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

The criminologist Clive Emsley also found very few crimes of this nature in the British military history archives and wondered whether the absence of corresponding judicial files was significant. It could be, he mused, that civilian victims remained silent out of shame, and that in any case there was little chance of an investigation of crimes committed by the occupying power, which was generally reckoned to be highly disciplined. Moreover, the victims would have had difficulty in identifying uniformed men, and the soldiers in question could in any case have easily presented alibis for one another. Two British soldiers, for example, were accused in summer 1945 of raping two women near Lübeck and stealing their bicycles. Their superior officer gave them an alibi for the time of the incident, although they were clearly in possession of the women’s bicycles, and the officer had even signed leave passes for them. The bicycles were returned to the two women and they were sent home in tears. [17] Clive Emsley, Solder, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since 1914 (Oxford 2013), pp. 128–30, 131. Cases like this indicate that the British occupiers also have skeletons in their closet and that further research is needed.

The legal situation in post-war Germany made it almost impossible for the German police to investigate rape and prosecute the perpetrators. In the first years of the occupation, a German policeman would not have been able to report anything even if he had burst in on an American gang rape. He could not have intervened, let alone arrested the soldiers, because the military police were responsible for crimes against the German population. Nor, incidentally, would German civilians have been entitled to come to the aid of the victims, as the Germans were forbidden from attacking members of the occupying forces or proceeding against them in any other form. The occupying power had sole responsibility for charges and investigations involving its soldiers, with the result that in most cases no charges were ever brought in the first place. The perpetrators could also not be arraigned before a German court. Here, too, the military courts had jurisdiction.

In 1955, the Paris Agreements came into force, ending the Federal Republic of Germany’s status as an occupied country, even if state sovereignty still remained restricted until German reunification in 1990 and the entry into force of the Two Plus Four Agreement in March 1991. In the East, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany was the effective supervisory and command structure in the Soviet occupied zone until 1949, making way then for the Soviet Control Commission in the newly formed German Democratic Republic. In September 1955, a treaty between the GDR and the USSR formally established the sovereignty of East Germany. The official end of the occupation period set the seal on a gradual easing and calming of relations between Germany and its former enemies. From then on, the Allies were less interested in settling accounts with the German aggressor and more concerned to protect their respective allies in the East–West conflict that was now raging. This changed not only the relationship between the occupiers and the occupied but also the symbolic significance of sexual aggression by Allied soldiers against the civilian population.

The victims of rapes after 1955 – at least on paper – were not part of a population that had just lost the war but the female citizens of an alliance partner (the FRG joined NATO in 1955). These rapes were no longer excesses arising out of a collective group conflict but the isolated acts of individuals. The rapes, committed by men in uniform in peacetime, could now also be better investigated and prosecuted by the German authorities, at least in theory. By 1955, the drawn-out political process regarding the legal status of the rape victims had ended.

In this ten-year period from 1945 to 1955, it is important to visualize the dramaturgy of the events. Without a doubt, most of the rapes took place as the Allies were advancing, no doubt on account of the atmosphere of violence and conquest, but also because of the numbers involved. At the end of the war there were 3 million US soldiers in Europe. By early 1946, there were only 600,000. Criminal acts against the civilian population by the US Army levelled out in 1947 and 1948, although there was a surge every time new troops were stationed, particularly in 1950/51. [18] On the changing role of the US Army, see Hans Joachim Harder, ‘Guarantors of Peace and Freedom: The US Forces in Germany, 1945–1990’, in: Thomas Maulucci and Detlev Junker (eds.), GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence (Cambridge 2013), pp. 37–54. On the crime rate of GIs, see Gerhard Fürmetz, ‘Insolent Occupiers, Aggressive Protectors’, in: Maulucci and Junker (eds.), GIs in Germany , pp. 189–211. In the early 1950s in particular, Bavarian communities like Würzburg or Aschaffenburg had frequent cause to complain about sexual aggression by US soldiers. The number of British soldiers stationed in Germany also fluctuated. In the closing phases of the Second World War, there were 400,000. Two years later, only 100,000 were stationed there. In 1951 the number rose to 250,000, and in 1952 to 300,000. The number of Soviet soldiers in Germany dropped by the end of 1947 from 1.5 million to 350,000. After 1949 this largest occupying army increased again to 500,000 or 600,000 soldiers. Added to this were over 200,000 civilians and family members.

With the transition from conquest to ordered occupation, not only the army personnel but also the nature of the rapes changed. This new quality can be seen in the case of an American soldier, who in 1945 went on a rampage of violence, possibly as a result of a war-related psychosis. By contrast, the actions of a group of drunken French soldiers, who in early 1951 attacked an elderly woman in broad daylight, dragged her into a military vehicle and brutally abused her, are more in the nature of a demonstration of power.

Apart from fluctuations in the military personnel, the living conditions of the soldiers, from billeting in private houses to the construction of dedicated housing for soldiers and their families, were also a factor in the risk of rape. The victorious powers pursued different policies in this regard. While US troops were encouraged to bring over their families, the Red Army housed its soldiers in barracks on the outskirts of towns and, for much longer than the Americans, forbade them from fraternizing with the civilian population, let alone marrying. The French billeted their soldiers in private houses, resulting in a particularly precarious situation for rape victims, as they had difficulty in proving that they had not provoked the attack themselves on account of the close contact with the perpetrator. Like the Americans, the British attempted to prohibit fraternization – with just as little success – and soon had a reputation in the population for being less casual than the GIs, but more respectful and disciplined. [19] Rainer Schulze, ‘A Difficult Interlude: Relations between British Military Government and the German Population and their Effects for the Constitution of a Democratic Society’, in: Alan Bance (ed.), The Cultural Legacy of the British Occupation in Germany: The London Symposium (Stuttgart 1997), pp. 67–109.

Apart from the attitudes of the former enemies, the structure and discipline of the units, and the likelihood of prosecution and punishment, we should also take account of the soldiers’ own political and personal motivation. Their own perception, and that of outsiders, of their status as conquerors, liberators, occupiers and protectors (from the other great occupying power) had an effect on the specific encounters between individual soldiers and the German population and on the crime rate as a whole, as we shall discuss later.