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

She was admitted to the reformatory with the official diagnosis of ‘sexual degeneracy’. According to one statistic, this diagnosis applied to almost 80 per cent of the female inmates of the reform schools after the war, while boys were mostly admitted for theft. Since the Weimar era, this group had been increasingly the target of ‘public health’. It was not a question of curing the ‘wards’ but of ridding the community of diseased elements – in other words, of preventing undesired reproduction, abortion and venereal disease. The situation of asocial juveniles became even worse during the Nazi era. They were classed as ‘morally feeble-minded’, and the eugenic principle meant that they were incarcerated in juvenile concentration camps, subject to forced abortion and sterilization, often without their knowledge and agreement.

After the war, the same people still held most of the responsible positions in the welfare and health sector. For homeless raped girls, the fact that there had been basically no change in attitudes to sexual vulnerability was fatal. Degeneracy was a ‘deep-lying pathological character defect’ characterized by an ‘abnormal lack of restraint and inability to form attachments due to shallowness, either innate or acquired, and an inability to sustain emotions and willpower, leading to a loosening (or under-development) of the inner perception of moral values’, was the description of the notorious child and juvenile psychiatrist Werner Villinger. He had been involved in euthanasia and forced sterilization during the Nazi era, and after denazification became dean and rector of the University of Marburg and president of the Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists. [31] ‘Die Bedeutung der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit für die Entwicklung des Kindes, Referat von Werner Villinger (Marburg/L.)’, in: Monatsschrift für Kinderheilkunde 103, 2 (January 1955), Verhandlung der 54. Ordentlichen Versammlung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Kinderheilkunde in Essen 1954, pp. 65–72.

The ‘treatment’ in such cases of ‘sexual degeneracy’ was as might be expected. As it was believed that the girls did not have the mental capacity to ‘sublimate’ their excessive impulses, the only possible therapy was ‘honest’ work in the disciplined environment of a home. The girls concerned were generally older than the boys and were kept longer in care. Girls with frequently changing sexual partners were seen as the problem, rather than their sexual partners. It was sufficient for a girl to be seen in ‘bad company’, to be heavily made-up or provocatively dressed, to go dancing until late at night, to masturbate, to have sex as a minor, to have venereal disease or get pregnant – regardless of whether it was the result of rape, abuse or consensual sex – for her to be caught up in the clutches of the ‘welfare’ agencies. [32] Gehltomholt and Hering, Das verwahrloste Kind , p. 123.

Becoming a ‘vagrant’ through the loss of one or both parents was enough for a child to be admitted. Of the 1.6 million children and juveniles who became orphans or semi-orphans as a result of the war, 80,000 to 100,000 were considered ‘unattached, homeless, unemployed and without a profession’ and thus automatically welfare cases. [33] Ibid., p. 41. No one knows how many of them were raped in the East or in post-war Germany. They were not discharged until they were considered resocialized – in the case of women, in other words, when they had found a man and got married, because marriage and family were seen at the time as the only effective ‘medicine’ for women.

Post-war society thus submitted young women like Anna, who had been thrown off course in the war by devastating experiences and tragic losses, to a bombardment of misdirected moral discourse. Girls like Anna were regarded as extremely sexually vulnerable because they had been raped and orphaned and were homeless and unemployed.

Everywhere in the country police were rounding up young women. In a major raid in Erding near Munich in November 1946, the Munich criminal police arrested a number of juvenile girls and arraigned them before the military tribunal. Some of the girls were admitted to Algassing hospital, where venereal diseases were treated; others were released because there was no evidence that they had committed an offence. ‘As no one bothered about the girls, they continued their sorrowful lifestyle’, wrote the welfare department in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior in November 1946. [34] Staatsarchiv München RA 77674.

The practice of placing supposedly degenerate women and girls in homes was so widespread after the war that, on 31 November 1946, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior received a cry for help from the director of the Upper Bavaria regional authority: there were no places left in the institutions, and referral to reform school should be seen as a last resort. Account should be taken of the fact that a certain amount of degeneracy in the morally loose segments of the female population was an inevitable product of occupation in any country and could not therefore be eradicated in its entirety. To prevent the institutions from becoming even more overcrowded, a staggered approach should be adopted. Before admission, the juveniles should be given a warning, which could be entered on the person’s identity card. Degenerates from other occupied zones might be sent back to their home towns. [35] Ibid.

The Traunstein police reported on 27 October 1947 that R. P., a girl with highly infectious syphilis, had escaped from Traunstein hospital. When the police caught her, she stated that another patient had frightened her by claiming that she had to pay 4.20 marks a day for her hospitalization. As she had no money, she had climbed out of the window of the men’s toilet at 6 a.m. and run into the forest, discarding her hospital clothes on the way. She had headed in the direction of Trostberg and got on a train at Nussdorf station. She was arrested when she returned to fetch clean clothing. R. P. was described as a ‘danger to public health’. As Traunstein hospital could accept no responsibility for her and the police considered the girl to be ‘highly impressionable’, she was transferred to the hospital bay at Stadelheim prison in Munich. [36] Staatsarchiv München, LRA Traunstein, Kriminalpolizei, Sicherheitszustand im Land Bayern, Lagebericht für November 1946.

After the war the risk of infection with a venereal disease increased considerably in the population as a whole, not only because of the rapes. In 1946, 0.5 per cent of Germans were infected with gonorrhoea and 0.2 per cent with syphilis, double and triple the rates for 1934, respectively. High incidence was reported not only in cities like Bremen and Bremerhaven, which were hubs for American troops stationed in the country, but also in many other towns and even rural regions. In the rural district of Eichsfeld in Thuringia, an absurd rate of 44 per cent of juveniles and 70 per cent of adults was claimed. The church, schools and doctors called for counter-measures. [37] Kreiegsende und Neubeginn im Landkreis Eichsfeld 1945/46: Eine zeitgenössische Documentation – im Auftrag des Landkreises Eichsfeld, der Stadt Heilbad Heiligenstadt und des Bischöflichen Geistlichen Kommissariates Heiligenstadt (Eichsfeld 2003), p. 210. Weekly statistics were kept in Saxony on the spread of syphilis, gonorrhoea and soft chancre. At a conference to discuss combating infection, psychiatrists and neurologists in the Soviet-occupied zone spoke in November 1946 of a ‘state of emergency’. Treatment centres had to be set up there that were also open at night. After ‘numerous armies’ had marched through Germany, venereal diseases were omnipresent not only in towns but also in the countryside. In Greifswald in the province of Mecklenburg, for example, over one third of the 3,246 infected persons were from rural areas. [38] Landesarchiv Berlin, DQ/1/1027. It is no longer possible to determine today what percentage of those persons had been raped.