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

Abortion in Germany was regulated at the time by paragraph 218 of the Civil Code (BGB). It was basically illegal, subject to long terms of imprisonment and only allowed exceptionally under special circumstances. Under the Nazis, the ban was lifted in the case of ‘undesirables’. During the war years, ‘ethical abortion’ was allowed in the occupied eastern regions in the case of rape by soldiers or civilians. [50] See Kirsten Poutrous, ‘Von den Massenvergewaltigungen zum Mutterschutzgesetz: Abtreibungspolitik und Abtreibungspraxis in Ostdeutschland, 1945–1950’, in Richard Bessel and Ralph Jessen (eds.), Die Grenzen der Diktatur: Staat und Gesellschaft in der DDR (Göttingen 1996), pp. 170–98. The fact that legal and illegal abortions after war-related rape were allowed has led the historian Atina Grossmann to conclude that the partial lifting of the ban on abortions at the end of the war was the result of the racist attitudes of the Germans. Grossmann, who only looked at the case of Berlin, writes that abortions were performed right up to the last month of pregnancy and that, with the approval of the church and the occupiers, women ended involuntary pregnancies ‘on a fast assembly line’. [51] Grossmann, A Question of Silence , pp. 44–5. They didn’t want to bring the inferior offspring of ‘Mongols’ or Slavs into the world. [52] See Poutrous, ‘Von den Massenvergewaltigungen zum Mutterschutzgesetz’. Abortions were officially allowed and accepted by society out of a ‘mixture of sympathy for the raped women, racism, hurt national pride and male solidarity’. [53] Ibid. This assertion is backed by the extensive collection of affidavits at Berlin-Neukölln department of health from women seeking an abortion.

Grossmann takes a fundamentally critical attitude to the handling of German victims of war. This is possibly the reason that the historian is less than objective in this matter. There can be no question of ‘assembly-line’ abortions from an individual or an official point of view. The Neukölln records indicate that the authorities were in no way enthusiastic about relaxing the abortion law and, on the contrary, they often blocked abortions. And women did not seek an abortion frivolously or for racial reasons – they did so as a matter of survival and to save their relationships. [54] My research also disagrees in this regard with Satjukow, ‘Besatzungskinder’, in terms both of numbers and of the frequency of abortions and institutionalization.

After examining several hundred applications for abortion in the archive of the Neukölln health department, I found only one single case citing an ideological motive of this type. As the applications were formulated in cooperation with doctors and officials, an opportunistic attitude by the women might have been expected – in other words, if they had believed that their cause would have been helped by citing racial grounds, we would also find this reflected in the records. German society was not ‘politically correct’ and there would have been no reason to suppress racial feelings, as we shall see later. We can therefore assume that the applications in Neukölln reveal the true motives of the women concerned.

It is difficult to say why so many women attempted to abort on their own without medical assistance. It is estimated that 27,000 illegal abortions were carried out in 1946. [55] Karl-Heinz Mehlan, Die Problematik der Schwangerschaftsunterbrechung auf Grund der sozialen Indikation (Berlin 1956), pp. 131–2. For the legal situation in the Soviet occupied zone and in East Germany, see Poutrous, ‘Von den Massenvergewaltigungen zum Mutterschutzgesetz’. I am convinced that, even in these cases, the main reasons were the shame at the illegitimate child, the fear of social stigmatization, the economic consequences and, with married women, concern at the survival of their marriages.

The request for termination of pregnancy on account of a sexual crime was dealt with differently at the local level, not only in the West and the East or as a function of the occupying power but also within the different occupied zones. Doctors could terminate the undesired pregnancies but were obliged to observe strict criteria. In most cases, the justification for abortion was the fear of serious psychological consequences for the victims of these unwanted pregnancies.

For a short time, the town of Greifswald was particularly generous. The Lex Gryphiswaldnis of 29 May 1945 stated that every woman who so wished could have an abortion in the University Women’s Hospital, although this was soon restricted to medical and ethical indications with approval of the official medical officer. In South Württemberg-Hohenzollern, a confidential decree was promulgated on 18 January 1946 demanding that the ban on abortion should be lifted only if rape had been proved beyond doubt and adverse psychological consequences were to be expected. In Baden in the French zone, the head of the German justice department sent a memorandum on 18 December 1945 to the senior public prosecutors stating that, apart from strictly interpreted medical indications, neither ethical, eugenic nor social indications could be used to justify abortion. A ‘clemency rule’ existed for cases of particular hardship, however. We shall see below how rarely clemency was shown on the matter of abortions. In Hanover, it was up to the doctor’s discretion whether pregnancies as a result of rape were terminated, provided that the women had reported it to the medical officer. This decree was revoked by order of the military government on 14 August 1945, although a loophole remained in the form of a combined medical and ethical indication. In the Soviet occupied zone, a committee had first to verify the circumstances of the pregnancy. Courts and public prosecutors were instructed, however, until further notice, not to press charges for violations of paragraph 218.

An official argument for the partial lifting of paragraph 218 for rape victims was the fact that society could not demand of a woman that she brought a forced pregnancy to term because this would cause her to lose her personal freedom and condemn her to motherhood against her wishes. [56] Fritz Naton, ‘Schwangerschaftsunterbrechung nach Sittlichkeitsverbrechen’, diss., Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, 5 April 1952. For a long time, therefore, the woman’s rights were given priority over those of the unborn child, a priority that was later to be confirmed in West German legal interpretations.

On the basis of a directive of 2 August 1945, in Bavaria a commission consisting of three doctors, including a public servant, decided on abortion requests. Prior to this the American military government had been responsible for approving the waiving of paragraph 218 and had promptly forbidden abortions. Rape by a GI was not recognized as sufficient reason for the termination of pregnancy, which was also illegal in the USA at the time. As Silke Satjukow points out, it was not in the interests of the Americans to approve abortion officially because this would have been tantamount to recognition of the large number of assaults by their own soldiers. [57] Satjukow, ‘Besatzungskinder’, p. 6. When the German authorities were allowed to decide for themselves, they made abortion conditional on the approval of a medical commission, which, however, only recognized medical indications.

The callousness with which medical officers argued is demonstrated by the case of an interpreter for an American unit, who requested an abortion after having been raped. The medical officer refused, stating that the woman, who was married, had evidently not sufficiently resisted the assault. It was ‘understandable’ that she was now suffering from a reactive depression on account of the pregnancy: ‘this is likely to be observed, however, in any happily married woman who has an affair in her husband’s absence.’ [58] State Health Department of Garmisch-Partenkirchen on 6 December 1945 to Military Government, BayHStA5086a, Bavarian State Ministry of the Interior regarding pregnancy termination, abortion, premature births and miscarriages.