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

Many women never spoke about their rape. As we have seen in some of the applications for compensation, young women who had never had sex before did not even inform their parents of their misfortune. Later, they often had to explain why they had not spoken immediately about it.

If the women became pregnant and couldn’t or didn’t want to terminate the pregnancy, they could no longer keep quiet about it. There were cases in which the rape victims invented a consensual sex encounter. Although society thought it more ‘honourable’ to have been raped than to have had voluntary sex with an occupation soldier, the women themselves apparently sometimes felt differently. The rape was so shameful that they preferred not to bring it up. The victims wanted to protect their families and in some cases, as we have seen from the Freiburg records, went as far as giving birth somewhere else. These were probably not isolated incidents, because illegitimate pregnancies before the Second World War were often kept secret in this way.

If the rape produced a child, the mothers, as we have seen, often kept quiet for another reason: they wanted to spare their child the knowledge of the way it had been conceived. They did not wish to impose on the next generation the suffering the victims often experienced for the rest of their lives, and the rejection by society. It was already bad enough to be stigmatized as a ‘Russian brat’ or ‘negro child’. It is questionable whether this policy of silence was successful.

Today there are organizations that help these children to find their fathers. [10] ‘GItrace’ ( www.gitrace.org ), the platform ‘Children born of the war’ ( www.bowin.eu ) and the Boltzmann Institute ( www.bim.lbg.ac.at ). In Russia there is a television programme entitled Zhdimenya (‘Wait for me’) for those seeking relatives.

Apart from fear of social opprobrium and family ‘disgrace’, many women also kept silent because the war-related rape was often interpreted as fraternization. The reversal of the burden of proof – it was the victim rather than the assailant who had to prove her innocence – was onerous, as the accusation of having had sexual contact with the occupation soldiers was difficult to shake off. We also know that some rape victims were urged by their families to keep quiet about their fate.

The case of Gabi Köpp, who, as described earlier, was raped several times as a fifteen-year-old as she fled from Posen (Poznán) to Hamburg, is particularly revealing. Her mother could not and would not help her to come to terms with these traumatic experiences, telling her daughter that if she had anything to say she should write it down. Gabi Köpp tells what it was like not to be able to talk. At some point she abruptly discontinued her diary because she could no longer stand the recurrent nightmares caused by the intensive recollection of the terrible experiences. She had to begin by trying to forget about the things she was not allowed to speak of.

Köpp wrote later about her initial attempt to face up to her situation: ‘In retrospect I can see today that my stamina lasted instinctively just long enough for me to get over the worst part of my flight by writing it all down.’ [11] Köpp, Warum war ich bloss ein Mädchen? p. 9. The fact that this diary existed at all was a bone of contention in the family: ‘As if I had done something wrong, the story told in these densely written pages was declared taboo.’ She kept the document in a safe. It was not until early 2005, on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, that she opened this Pandora’s Box and began to transcribe the notebook onto a computer. The renewed confrontation with what she had experienced in flight was possible only after years of psychoanalysis.

Before we accuse families and post-war society too hastily of being generally unfeeling, we should recall that the idea that rape could cause severe psychological trauma was not yet accepted. The concept of post-traumatic stress did not become an official diagnostic category in psychiatry until 1980. Until then it was not believed that the psyche could be pathologically affected by a bad experience. Not least because post-war society did not want to award pensions for war-related mental suffering, in Germany the ‘neuroses’ of returnees were also attributed to the personality of the individual and not to the experiences themselves. [12] See Svenja Goltermann, Die Gesellschaft der Überlebenden: Deutsche Kriegsheimkehrer und ihre Gewalterfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich 2009). It was assumed that someone suffering from the effects of a trauma must have had an existing mental illness. [13] The popularity of the concept of trauma and its inflationary position today, also in the humanities and in popular discourse, began in the 1970s. For the critical relationship between the concept of clinical trauma and its appropriation by the humanities, see Harald Weilnböck, ‘“Das Trauma muss dem Gedächtnis unverfügbar bleiben”: Trauma-Ontologie und anderer Miss-/Brauch von Traumakonzepten in geisteswissenschaftlichen Diskursen’, in: Mittelweg 36, Zeitschrift des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung (April 2007), pp. 2–64. As we have seen, this also applied to war-related rape victims. Because they had no physical damage, they had no hope of a war disability pension or compensation for pain and suffering, unless they had a history of mental illness.

An expert opinion from the psychiatry department in Reichenau in 1957 illustrates the uncertainty regarding the problem of rape victims. G. F. [14] Staatsarchiv Freiburg, compensation court, individual cases, 3889; name abbreviated to protect the patient. from Breisgau/Hochschwarzwald district, who worked as a laundress in a station hotel in Immendingen, was brutally raped four times by French soldiers on 8 December 1950. Her head was banged against the floor of the vehicle, a French ambulance, until she lost consciousness, her mouth was held closed, she was strangled, beaten and finally after half an hour thrown out onto the street. By chance, a doctor came by and notified the (German) police to make a report. At the time, G. F. was fifty-two years old.

She was admitted to the psychiatric ward, not because she was diagnosed as being traumatized, but because she was said to have been behaving oddly at the hospital in Möhringen, where she was originally brought. The medical report of 16 December 1950 states that she was suffering from severe concussion with vomiting and a slow pulse, torn ligaments and joint pain, and severe bruising, contusions and cuts: ‘Emotionally the patient is completely exhausted and says she thought she was going to be killed.’ This perception of mortal danger, as we know better today, is what probably caused the lasting mental stress.

The doctors at the time decided to admit her to the psychiatry department because G. F. posed a risk to herself and to others. She was behaving ‘in an unruly manner’, demolishing objects and refusing to eat for fear of being poisoned. After consultation with the psychiatry department, however, the general hospital had to admit that the nurse treating her had not been very friendly and that the patient had not in fact destroyed anything. G. F. was discharged in January 1951.

Seven years later, the psychiatry department in Reichenau noted that her condition since the terrible experience had not improved. According to her neighbours, she still called out at night for help and mentally relived what had happened – a typical symptom of post-traumatic stress syndrome. She had not recovered her ‘inner peace’. She was awarded 6,230 marks for loss of earnings and treatment costs on the basis of compensation for ‘occupation damage’. [15] Ibid.