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

The battle of the sexes was not a German or European phenomenon but one involving the entire modern world: press, academics, political parties, doctors and psychiatrists explained that men and women were not meant for one another and that the relationship between the sexes was a battleground, in contrast to the utopian bourgeois idea of the previous century of complementarity: the man operated in public, the woman in the home, both working towards a peaceful family life based on love, respect and tolerance. Meanwhile, the biologism and Darwinism of the late nineteenth century produced a conflictual model based on feelings and sexuality. Experts now claimed that women could not separate sex and love, while men used sex above all to pass on their genes. The quality of the desire was also completely different: men wanted hard sex, women cuddly sex. A real man needed to dominate, possibly with a hint of violence, and a real woman would yield to this need in the interests of natural selection of the stronger.

Ideas like this meant that even before the First World War prostitution and trafficking in girls increased greatly. The number of prostitutes in the German Empire rose, for example, from 100,000 to 330,000. The trend was even more marked in times of war, when the military set up brothels and controlled prostitution to give soldiers access to sex. This did not stop many soldiers from believing that they had a right to sexual war booty. The penis as weapon, the sex act as surrogate for fighting, the diametrically opposed nature of the passive woman and the aggressive man – all this produced an explosive mix in the relations between the sexes. Where simple organizational categories were questioned, there was a need for hard contrasts so that women would feel feminine and men masculine.

The women’s emancipation movement, the increasingly open homosexual milieu, psychoanalysis, the first sex-change operations all shook the traditional ideas of masculinity, not only in the Western world, but also in the East, where Communism advocated equality of the sexes. In the Soviet Union, the ideologically ordained but only fragmentarily implemented gender equality was not particularly welcomed by men. Women should have children and work, and the link between production and reproduction was therefore a central focus of gender politics. Despite this, women were usually stuck in the lower-paid and less prominent areas of politics and industry. [47] Women were enlisted into fighting units in the Red Army and fought alongside their male colleagues. After the invasion by Nazi Germany, it was the patriotic duty of both men and women to defend their homeland. Some 800,000 women served in the army, navy and air force or on the home front, and from 1942 they were trained in special facilities as snipers, pilots or military officers. The ideal, as in Germany, was nevertheless a strong and independent woman on the home front to take the place of the men and at the same time to keep the home fires burning for the returning troops.

In the early twentieth century, therefore, the dominant male model came increasingly under pressure. The male image was of workers and fighters, but machines made physical strength less important, as work could now be carried out by less skilled immigrants and women. At the same time, from the First World War onwards, the fighting affected civilian life more and more and thus impacted not only on men. As the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz puts it, the male position was ‘doubly destabilized: at home and at the front, which affected very many more civilians than previous wars’. It was now no longer the ‘privilege’ of men to fight, to prove themselves in war and, if need be, to die heroically for the fatherland. This could explain why the post-war periods after 1918 and 1945 saw a radically new gender order. [48] Reckwitz, ‘Umkämpfte Maskulinität’.

Masculinity also suffered in the USA in the 1930s. The economic crisis caused mass unemployment and wage cuts, making millions of family providers reliant on welfare. The fear of a soft and ‘feminized’ nation was greater for some people than the threat of war with Germany. It gave rise to a movement aimed explicitly at strengthening men, shoring up the health and strength of the nation through physical fitness and male vitality. The outbreak of war was an ideal moment for combining male and soldierly images. The ‘real man’ could prove himself in a particularly hard situation full of deprivation, physical stress and boundless violence. [49] Frank Werner, ‘“Noch härter, noch kälter, noch mitleidloser”: Soldatische Männlichkeit im deutschen Vernichtungskrieg 1941–1944’, in: Anette Dietrich and Ljiljana Heise (eds.), Männlichkeitskonstruktionen im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt 2003), pp. 45–63, 51.

British soldiers also had to deal with contradictory male virtues in the war: on the one hand an honourable and emotionally controlled or ‘tempered’ bourgeois masculinity as a contrast to the hyper-masculine Nazi maleness, and, on the other hand, a heroic, steady and soldierly masculinity to defend the attacked ‘female’ nation. [50] See Sonya O. Rose, ‘Temperate Heroes: Concepts of Masculinity in Second World War Britain’, in: Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester 2004), pp. 177–95.

The idea of soldierly comradeship as an exclusively male domain that didn’t require women, who stood for home, family and security, played an important role in the punishment of aggressive sexual practices. [51] Thomas Kühne, ‘Zärtlichkeit und Zynismus: Militärische Vergemeinschaftung 1918–1945’, in: Borutta and Verheyen (eds.), Die Präsenz der Gefühle , pp. 179–202, here p. 183. A comrade was someone with whom one could do things together. Getting up to tricks meant, above all, non-marital sex with women:

Adultery with comrades was what made a soldier’s life interesting… Boozing and going on the rampage gave the male society the feeling of being able to flaunt the formal rules of military order and even more so the morality of bourgeois life. Demonstrating disdain for women, talking of sexual matters in a crude and unmannerly way, talking smut were all signs of real maleness. [52] Ibid., p. 191.

It was not primarily sexual needs but rather the need to fit into the soldierly community and to prove oneself among comrades that counted.

This is the background to the frequent commission in groups of rape and other crimes in the Red Army and in the US, British and French armies. It was not just a matter of punishing the enemy but of interaction with comrades. ‘The victims themselves scarcely seemed to feature in their minds as people…. The passion in question was largely their love for each other, and also their grief – undrownable despite oceans of wine and schnapps – for all the people and the chances they had lost’, as Catherine Merridale describes it. [53] Merridale, Ivan’s War , p. 267. The desire for comradeship and the fear of being seen as a coward were both reinforced by the group rapes. Merridale tells of a Red Army soldier who was invited to select a German girl from among a group of terrified captives. His first fear was that his own men might think him cowardly or even impotent if he refused. [54] Ibid., p. 268. The same phenomenon can be observed today in male initiation rites in student fraternities or gang rapes by criminal bands.

Gaby Zipfel points to a further motive for the soldierly violence against women and civilians. The soldiers hid their vulnerability in war by directing their power to harm against female or feminized people. They compensated for their own fear and weakness through male aggressiveness. The victim did not have to be a woman. The mass rapes in Nanking in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War also included the anal rape of men and forcing men to sexually abuse one another. In the Bosnia war in the early 1990s, Serbian soldiers also forced men to have intercourse with one another. [55] Gaby Zipfel, ‘Ausnahmezustand Krieg?’, in: Insa Eschebach and Regina Mühlhäuser (eds.), Krieg und Geschlect: Sexuelle Gewalt im Krieg und Sex-Zwangsarbeit in NS-Konzentrationslagern (Berlin 2008), pp. 55–74; see also Miranda Alison, ‘Sexuelle Gewalt in Zeiten des Kriegs: Menschenrechte für Frauen und Vorstellungen von Männlichkeit’, in: Eschebach and Mühlhäuser (eds.), Krieg und Geschlect , pp. 35–54.