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

H. S. threatened to kill herself. She had been evacuated in 1944 from Westphalia to East Prussia and had had to flee in January 1945 with a four-month-old baby. The child had been run over by a tank. She had had to work for several months for the Soviets. Now she was six months pregnant and wished to return to her husband in Gelsenkirchen.

I urgently request that the child be taken away from me. I am not in any state emotionally to give birth to a child conceived under such atrocious circumstances. I have gone on living only in the hope of the medical assistance I now request. In this condition I shall not under any circumstances give my husband the news of the death of my little boy. I implore you to help me and to admit me to an institute, as I have no food here and wish to return home as soon as possible. If I do not receive a positive response, I will no longer be able to remain living. I hope that you will appreciate my situation and remain, with gratitude, Mrs H. S., 14 September 1945.

Our examples, which could be continued at will, indicate that some women would have given birth if they had been able to count on support. Their requests and letters clearly disprove Atina Grossmann’s racism thesis. In the Bavarian applications, there is not one single case connecting the request for an abortion with the skin colour of the father. We have already heard about cases of women who request compensation for children resulting from rape. Here, too, there are no arguments on the grounds of race.

This does not mean that racism did not play a role in society. As we shall see, the authorities were indeed influenced in their decisions whether to recognize rape or not by the ethnic origins of the soldier concerned. For the time being, however, it would appear that in many cases the reasons for wanting an abortion did not differ greatly from those involved in any case of unwanted pregnancy: economic consequences and fear of personal repercussions. The danger to an existing marriage was a promising reason at the time for applying for an abortion. Concern about the survival of the family was prominent, a factor that was also determinant in considering compensation for the children of rape. Siring by men stigmatized as being inferior was secondary to the question of morality and restoring family values after the war.

Pregnant raped women who did not want or were unable to obtain an abortion had two possibilities open to them: to keep the child or give it away. In 1956, there were officially just under 3,200 children resulting from rape in West Germany including West Berlin. It is not known how many were brought up by their mothers, but we do know that of all the occupation children, as they were called, 73 per cent remained with their mothers and only 7 per cent ended up in homes. The rest were brought up by maternal relatives, usually the grandparents, or by foster or adoptive families (which was not uncommon for illegitimate children after the war). These figures were officially collected and surprised the authorities themselves. This also disproves the thesis that rape victims seeking an abortion did so mainly for racial reasons. [67] BayHStaA MInn 81091 6726 – Processing of child maintenance claims against members of foreign armed forces 1958–60.

According to official statistics, in April 1953 there were 202 children who had been proved to have been conceived as a result of a rape by a member of the occupying forces. Almost all of them were being brought up by their mothers, some by their grandparents, and a few in adoptive families. [68] BayHStaA MInn 81091 – Report of juvenile departments in 1953, supplement to 6726. Mothers were reluctant to put their children in homes not just because of the costs, which they would have had to pay themselves until a financial arrangement had been agreed for them. As we shall see from eyewitness accounts, the women very often took the children to heart, in spite of the terrible circumstances in which they had been conceived, regarding them as their own flesh and blood and suppressing the way they were conceived. There were even some women who regarded the child as the only positive aspect of a horrendous time.

Even with half-caste children of African American or North African soldiers and members of the occupying authorities, the proportion of children in homes and with foster families was only slightly higher than with white children. [69] Of 100 white and half-caste illegitimate occupation children in Bavaria, in 1954 70 and 61, respectively, lived with their mothers, 16 and 10 with relatives, 9 and 14 with distant relatives, and 5 and 15 in homes. Thus 95 per cent and 85 per cent respectively lived with close relatives. The records explicitly point out that the placement of half-caste children in foster families ‘in general did not meet with the resistance that had originally been feared’: BayHStA MInn 81094, supp. no. 3 to 67261. Contemporaries nevertheless noted that single women with coloured children had less chance of finding a husband. For that reason, thought was given to establishing special homes for ‘mulatto children’. In summer 1953, a clergyman from Switzerland offered to accept a number of occupation children from West Germany into his community. He called his project Action for No One’s Children. [70] BA Koblenz B 153/342.

The children were designated ‘occupation children’ by the authorities despite the fact that around a third of them had been conceived during the last days of fighting before the official start of occupation. Their legal situation was precarious. They were German citizens. Only the French occupying forces granted the children of relationships with their soldiers the possibility of French nationality. For pronatalist reasons, the French even claimed such children, although they did not pursue the claim with any force. The other occupying forces did not make any attempt to claim custody for the fathers of these children, and in the case of rape such requests would probably in any case have been ignored.

Thus it was the German mothers and the German state who were responsible for the children. Until the Paris agreements entered into force in 1955, German courts had no jurisdiction over child maintenance claims for illegitimate occupation children in any of the three zones. Claims for maintenance could not be asserted in the occupation courts either. It was only after 1955 that German jurisdiction was extended in general to all non-criminal cases against natural persons. Even with children who were not conceived through rape, maintenance payments were made by the fathers in only 1.7 per cent of cases for white children and 2.1 per cent for black ones. [71] Ibid. In 1956 in Munich, all of the fathers known to be alive were summonsed, but only 10 per cent of the soldiers and members of the occupying authorities responded to the friendly invitation and only 6 per cent ultimately acknowledged paternity, mostly men who had been in a long-term relationship with the German mother and even intended to marry.

The children basically had the same status as German illegitimate children, but they were worse off financially because they were not eligible for an orphan or war invalid allowance. Thus the legal right to being raised ‘to bodily, spiritual and social fitness’ was less secure than with illegitimate children with German fathers.

The complex legal status with regard to maintenance payments for the children resulting from rape was thus a further heavy burden for the abused women. Of course, the men committing the rape didn’t leave an address, but it sometimes happened, especially when occupying troops were billeted in the houses of German civilians, that the women knew the name, rank and company of the perpetrator and child’s father, or had at least sufficient fragmentary information to find out who had made them pregnant. This did not mean that they were able to obtain financial support from them. Even after 1955, there was still a yawning gap between the legal situation and the reality. The headquarters of the US Army in Heidelberg, which was meant to serve the summonses of the guardianship courts – the army refused to serve the soldiers directly – often failed to fulfil its duty and even advised the soldiers in writing that they were not obliged to pay child maintenance and that coercive measures by the German courts were not supported or followed up by the US headquarters.