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

In September 1961, the 35-year-old housewife U. G. appeared before Opladen local court. She was informed of her right to refuse to testify but said that she was willing to do so. She related that in the late afternoon of 8 May 1945, she had been walking from Weede to Steinweg in the district of Segeberg when, at around 7 p.m., she saw a British motorcycle driver leaning against a tree. His hand was on the pistol in his lap. He addressed the two women and asked in broken German how old they were. At the time U. G. was eighteen and her friend just sixteen. The soldier told the friend that she was too young for him and she was able to get away. ‘I wasn’t able to escape’, continued U. G.; ‘He grabbed hold of me so that I couldn’t free myself. He was like an animal, you could say, and threw me onto the ground, tearing my blouse in the process.’

When U. G. later spoke to her friend, the latter said that she had wanted to fetch help but couldn’t find anyone. U. G. related the incident to her mother, who told her she should wait first for her next period. But it didn’t come. A pregnancy test was carried out by the health department in Bad Segeberg. Her mother wanted her to have an abortion, but they were told at the department that abortions were strictly forbidden. On 30 January 1946, U. G. gave birth to the child of the British rapist. Now, fifteen years later, she swore that her testimony was true. She hoped to receive a hardship allowance for her daughter.

One of the aspects of the mass rapes after the war that still remains to be discussed is the fact that in many cases the suffering of the women did not end with the rape. Many victims had to endure humiliation for years afterwards. Especially for those who became pregnant as a result of the rape there was very little chance of starting over again after the war. They were despised by society and had to fear that their husbands would leave them, or discovered that, encumbered with an ‘occupation child’, they had little chance of finding a partner who would marry them. And they had to bear the financial costs of the outcome of the rape.

Unwanted pregnancies were just one of the consequences of sexual violence at the end of the war. Those women who had ‘only’ become infected with a venereal disease and had to deal ‘only’ with the psychological consequences or were marginalized in society were to discover painfully how German society dealt with victims for whom they had no sympathy.

For U. G., the story continued. Two months after her court hearing, a municipal councillor at the Amt für Verteidigungslasten [department for losses incurred by foreign defence troops] in Düsseldorf stated that she had provided no proof of rape and requested that the friend who had run away be questioned under oath. The witness was heard on 21 December 1961. She added that they had both started to cry when the soldier spoke to them and she had told him that she was very young and had a sick mother at home. The soldier then grabbed her friend by the arm. She could not say whether her friend had resisted. Her testimony satisfied the judge, however, and on 14 March 1962 U. G. received a decision in her favour, granting her a hardship allowance for her daughter of DM 65 per month backdated to 1 October 1958, minus 50 per cent to take account of state welfare payments. The total amounted to DM 1,300. The child was now sixteen years old and was to receive a hardship allowance of DM 42 per month until she completed her vocational training in 1965. [4] Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Amt für Verteidigungslasten Düsseldorf, BR 2076 No. 412. It had taken twenty years for compensation, at least of a financial nature, to be obtained for the rape.

The social climate at the time and the institutions dealing with the women in many cases provided no help for the victims, but rather worsened their situation. Insensitive gynaecologists and unpitying jurists decided on abortion requests and compensation claims; authoritarian welfare workers controlled their household and child allowances if the women had had a child as a result of the rape; and brutish policemen assisted the occupation forces’ military police in fighting suspicious ‘sources of infection’ with venereal diseases – often with the same occupying power that had committed the rapes. And the reputation and credibility of the women were always at stake. Post-war society was more interested in struggling to restore the supposedly lost ‘morality’ than in dealing with the consequences of acts of violence suffered by the German population in the Nazi era and war.

Few people are aware today of the mass rapes committed by GIs and soldiers of the French Army. Unlike the acts by the Red Army soldiers, these crimes have not entered the collective German memory. Even in small communities, they have been forgotten or suppressed. The images of fraternization are much more vivid: women and girls who landed the nearest muscle-bound GI allegedly for a cigarette or a pair of nylon stockings or simply because they found the well-nourished American soldiers more attractive than the emaciated German men. It was said that Americans took six years to defeat the German soldiers but it took only one day and a bar of chocolate to get a German woman. [5] Pfister, Das Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs , p. 923; see also Susanne zur Nieden, ‘Erotische Fraternisierung: Der Mythos von der schnellen Kapitulation der deutschen Frauen im May 1945’, in: Hagemann et al. (eds.), Heimat-Front , pp. 313–25.

It is difficult today to understand the indignation at women who had relations with occupying soldiers. At the time, however, both the occupying powers and the Germans had different reasons for wanting to prevent contact between the military and civilians. For the Germans, there were questions of loyalty to the nation and the soldiers who had been killed or taken prisoner in the field, while the Americans, British, French and Soviets feared that informal contact with the enemy population could weaken and endanger their own troops. Moreover, the Allies wanted the Germans to feel in no uncertain terms that they had lost the war and that they could not expect any sympathy or clemency.

It was for that reason that, as early as 12 September 1944, General Eisenhower forbade private contact with Germans: ‘Every friendly German civilian is a soldier of hate in disguise… A smile is the weapon they use to disarm you. Do not fraternize.’ [6] Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Die amerikanische Besatzung Deutschlands (Munich 1996), p. 188. This attitude was reinforced by the ban on fraternization in early 1945, designed to prevent any unnecessary personal contact. After Germany’s surrender, however, the ban on contact proved to be neither enforceable nor desirable, because the occupying powers were reliant on the help of the Germans in administering the occupied territories, and were also intent on reeducation and democratization. By October 1945, the American ban on fraternization had been officially lifted.

At the same time, the term ‘fraternization’ acquired a second unofficial meaning – namely, consensual (hetero-)sexual contact between German women and Western soldiers and other members of the armed forces. [7] See Petra Goedde, ‘From Villains to Victims: Fraternization and the Feminization of Germany, 1945–1947’, in: Diplomatic History 23, 1 (winter 1999), pp. 1–20. Even if ‘fraternization’ is generally associated with American soldiers, the British had similar ideas about the nature and intentions of German women and warned their soldiers accordingly. In a 1944 manual, the British soldiers were warned that ‘under the shock of defeat, standards of personal honour, already undermined by the Nazis, will sink still lower. Numbers of German women will be willing if they can get the chance to make themselves cheap for what they can get out of you.’ Marriage was forbidden by the British as a precautionary measure, since the German girls would become British if they married British men and exploit all the advantages of this nationality. They would not be doing it out of affection: ‘When once they had their marriage lines, he would have served his purpose.’ They were also warned that the Germans might use attractive women as spies: ‘Don’t be too ready to listen to stories told by attractive women. They may be acting under orders.’ [8] The Bodleian Library (ed.), Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany , issued by The Foreign Office, London, pp. 42–3, 63.