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

The rules of procedure stated that a mother could apply for compensation only if she could describe the course and circumstances of the rape in minute detail. Short answers in a questionnaire and affidavits were not sufficient. An offence was deemed to have been committed only if the perpetrators proceeded using either physical force against the child’s mother to ‘break her resistance’ or an unequivocal and serious psychological threat. Proving this in the case of war-related rape was a nerve-racking affair for the women, since the jurists made everything dependent on the mother’s credibility.

Women were assumed to be credible if they could describe the incident coherently and without contradictions:

In addition, her general personality was decisive, as demonstrated by her general appearance and the way she described the incident. It is also normally useful if not vital for the authorities to obtain assistance in their decision on the personality of the child’s mother on the basis of the assessment by trustworthy persons who have known her for a long time and can reliably judge her character.

A further guide in determining whether rape had taken place was the reaction by the woman concerned. Only those who immediately informed a relative or close friend and consulted a doctor ‘if only to prevent the risk of infection’ were considered credible. In addition, the place where the rape allegedly took place, the circumstances and whether the child’s mother associated with members of the occupying forces needed to be taken into account. [89] Ibid. In a nutshell, when in doubt, decide against the applicant.

A study of the application processes reveals depressing details of humiliating and routine suspicion. In the state archive in Freiburg, there are over 200 applications for compensation for the maintenance of children resulting from rape. Most of the fathers were French soldiers. [90] See Bernd Serger, Karin-Anne Böttcher and Gerd R. Ueberschär (eds.), Südbaden unter Hakenkreuz und Trikolore: Zeitzeugen berichten über das Kriegsende und die französische Besetzung 1945 (Freiburg 2006). The documents also provide an insight into the extent of the rape problem under French occupation. In 1955, there were officially 471 occupation children resulting from rape in the whole of Baden-Württemberg. According to my formula, this would be equivalent to 47,100 rapes, which inevitably, because of the great mobility at the end of the war, will not all have occurred in the south-west. [91] BA Koblenz 153/342, Statistisches Landesamt Baden-Württemberg, census of illegitimate occupation children of 30 May 1955.

The German people had a historical prejudice in particular against Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian and Senegalese colonial soldiers dating back to the French occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War, a period known in the collective memory as the ‘Black Shame’. The horror stories about ‘Moroccan’ rapists were just as embedded as the prejudices against the raping ‘Mongols’. The encounters between the population of south-west Germany and the French soldiers apparently followed the same preordained choreography as in the East, Berlin and Upper Bavaria.

In the border areas in particular, however, there was also a lot of sympathy and a sense of kinship with their close neighbours, and the abhorrence at the deeds was just as great as with the Berlin Communists in respect of the Red Army, or among those who had initially welcomed the Americans so warmly regarding the actions of the GIs. A woman from Freiburg wrote indignantly to the French military government that she had always respected the French hitherto: ‘Then you came… and what now? Your black soldiers have raped whole villages of women. Your officers have done nothing about it and have themselves given orders or taken part in these atrocities.’ [92] Quoted in Edgar Wolfrum, ‘Das Bild der “düsteren Franzosenzeit”: Alltagsnot, Meinungsklima und Demokratisierungspolitik in der französischen Besatzungszone nach 1945’, in: Stefan Martens (ed.), Vom ‘Erbfeind’ zum ‘Erneuerer’: Aspekte und Motive der französischen Deutschlandpolitik nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (suppl. to Francia 27, edited by Deutsches Historisches Institut Paris) (Sigmaringen 1993), pp. 87–113.

Rapes are known to have taken place in Stuttgart, Freudenstadt and Konstanz. [93] Marc Hillel, L’occupation française en Allemagne, 1945–49 (Saint-Armand-Montrand 1983), pp. 83, 108–11, quoted in Perry Biddiscombe, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: The Anti-Fraternization Movement in the US Occupation Zones of Germany and Austria, 1945–1948’, in: Journal of Social History 34, 3 (2001), p. 635. Particularly in places where the army had encountered strong resistance, there were ‘free nights’ in which the soldiers could make use of the German enemy in every respect for up to forty-eight hours. [94] Serger et al., Südbaden unter Hakenkreuz , p. 311. The French historian Marc Hillel reckons that there were 385 rapes in Konstanz, 600 in Bruchsal and 500 in Freudenstadt. As in the archbishopric of Munich-Freising, Catholic clergymen in the bishopric of Freiburg documented hundreds of cases. In many villages, there were dozens of sexual assaults. [95] Schwendemann, ‘Das Kriegsende in Ostpreussen’, p. 105. Responding to the violent excesses, the French authorities stated that they were doing exactly the same as the Wehrmacht and SS had done in occupied France. Attempts were nevertheless made to restore discipline. Brothels were established, and the army leadership made the occasional example and executed a convicted rapist. In 1946 a French parliamentary inquiry committee came to the conclusion that ‘regrettable aberrations’ had taken place during the invasion. [96] Quoted in ibid., p. 106. Many of the offences did not take place directly after the fighting, however, but later during the occupation.

After the decree regarding compensation payments for children resulting from rape, applications were received from women from the smallest villages and hamlets who had been made pregnant against their will by an occupation soldier. It might be due to a special south-west German piety that the victims’ stories were investigated and handled with harsh and meticulous care and stringency. Approval was extremely rare.

It did not suffice for the women to describe the circumstances of the rape and even provide the name of the perpetrator. The officials collected further, supposedly more objective testimony, so as to obtain a faithful picture of the incident and, above all, of the claimant’s character. The character references from social welfare workers and statements by neighbours, doctors and relatives were ultimately determinant – in other words, it was bourgeois respectability and the women’s family background that were pivotal. The criteria for assessing the incidents were at all events irrelevant: the women’s lifestyle, their housekeeping and child care – in short, their morality and sense of family, rather than the injustice they had suffered, were what counted.

It cannot be repeated often enough that the assessments by welfare workers, experts, witnesses, decision-makers in the offices and courts, and the descriptions by the victims themselves are all sources requiring a certain critical historical discernment. All of these actors were following their own agendas and made use of rhetorical argumentation. We cannot say today who was telling the truth; all we know is the motives. What we can infer with certainty from these sources is the degrading and routine suspicion to which the women were exposed. It gives us an insight into the mean-spirited worldview of the welfare workers, psychiatrists and officials in the 1950s.