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

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] In the former local cemetery in Neukölln is a hidden memorial stone with the inscription: ‘Against war and violence. In memory of the victims of expulsion, deportation, rape and slave labour. Innocent children and mothers, women and young girls. Their suffering in the turmoil of the Second World War should not be forgotten, so as to prevent future suffering.’ Information on the feminist women’s rights organization at www.medicamondiale.org . 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] Frank Biess, ‘Moral Panic in Postwar Germany: The Abduction of Young Germans into the Foreign Legion and French Colonialism in the 1950s’, in: Journal of Modern History 84, 4 (2012), 789–832. 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] Walter Ziegler, ‘Bayern im Übergang: Vom Kriegsende zur Besatzung 1945’, in: Peter Pfister (ed.), Das Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs im Erzbistum München und Freising (Regensburg 2005), pp. 33–104, here p. 102. 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] Robert G. Moeller, ‘Deutsche Opfer, Opfer der Deutschen: Kriegsgefangene, Vertriebene, NS-Verfolgte – Opferausgleich also Indentitätspolitik’, in: Klaus Naumann (ed.), Nachkrieg in Deutschland (Hamburg 2001), pp. 29–58, here p. 32. 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. [8] Biess, ‘Moral Panic’, pp. 792–3. In 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] See Ruth Seifert, ‘Krieg und Vergewaltigung: Ansätze zu einer Analyse’, Working Paper (Munich 1993), p. 19.