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

The Protestant church used similar arguments in favour of compensation for raped mothers. The Landesverband der Inneren Mission der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche in Bavaria supported its plea for maintenance with a particularly vivid example:

Margarete F., a married woman, gave birth on 27 February 1946 to a half-caste child resulting from a rape by a negro. Both the mother and her parents had been extremely taxed by the situation and had difficulty coming to terms with it. The child was put in a home immediately after the birth and through our mediation came into a foster home in Winkelhaid bei Altdorf.

The raped woman nevertheless had to pay 30 marks a month for the child’s maintenance. Her husband divorced her when he returned from the war and paid no maintenance, either for the wife or for his own legitimate child. Mrs F. now wanted to remarry, but the new husband refused to pay maintenance for this ‘nigger child’. The mother had therefore stopped the payments, with the result that the local welfare authority was billing the father of the child’s mother. The grandfather was a pensioner with a gastric disorder. His wife, who was also sick, still worked so as to improve the family’s income situation. [83] BayHStA MInn 81085. According to the churchman, this represented a moral and human hardship that the state should put an end to. The bone of contention was thus the question of the continued existence of the family and not the woman’s experience of violence.

There still remained the conflict between the desire to protect the family and the fear of endangerment to the family from women lacking bourgeois morals. The suspicion that the single mothers had ‘fraternized’ and then claimed to have been raped so as to make unjustified demands would continue to stick. Those dealing directly with the victims were very hesitant. On being asked by the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, the Working Committee of the Bavarian State Welfare Associations, for example, considered that in the event of rape ‘special welfare arrangements for women and their children in general were not applicable’ because it was impossible to produce evidence to the contrary, opening the door to misuse (of state subsidies). The state was only willing to act in the place of the defaulting payer of maintenance in the interests of protecting and encouraging the family if the woman’s ‘moral character’ was unimpeachable.

The dispute between the various actors regarding compensation payments to rape victims who had been made pregnant, which went on until the mid-1950s, can ultimately be reduced to this social contradiction: on the one hand a gender model that suggests that even raped women basically had lax sexual morals and were thus responsible themselves for their fate; on the other hand, the need to name the suffering caused by the enemy and in this way possibly to make good Germany’s own guilt, but also above all to strengthen the ‘healthy’ family.

As late as June 1956, Federal Minister of the Interior Gerhard Schröder from the conservative CDU party rejected compensation for women who had been made pregnant through rape by members of foreign armies. On 17 December of that year, a ruling was finally arrived at. On the basis of the Law on Compensation for Occupation Damage, under certain circumstances compensation could be provided from federal funds for maintenance for children resulting from rape by members of the occupying forces. The extent was determined as a function of the amount the father should have paid according to the law.

The ruling was continuously fine-tuned for a long time. By limiting it to occupation children in the narrow sense, i.e. children conceived against their mothers’ will on the territory of the future West Germany between 1 August 1945 and 5 May 1955, it soon became obvious that a large number of mothers would get nothing – namely all those who had been raped while fleeing during the last weeks of the war. The Berlin Senator for Finance immediately complained in March 1957 that all of the known 200 ‘Russian children’ living in (West) Berlin would receive no compensation under these circumstances. [84] BA Koblenz B 126/28038, Berlin Senator for Finance, 28 March 1957. The ruling was re-examined.

The number of eligible women gradually increased. Applications for compensation could now be made by mothers who had been raped before the official start of occupation; mothers who had been raped in the former colonial territories in the East; mothers who had been deported and forced to work in the East and had been raped and made pregnant there; mothers who had been raped by members of the occupying forces who weren’t soldiers but civilians or their dependents; refugees who had been expelled and fled and who did not acquire German citizenship until the 1950s. The general criterion was that the rape and pregnancy were due to the war and post-war situation. The duration of the monthly allowance, initially limited to the end of the child’s sixteenth year, was later extended to the end of its education or the age of twenty-four. The Amt für Verteidigungslasten [department for losses incurred by foreign defence troops] was responsible for approving applications.

There was no discussion of real compensation for suffering due to the rape. It was finally admitted in a letter in August 1956, from the Federal Ministry of the Interior to the Federal Ministry of Finance, that even if rape did not cause any external injury, it caused emotional damage ‘as the side effects of an act of violence [could] lead to extremely severe emotional shock’, [85] Federal Ministry of the Interior to Federal Ministry of Finance of 28 August 1956; BA Koblenz B 126/28038. and compensation for suffering might therefore be considered. It could never be put into practice, however, because the number of potentially entitled women was too great. The Federal Minister of Finance knew very well why he opposed payments to rape victims: it was to be feared that an extension of the acts eligible for compensation would prejudice other cases; put another way, there might be other victim groups who hoped for compensation for their wartime trauma.

For that reason, at the end of December 1956, it was decided that only the above-mentioned compensation would be paid to mothers of rape children on the basis of the compensation paid for occupation damage. The Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Finance agreed that the compensation should have two purposes: ‘50 per cent for the child’s maintenance and 50 per cent to compensate for immaterial damage to the child’s mother’. [86] Letter from the Federal Ministry of the Interior on 5 July 1960. After a lot of hesitation, the matter was finally settled – at least in theory.

Doubts as to the credibility of the rape victims were still almost impossible to remove. There was great concern that some women would come up with the idea ‘for the child’s mother to claim and testify to rape without the necessary conditions having been met so as to obtain money for the child’. [87] BayHStA MInn 81086, 26 March 1954, Federal Minister of the Interior to the Bavarian State Ministry. In other words, it was seriously believed that masses of women would falsely claim to have been raped merely to obtain a small monthly allowance.

As late as 1960, the Federal Ministry of Finance considered how it might assess a claimant’s application. It was not enough for a rape to have been ‘plausible’, as this would only demonstrate the ‘probability of the claimed facts but would not represent proof’. An affidavit was not therefore sufficient to determine that a rape had actually taken place. An authority should not be satisfied with a mere probability and should not under any circumstances make its decision on ‘instinctive deliberations or general suspicions’, but should establish certainty according to generally applicable empirical rules for determining the truth. Although final proof could not usually be provided, the child had to have been the product of rape ‘with a probability bordering on certainty’. [88] BayHSta MInn 81086. But when is a claimed rape really a rape with a probability bordering on certainty?