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

One victim from Berlin, asked by the social scientist Erika M. Hoerning, explained her own behaviour retrospectively as follows: ‘As I said, there were eight Russians… very brutal, and I must tell you that I didn’t scream or do anything else. I whimpered because everybody talked about raping and then being shot in the neck, and I was terribly afraid of that.’ [42] Erika Hoerning, ‘Frauen als Kriegsbeute: Der Zwei-Fronten-Krieg, Beispiele aus Berlin’, in: Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato (eds.), ‘Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten’: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Ländern (Bonn 1985), pp. 327–44, here p. 334. Lilly believes that this might even have brought about an escalation in the sexual assaults. Some soldiers, he surmises, might have interpreted the lack of physical resistance as consent, not least because they were also unable to communicate verbally and were not in fact allowed to do so, because the ban on fraternization included even speaking with the civilian population. Moreover, they often took a no as a bashful yes. [43] Lilly, Taken by Force , p. 146.

I believe that this argument is viable only to a limited extent. There were no doubt plenty of verbal and non-verbal opportunities for misunderstanding between the soldiers and their victims. Non-consent is expressed not only through vehement resistance and verbal means. The sources speak again and again of victims who cried, pleaded, begged, attempted to flee and resist physically, and of soldiers who held down their victims by force and threatened them with weapons. It is difficult to interpret these situations as consensual sexual contact. The slogan ‘copulation without conversation is not fraternization’ cannot be used to justify the assaults at the time.

The mitigation strategy used by the occupiers was nevertheless effective. Lilly believes that incidents in Britain or France that would have been prosecuted as rape might have been interpreted differently in Germany. He mentions a case in Aldekerk in the Lower Rhine region in which two GIs alternately raped a 19-year-old girl twice in her house. The victim cried and was in pain. After the act the soldiers drank wine with her and her mother and then the girl was once again abused. One of the GIs took a ring from his finger, gave it to the victim and said: ‘You me Frau.’

A military doctor confirmed afterwards that the victim had been a virgin. The soldiers had not hit her or pointed a weapon at her, and the rifles had been just within reach next to the bed. One of the soldiers said afterwards that he had given her the gold ring in the belief that she had earned it as recompense for the sex. The military court nevertheless sentenced both soldiers to life imprisonment with hard labour for the rape. The appeal court reversed the judgement, however, finding the accused guilty only of fraternization and promiscuous behaviour with an unmarried woman, transforming the sentence into a year’s hard labour and discharge from the army. They reasoned that the victim had not resisted physically or complained, and the weak signals of resistance like shaking her head and crying were completely normal behaviour for women in her position. This judgement reflects the widespread belief at the time that women wanted to be conquered and that a healthy degree of feigned resistance was part of the morally approved image of female sexuality.

After studying court files for the period March to September 1945, Lilly comes to the conclusion that the military courts increasingly trivialized rape. In the descriptions, earlier epithets like ‘brutish’ or ‘bestial’ were rarely used. He claims that the changed language was indicative of an increasingly blasé attitude by those involved. The anal and vaginal rape of the 60-year-old Anna K., for example, is described laconically as: ‘He satisfied his lust.’ Other cases speak merely of ‘satisfying sexual needs’ or say that the perpetrator intimidated his victim in order to initiate sexual intercourse. [44] Ibid., pp. 151–2.

The sentences for rape also changed. In Britain and France, where there had already been problems with rape by GIs, rapists – particularly blacks – were more frequently sentenced to death, with the possibility in some cases of mutation to life imprisonment. In Germany, however, perpetrators could expect lighter sentences. Lilly surmises that this had to do both with appearances and with internal considerations. The army did not wish to demoralize its soldiers in the face of the enemy, and in any case the women of the vanquished enemy were worth less than the women of the Allies or those who had suffered under German occupation.

We should avoid compartmentalizing these events as incidents in a higher-level battle of the sexes. Sexual assault is not a male privilege, and the experience of being sexually assaulted is not a female privilege. Present-day feminist theory no longer uses this binary code as a pattern for identifying perpetrators and victims, but takes account of the interaction of social, ethnic, religious, age and other categories in the individual. Sexuality is understood as situational or enacted: in other words, acquired and visualized only through interaction with another – not least through rape. Regardless of whether the sexual assault is between men, between women, or between a woman and a man, it is ultimately a question of the exercise of power in a patriarchal setting that makes the victim into a ‘woman’ – in other words, disempowered.

Systematic rape in war and crisis regions has once again recently come shockingly to the fore. The terrorist organization Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and Libya, the radical Islamic sect Boko Haram in Nigeria – is rape part of the arsenal of all wars? My historical study of the rapes at the end of the Second World War is designed to counter such generalizations. On the contrary, I seek to identify the factors that led to these crimes in a particular historical constellation.

To understand the gender culture that was partly responsible for the mass rape, we need to go back further in time, to the bourgeois era when the male–female ‘emotional culture’ changed from a sensitive and friendly relationship to a polar confrontation. On the one side was the soft, emotional woman in need of protection; on the other side the aggressive and rational man. This confrontation of the sexes during the nineteenth century fostered in men ‘aggressive and competitive affects in the market society’, competition, rivalry, warlike hardness. [45] Andreas Reckwitz, ‘Umkämpfte Maskulinität: Zur historischen Kultursoziologie männlicher Subjektformen und ihrer Affektivitäten vom Zeitalter der Empfindsamkeit bis zur Postmoderne’, in: Borutta and Verheyen (eds.), Die Präsenz der Gefühle , pp. 57–80, here p. 67. The female subject by comparison was reconstructed as being emotional, empathic and tending to sentimentality. The consumer society of the early twentieth century reinforced the sexualization of women, while men adopted a power-oriented, uncompromisingly heterosexual gender role that left little scope for mutual attraction and empathy for others. It was in this charged male–female atmosphere that the concept of a ‘war of the sexes’ emerged in the early twentieth century. It became fashionable to speak of the supposed irreconcilability of the sexes. [46] Meyers Grosses Konversationslexikon of 1905 states: ‘The nervous system in general is more irritable in the female sex… There are also mental gender differences; in women feelings and emotions have the upper hand, in men intelligence and reason; women have a more lively imagination than men but it rarely achieves the same heights and boldness as in men.’ Quoted in Angelika Schaser, Frauenbewegung in Deutschland: 1848 bis 1933 (Dortmund 2006), p. 69.