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

It was only decades later, after the reunification of Germany, that this frozen posture slowly thawed. The two main works recalling the mass rapes, Helke Sander’s BeFreier und Befreite , and the German reprint and filming of A Woman in Berlin , were products of the 1990s and 2000s. They were still not completely successful in overcoming the reluctance by society to confront this topic. Sander was angrily accused by historians of falsifying history, and through her calculations of relativizing the number of Holocaust victims. There was still evidently an image of heroic victims of the air raids, imprisonment, expulsion and fatherless children as opposed to the disgrace of sexual subjugation. The discussion that flared up following the republication of A Woman in Berlin in 2003 took a different tack. The book was a bestseller, but the credibility of the author, who had described her experiences in spring and summer 1945 and did not wish to be named, was disputed, an all too common pattern in dealing with rape victims, and this was then followed by the indiscreet revelation of her true identity.

Historians did not cover themselves with glory either in their treatment of rape victims. Professional chroniclers were unable to summon up sympathy for the victims, and their concerns were reserved for those symbolically associated with the male aspects of warfare. The sons of soldiers who grew up without a father, in particular, succeeded in attracting the attention of scholars and the public to their fate. [10] An early interest in the fatherless male generation was shown at a congress in April 2005 in Frankfurt. See Lu Seegers, ‘Die Generation der Kriegskinder und ihre Botschaft für Europa sechzig Jahre nach Kriegsende’, in: H-Soz-u-Kult , 1 May 2005. Other studies from the male point of view followed, e.g. Hermann Schulz, Harmut Radebold and Jürgen Reulecke, Söhne ohne Väter: Erfahrungen der Kriegsgeneration (Berlin 2004). The cover shows a boy in the Nazi era with a model aeroplane in his hand and a mother figure in the background. Historical studies still shy away from dealing with the rapes at the end of the war. The new Oxford Companion to World War II , a work of over 1,000 pages claiming to be a comprehensive summary, does not even devote a chapter to this topic. The latest books on German history in the twentieth century also devote a paragraph at best to the experience of hundreds of thousands of women. Rape appears still to be tacitly regarded as a by-product of the ‘legitimate’ use of force in wars. And it was only due to public pressure that the exhibition ‘Kriegsende und Vergangenheitspolitik in Deutschland’ at the Haus der deutschen Geschichte in 2005, sixty years after the capitulation, displayed a single exhibit on the subject. The accompanying studies made no mention of rape. [11] Burkhard Asmuss (ed.), 1945 – Der Krieg und seine Folgen , book accompanying the exhibition ‘Kriegsende und Vergangenheitspolitik in Deutschland’ (Berlin 2005).

Academics and society have both failed utterly in dealing with this topic. A small research project at the University of Greifswald on post-traumatic stress in rape victims is a comparatively insignificant effort by society on behalf of the 860,000 women who, on my conservative estimate, were raped by Allied soldiers between 1944 and 1955. [12] The research group led by Philipp Kuwert has studied the psychotraumatic consequences, above all of victims of rape by Red Army soldiers. Its findings are published in Svenja Eichhorn and Philipp Kuwert, Das Geheimnis unserer Grossmütter: Eine empirische Studie über sexualisierte Kriegsgewalt um 1945 (Giessen 2011). And even if the ‘unheroic’ and usually female victims of violence are finally accorded some recognition today, it is unfortunately too late for most of them. They are no longer alive to experience it.

To determine how many women were raped as a result of the war, it is necessary first of all to define the timeframe. When do we stop counting? Which rapes were associated with the war and which were ‘merely’ rapes by occupying soldiers in peacetime? I have restricted my study to the time from the fighting during the advance of the Allies on Germany to the end of the occupation period. [13] The occupation statute was in force from September 1949 until the Paris Agreements of May 1955 and determined the legal authority and responsibilities of the Western powers in the Federal Republic. The rights of the Allies did not end until the reunification and the Two Plus Four Treaty of March 1991, which restored the Federal Republic’s full sovereignty. My account begins in autumn 1944, when the Red Army reached the eastern border of the German Reich, setting off the mass flight westwards. It continues in Berlin, when rape was so common in spring 1945 that women are said merely to have asked one another, ‘How many times have they done you?’ Moreover, the rapes did not end after the fighting had stopped. We then move on to Upper Bavaria, to a self-contained and traditionally rural area, in which priests reported numerous sexual assaults by the French and, above all, the Americans. In Bavaria, as well, the problem was not over in summer 1945. The locals continued to complain of ‘breaches of the peace by US soldiers and the failure by the German authorities to respond’. In considering the consequences for the victims, we move to south-west Germany, where places like Freudenstadt and Stuttgart achieved sad notoriety on account of mass rapes by the French army. We can study these crimes through a particularly disturbing source describing the efforts by raped women to obtain compensation from the authorities for unwanted children.

The current book cannot and does not offer a comprehensive overview of the events after the end of the war but looks at the incidents and their consequences on the basis of individual fates and regions and the problems raised by them. As there is practically no mention in the records of the British as occupying forces, and as the information to be gained from sparse material in archives like the Hamburg State Archive does not differ from that relating to the other occupying powers, British involvement in war crimes receives scant attention in this book. [14] See the archive items not seen by me in the Hamburg State Archive under 354–5 II (Jugendbehörde II) no. 240 Uneheliche Kinder von Besatzungssoldaten; 354–5 II (Jugendbehörde II) no. 239 Vormundschaft für Kinder aus Vergewaltigungen durch Angehörige der Besatzungsmächte; 131–1 II (Senatskanzlei) no. 2810 Übergriffe von Angehörigen der Besatzungsmacht 1946–1965; 131–11 (Personalamt) no. 1697 Schadensersatzansprüche gegen die Besatzungsmacht 1946–1952; 131–5 (Senatskanzlei – Verwaltungsbeschwerden) no. 234 Besatzungsschäden durch Straftaten britischer Soldaten 1949; 132–5/11 (Hamburgische Ver-tretung beim Bund in Bonn) no. A391 Unterhaltsverpflichtungen für uneheliche Kinder von Besatzungsangehörigen 1950–1953.

We know, however, that members of the British armed forces also committed rape, albeit probably to a lesser extent. Although the civilian population under British and Belgian occupation was greater than in the American or Soviet zones, [15] The American and Soviet occupied zones comprised 17.2 million citizens in 1946, the British 22 million, and the French 5 million. there are far fewer recorded cases in the archives. One known incident took place in Soltau on the Lüneberger Heide. The town was captured on 17 April 1945 after a stubborn rearguard action by the Germans. On the first night, the British soldiers combed all houses for soldiers and arms, and stole watches and other valuables. Rumour had it that the town was to be punished for its stiff resistance. In the first two days of occupation, there were several rapes in Soltau and the surrounding rural communities, one of them committed by an officer. [16] Willy Klapproth, Kriegschronik 1945 der Stadt Soltau und Umgebung, mit Beiträgen zur Kriegsgeschichte 1945 der Süd- und Mittelheide (Soltau 1955), p. 205.