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

For rape victims – in particular, of Western Allies – this judgement had fatal consequences. Women had great difficulty in shaking off the suspicion of fraternization, even when they had been victims of sexual violence. One of the main problems was that rape in general – and not just at the time – was often seen as a misfortune brought upon the women by themselves, the result of the unstable female character. Rape by a Western soldier, rather than a Soviet, who in the Nazi ideology belonged to a lower species, doubled the lack of credibility.

There were concrete arguments that combined with social anxieties and the sense of shame to form a complex structure that militated against women. On the one hand, there was a real need for food, cigarettes and other commodities available in large quantities to the US soldiers. There was also a fear of the sexual and emotional attraction of the ‘victors’, which was also experienced as an insult to German men. This fear nourished the collective fear of an ‘emasculated’ German nation. Rejection and resentment of foreigners and other ethnic groups fuelled this mixture of emotions and needs.

The German population generally regarded those who fraternized as prostitutes. Women did not sell themselves because they needed to or because they were uprooted, but because they didn’t want to work. As such, they were an insult to all of the men who had sacrificed themselves in the fight for the German fatherland; they had their fun while the former soldiers suffered; they damaged the ‘health of the nation’ and burdened the public sector by spreading venereal diseases; and they endangered the moral discipline of the young. Above all, however, they threatened the bourgeois family model with its established gender roles; they were the only ones to blame if Germany lost its dignity after the war. Their extramarital relations with soldiers of the occupying powers undermined morality and decency; through their consumption of American men and products they contributed to the ‘Americanization’ of Germany, to sexual libertinage, materialism, and ‘miscegenation’ in the event of contact with black soldiers. The only good thing to say in this moral discourse was that the ‘Yank lovers’ at least protected respectable women from the sexual advances of members of the occupying powers. [9] See Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German–American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill and London 2002), particularly pp. 126–54.

Some observers even connected the supposed moral decline in women with the Nazi past. After the Hitler regime had forced people into ‘mental prostitution’, it did not take much for them to take the step to physical prostitution. [10] Fränkischer Tag of 21 September 1945, quoted in Peter Zorn, ‘“Ami-Liebchen” and “Veronika Dankeschön” – Bamberg 1945–1952: Deutsche Frauen und amerikanische Soldaten’, in: Geschichte quer 11 (2003), pp. 39–42, here p. 41. This was a strategic argument that associated the supposedly immoral women with the Nazi ideology. [11] See also Barbara Willenbacher, ‘Zerrüttung und Bewährung der Nachkriegsfamilie’, in: Martin Broszat, Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Hans Woller et al. (eds.), Von Stalingrad zur Währungsreform: zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland (Munich 1990), pp. 595–614. Sexual contact with foreign soldiers was interpreted as a continuation of the immoral period before 1945 and a betrayal of the German people. [12] Almuth Roelfs, ‘“Ami-Liebchen” und “Berufsbräute”: Prostitution, Geschlechtskrankheiten und Besatzung in der Nachkriegszeit’, in: Günter Kronenbitter et al. (eds.), Besatzung, Funktion und Gestalt militärischer Fremdherrschaft von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn et al. 2006), pp. 201–10, here p. 205.

Careful study of the reports of fraternizing women reveals that one group of women in particular – lower class, non-local city dwellers – were accused and even publicly singled out by having their hair shorn and other shaming rituals. Their mere existence appeared to stand in the way of the desire for consolidation of sexual and family morality after the war. ‘Unfortunately there were flirtations between Yanks and German girls and women. There were even friendships with blacks, fortunately only in the case of two or three dishonourable women (two from Silesia!)’ wrote Albert Michel, minister from Alling in the district of Unterpfaffenhofen in the summer of 1945. [13] Pfister, Das Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs , p. 668. The pastor Joseph Hort from Gündlkofen bei Moosburg also didn’t mince words in identifying those who perturbed the traditional public order: ‘Sympathy for the evacuees is usually misplaced. They are lazy, thieving, argumentative, accusing farmers for the smallest thing, and need to be chased out of our Bavarian province as soon as possible.’ [14] Ibid., p. 832.

The prejudicial moral condemnation, particularly of urban dwellers and strangers, combined at the end of the war with the humiliation of defeat for German man. The problem was not the killing in the country’s recent past, in which the men had been deeply involved, but the moral disintegration of the present, which was projected onto the women. The persistence of this point of view can be seen in the professional reconstructions today that still fail to question the prejudices of the time. Otherwise serious histories of the occupation period deal with the subject of rape under the heading ‘fraternization’, boldly connecting two aspects that are in fact quite disparate – the voluntary, if sometimes needs-driven, relationships between GIs and German women, and the sexual aggression of the occupiers. This distorted representation culminates in an inflexible thesis that has kept us in ignorance, even today, of the rapes by the Western allies; according to this thesis, sexual aggression by the Americans was ‘limited’ because German women were very welcoming. In other words, the GIs didn’t need to commit rape because the women wanted in any case to have sex with them. [15] Henke, Die amerikanische Besatzung Deutschlands , particularly pp. 190–6.

This thesis is based uncritically on discussion at the time of the relationship of German women to Western occupying forces. The truth in these claims made at the end of the war is not questioned, and the conclusion is simply drawn that ‘cases of rape in the West were isolated and had various causes. One was that there was apparently a sufficient number of German women who were so attracted to the occupying soldiers from the outset that there was no need for the use of violence.’ [16] Sagan, Kriegsende 1945.

The GIs, writes the historian Klaus-Dietmar Henke, were in an unfortunate position, compared with their French and German comrades, because the US Army did not wish to provide military brothels for them. But the ‘attraction’ between American soldiers and German women was great and there was a mutual need for distraction, tenderness and sexual adventure. Curious about the smart and well-fed charmers from the fabulously rich and superior America, ‘fraternization’ by German women started on the day they arrived. The non-fraternization policy of the American Army, the prohibition of any private contact by soldiers with the enemy civilian population, could not compete with this force of attraction. In the eyes of this specialist on the history of the American occupation, there were therefore hardly any instances of rape. During 1945, he estimates, there were around 1,000 to 1,500 cases. [17] Even if there were a large number of unreported cases, this was ‘not a lot given the fact that, for example, 900 people were convicted of rape in 1939 or that in 1950 the police in Bavaria alone investigated over 500 German citizens on charges of rape. These figures are a clear indication of the relative lack of violence by the US army towards the civilian population during the occupation of Germany.’ The comparison is false, of course. For one thing, the author uses area as a parameter (instead of the male population), which makes no sense because the Americans were not stationed all over Germany. In addition, the cases of rape reported to the police before and after the war cannot be compared with the documented cases at the end of the war, because it was almost impossible for German civilians to report crimes. See Henke, Die amerikanische Besatzung Deutschlands , pp. 1038–9.