg also wrote: ‘There was talk about rapes, although in some cases the victims themselves were not completely without blame. One Yank is said to have apologized officially to a girl, saying that he was inebriated and had never done such a thing before.’ [29] Ibid., p. 585.

In spite of reservations about the utility of these reports as a source – reservations that also apply to the documentation on flight and expulsion – it would appear overall, to judge by the situation in the archbishopric Munich-Freising, that there was extensive mass rape throughout Upper Bavaria, mainly by US soldiers and occasionally by the French – for example, in Lochhausen, Obertaufkirchen, Feldmoching, Schellenberg bei Salzburg, Neumarkt, Oberau, Eberseberg, Grafing, Holzkirchen, Freising, Gammelsdorf, Palling, Miesbach (including children), Moosach, Kirchdorf bei Haag, Wolfratshausen, Otterfing, Traunstein and in Munich in the parishes of St Emmeram, St Achaz and Namen Jesu. In many communities the ministers write in general of the ‘hunt for women and girls’, as in Allach. Rapes leading to death occurred in the parish of Mariahilf in Munich, where a young woman from Welfenstrasse was molested and then shot by American soldiers. [30] Ibid., p. 328. In Unterstein bei Berchtesgaden, an 11-year-old girl was shot in the foot while running away and a woman injured herself jumping from a balcony; in Tittmoning, a woman died of a heart attack because her two daughters were being threatened by GIs; and in Schönberg, a young woman died from a botched abortion. [31] We have precise figures for victims from the following places: one from Helfendorf, four from Haag an der Amper (including ‘an unblemished girl of sixteen, one married and one single woman’), six in the parish of Litzdorf (four peasant girls, one evacuee and one army helper), three in Tuntenhausen, five to ten in Dorfen, eight in the parish of Ramsau, ten in Schwindkirchen (‘virtuous women and girls’), eight ‘serious cases’ in Taufkirchen an der Vils, one in Trudering, two married women in Hörgersdorf, one 63-year-old woman in Kirchasch, one in Alling, three in Gerlinden bei Maisach, one in Inkofen, one 17-year-old in Ensdorf, one married woman and three girls in Grossholzhausen, one in Mailling, three in Pfarrenhofen am Inn, one near-rape in Böbing (‘a 15-year-old had a narrow escape’), one in Obermarbach, one 7-year-old girl in Scheyern, who was infected with gonorrhoea, one in Frasdorf, two in Zaisering, one in Osterwarngau, one mother of four children in Steingau/Otterfing, one married woman and two girls in Petting, two in Teisendorf, two in Otting, six to eight in Siegsdorf, two in Vachendorf, two in Lohkirchen, one in Niedertaufkirchen, eight in Oberbergkirchen, one in Oberwarngau, six or seven in Ranoldsberg, two in Schönberg, four in Stefanskirchen (including a 69-year-old woman), two in Baierbach, five in Hohenpolding, one in Pauluszell, one in Babensham, one in Fürholzen, one in Langenbach, and three in Lengries.