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

The dramatization of sexuality and gender roles in wartime, the male experience of downgrading in their countries of origin, the subconscious insecurity with regards to identity in view of the growing women’s labour force created a climate of anti-female aggression in both the West and the East. This made women into particular targets for male frustration in the last phase of the war and the post-war period. The most extreme expression was rape, but there were also other forms of reaction to masculine insecurity, such as the shaming rituals through the public shaving of the heads of supposed collaborators in France and Germany. Compulsory examinations of female ‘sources of infection’ can also be seen in this light, not to mention the merciless discipline in homes for ‘destitute’ girls and, not least, the constant suspicion that rape victims had in fact consented to the approaches by the occupiers and had even sought financial recompense for their immoral behaviour. [56] John Horne, ‘Masculinity in Politics and War in the Age of Nation-States and World Wars, 1850–1950’, in: Dudink et al., Masculinities , p. 33.

It is repeatedly pointed out that the victims of the misdeeds committed by the Allies and German soldiers in the Second World War were the vanquished population and that they were part of the sexual conquest of a country. War-related rape is categorized within the semantic field of violent attack on the rights, property and collective honour of others. [57] Angela Koch, ‘Die Verletzung der Gemeinschaft: Zur Relation der Wort- und Ideengeschichte von “Vergewaltigung”’, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 15, 1 (2004), pp. 37–56, here p. 46. However plausible this might sound, in my opinion this highly abstract explanation does not help us to understand what happened. The concept of symbolic collective rape, like the earlier idea of a natural male sex drive, runs the risk rather of normalizing sexual violence in war and presenting it as an unavoidable evil.

It would be more useful in my opinion to consider that it was rather the specific experience in dealing with the sexes and the established behaviour patterns in the different armies that led to the eruption of sexual violence at the end of the war. Rapes had occurred as the armies advanced on Germany – the communal acts had already been ‘tried out’ by the Americans in Britain and France and the Soviets in the East.

Alongside the acute war-related opportunities for the mass rape of German women, the interaction of ethnic, sexist and specific social factors might be a further reason why the fate of German women has never been recognized or sympathized with. They have never been delineated as a victim group, as they were not raped solely as Germans or as women. As we shall see, this had ambivalent consequences in the attempts to come to terms with what had occurred. Treating the terrible events as the violent fate of a nation helped in particular in discussion of German flight and expulsion, but it also meant that for a long time the fate of the individual women was ignored and has still not been recognized today. It was a woman’s fate, leading in a post-war society interested in re-establishing male dominance to a devaluation of a group of victims who were ‘female’ and hence inferior.

The decision for the second time in a generation to send soldiers across the Atlantic to fight at the side of the Allies against Germany was initially anything but popular with the US population. It was not until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the mood changed. After the initial goal of liberating the countries occupied by the Germans, of disarming the enemy and bringing the main persons responsible to justice, the aim was to restore security and order and to re-educate the Germans to build a democracy. The long-term objective of the United States to consolidate the American influence in Europe and to keep the Soviets in check was ultimately to require presence of US troops abroad for many years.

The prospect of permanent stationing in Europe under living conditions much worse than those at home was not popular with the soldiers. Noble political motives on their own were often not sufficient to motivate the ordinary troops. In her book What Soldiers Do , about the sexual conquests by GIs in France at the end of the Second World War, Mary Louise Roberts points to another motivation used by the US Army to lure soldiers – the reward for the efforts and hardships of war could also be of a sexual nature in the form of European women.

Roberts shows that the US Army, in its attempts to inspire the young men to fight, quite deliberately disseminated an image of French and European women as sexually hungry and open-minded. In the military newspapers and propaganda leaflets, the prospect of a long and hard struggle to liberate Europe from the German aggressor was blatantly made more palatable through the prospect of gratitude by the women. [58] Roberts, What Soldiers Do , pp. 62–3. Countless cartoons and photographs showed American heroes being embraced and kissed by the women in the liberated countries. Roberts claims that the ‘conquest’ of women fulfilled a dual purpose: on the one hand, as a trophy for the American soldiers themselves; and, on the other hand, as a strategy in the power struggle for domination in the country. Consensual and non-consensual sex by foreigners with their wives and daughters clearly demonstrated to the men of Europe how insignificant their position had become in the world. [59] Ibid., p. 7.

Thus, the raping by American soldiers did not begin after they had crossed the Rhine but right after the landing in Normandy, where there was fighting, looting and destruction by US troops. French women suffered on account of their reputation among the American men as being particularly easy prey. The prolonged US propaganda to encourage and sexualize the American soldiers had its consequences: ‘The myth of the manly GI turned out to be too successful. Sexual fantasies about France did indeed motivate the GI to get off the boat and fight. But such fantasies also unleashed a veritable tsunami of male lust.’ [60] Ibid., p. 9.

The conquest and liberation of Europe was made to look like a romantic affair – expressed by laughing women in the arms of American soldiers – but in reality the French were obliged to complain continuously to the military authorities that the soldiers sought sex in public in broad daylight, peacefully sometimes but also by force. Parks, ruined buildings, cemeteries, railway tracks all appeared ideal for this purpose.

In spite of the numerous complaints, the American army command did nothing to discipline its troops. Instead, it justified the behaviour of the soldiers by pointing to the military – in other words, male – inability of France to resist Nazi Germany, and decided high-handedly that social ills like the open and secret prostitution, particularly of young girls from rural areas, and the growing rate of infection with venereal diseases were a French problem – as long as the American public, particularly women, remained untouched by it.

When the complaints of rape by the French increased and came to the attention of the American media, however, the army leadership resorted to pointing the finger at African American soldiers, whom they prosecuted and punished with particular severity. In October 1944, 152 American soldiers, including 139 blacks, were convicted of rape in France. Within a single year, forty-five black soldiers were executed there for rape. This was fine with the French, who were also particularly interested in the prosecution of dark-skinned perpetrators.