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

The prejudice that still exists in historical research today is due to the intensive attack at the time on fraternization by German women. The contemporary sources, which are in reality highly questionable, are the chief witnesses in this incorrect assessment.

There are not only the memoirs of German men with battered egos, like the jurist Dietrich Güstrow, who was a public prosecutor in the Nazi era and a judge and mayor after the war. When the Americans arrived in his village in the Harz, he had to put up with having eight American soldiers living in his home, which was particularly hard for his fanatically nationalistic Prussian mother to swallow. The frustration was all the greater when their Russian servant, a slave labourer, suddenly confronted the Güstrow family. She flirted with the Americans and insisted on her right after liberation to decide for herself when she would work for the family. The rapid rise of the former slave labourer to become a self-assured member of the victors was a typically bitter experience for the Germans at the time, particularly the heads of the families, who were used to exercising unlimited power. Güstrow described the young American officer as an ‘ill-behaved man’ who refused to ‘cooperate’ with the Germans and brazenly insisted that the US soldiers were not ‘visitors’ but had come to Germany as conquerors. [18] Ibid., p. 44.

It is against this background of a disempowered German patriarchal system that no longer had control over its women and had to stand by as they fraternized with the new masters that the criticism of this all too willing fraternization is motivated: ‘It was not long before we discovered that nothing is as erotic as power.’ [19] Dietrich Güstrow, In jenen Jahren: Aufzeichnungen eines ‘befreiten’ Deutschen (Munich 1983), p. 34.

Another questionable source regarding the apparent immorality of German women is to be found in the reports of the time by American soldiers. Many GIs wrote home boastfully from Germany – like this one: ‘The girls here are all well-rounded. Perhaps it’s because I have been away so long, but they all look pretty to me. It’s forbidden to fraternize, but I reckon they don’t mind our eying them. Everywhere I’ve been they’re all the same, a bunch of flirts.’ [20] Letter from a soldier in the Field Artillery Battalion of the 99th Infantry Division, quoted in Henke, Die amerikanische Besatzung Deutschlands , p. 195.

These are the mirror image of the German documentation, expressions of triumph over a humiliated patriarchal society. [21] Thus, in my opinion, the assumption that there were few cases of rape among the American occupiers, but rather consensual sexual relationships, is based on extremely unclear sources. Testimony at the time was almost always given by biased witnesses: by men who had been defeated in battle and transformed their military defeat into a moral defeat by their women, or by soldiers in the conquering army flaunting their heroic sexual exploits. The reports of allegedly consensual sexual contacts also come from soldiers who had been infected with venereal diseases and had to endure highly embarrassing questions from doctors, or – another often cited source – from clerical or other authorities (for example, the American anti-prostitution feminists, representatives of the American ‘social purity movement’), who also had their own moral agenda. No one can deny that the American soldiers and German women were strongly attracted to one another and that the need for distraction, tenderness and sexual adventure was not one-sided. But those who look at the large number of rapes by American soldiers will seriously question whether that was all there was to the story of German–American sexual contacts.

The sexual order of the time, influenced by a bourgeois Christian sense of morality, the hierarchy of feelings, makes it practically impossible today to determine the real nature of the sexual relations. But to explain them merely as indication of a search for ‘human warmth and entertainment’ sounds like an extreme simplification. [22] Konrad Jarausch, Die Umkehr: Deutsche Wandlungen 1945–1995 (Munich 2004), p. 141. We would not dream of making such a supposition in the similar case of the sex trade between tourists and locals in poor countries. I therefore agree with Jennifer V. Evans that the idea of fraternization by German women needs to be fundamentally revised. Only by looking more closely at ideas of gender and morality at the time (and to some extent today as well) can we shed light on the grey area between open violence, forced prostitution and consensual sexual contact – grey zones in the power hierarchy of Germans and Americans, women and men. [23] Jennifer V. Evans, ‘Protection from the Protector, Court-Martial Cases and the Lawlessness of Occupation in American-Controlled Berlin’, in: Maulucci and Junker, GIs in Germany , pp. 212–33, here p. 233.

Another major obstacle to a reasonable approach to the rape victims was the attempt by post-war society to restore Sittlichkeit (‘public morality’). [24] See Sybille Steinbacher, Wie der Sex nach Deutschland kam: Der Kampf um Sittlichkeit und Anstand in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Munich 2011), pp. 21–134; Eva-Maria Silies, Liebe, Lust und Last: Die Pille als weibliche Generationserfahrung in der Bundesrepublik 1960–1980 (Göttingen 2010), pp. 37–61. After the years of Nazism and war, there was a movement in Germany to clean up the distorted value system by restoring sexual morality, of all things. It was thought that the battered society – as Germany saw itself – could recover only on the basis of a solid morality. There was therefore an all-party interest in the alleged threats to Sittlichkeit : pornography, prostitution, writing harmful to young people – but also materialism and sexual profligacy. To those fighting for decency, women who abandoned themselves voluntarily out of pure craving and hedonism were a perfect target. [25] See Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins , pp. 153–4.

Post-war society operated on the tried and tested principle of seeking a scapegoat as a way of avoiding a personal admission of guilt.

Responsibility for the disaster of the Second World War and the Shoah was established by inverting the cause-and-effect relationship. If the Germans had recalled their traditional bourgeois values in time, if the Weimar society had not taken the first steps towards pluralism, if the churches and patriarchal family heads had been stronger, all this wouldn’t have happened. In other words, everything that contributed to the disappearance of the good old days before 1933 was made responsible for the later moral and military defeat. In this way, “traditional values” were disconnected from Nazism, and the crimes of the Nazi regime ultimately interpreted as having to do with the relaxation of morals before 1933. [26] See Jens Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit: Die liberalkonservative Gründung der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen 2006), pp. 14–15, 36. On the desire for inner stability, see also Ulrich Herbert, ‘Liberalisierung als Lernprozess: Die Bundesrepublik in der deutschen Geschichte – eine Skizze’, in: Herbert (ed.), Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980 (Göttingen 2003), pp. 7–49.

This morality rhetoric had its price: politicians, administrative employees, welfare services and police, doctors, psychologists, social workers and criminologists, clerics – of course – all united to deny that the decline of morals was a consequence of the lost war and that immorality was a consequence of the distortion of values by the Nazis and of the economic impoverishment and occupation. This meant ultimately that the German women had not been raped at the end of the war and during the occupation because of the population’s own immoral behaviour under the Nazis. Even worse, in the tradition of mistrust of the supposedly unstable female morality, the rapes were often seen as a further problem of questionable morality. Put succinctly, in this way women who were in reality victims because of the criminal acts of the Germans under the Nazis were seen as having to be cured of their immorality.