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

The historian Svenja Goltermann has investigated the extent to which the diagnostic tools available at the time influenced doctors and psychiatrists and how society judged the returnees’ experience of violence. These findings are also applicable to rape victims. Whether the contemporary state of psychiatric knowledge shaped the perception of the victims themselves, as Goltermann claims, is open to discussion. The question is whether the inability to express a physical experience in technical language with terms like trauma and post-traumatic disorders did in fact mean that the victims experienced the event differently. Against this constructivist view is the fact that the experience of violence created long-term physical and psychological structures that could not be formulated in words but still rose to the surface even decades later and expressed themselves in the form of symptoms. At all events, Goltermann is right in her conclusion that the belief at the time that external events could not cause mental illness prevented society from showing sympathy. [16] Svenja Goltermann, ‘Im Wahn der Gewalt: Massentod, Opferdiskurs und Psychiatrie 1945–1956’, in: Naumann, Nachkrieg in Deutschland , pp. 343–63, here pp. 358–9.

It was not only relatives and doctors who shared the general lack of understanding of the victims of mass rape. Given what we know today – that probably hundreds of thousands of war-related rape victims suffered long-term psychological consequences – it is difficult to understand how casually and how persistently post-war society spoke of the effects of mass rape. There is a powerful thesis from this time, and still current today, regarding individual reactions to the atrocity, stating that the experience did not particularly cause lasting damage to the victims. Not only did most of the women show no resistance and abandon themselves to their fate, they also came to terms with the experience of violence ‘surprisingly quickly’. The reason cited is that they were able to interpret their individual fate as a shared experience, as a ‘collective fate’. [17] Some formulations recur in current research literature, particularly the thesis by Kuby of the women’s ‘surprisingly rapid’ convalescence; see Naimark, Die Russen in Deutschland , pp. 162–3; Sibylle Meyer and Eva Schulze, ‘Als wir wieder zusammen waren, ging der Krieg im Kleinen weiter’, in: Niethammer and Plato (eds.), Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten , pp. 305–26. Even renowned feminist scholars today still maintain that the Nazi ideology, the sense of community and the great contempt for supposedly inferior nations like the Soviets offered a possibility for resisting a trauma. [18] Regina Mühlhäuser, ‘Massenvergewaltigungen in Berlin 1945 im Gedächtnis betroffener Frauen: Zur Verwobenheit von nationalistischen, rassistischen und geschlechtsspezifischen Diskursen’, in: Veronika Aegerter et al. (eds.), Geschlecht hat Methode: Ansätze und Perspektiven in der Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte (contribution to the Ninth Swiss Historians’ Conference 1988) (Zurich 1999), pp. 235–46, here p. 239; see also Mühlhäuser, Vergewaltigungen in Deutschland 1945 , p. 389; Atina Grossmann, ‘Eine Frage des Schweigens: Die Vergewaltigung deutscher Frauen durch Besatzungssoldaten – Zum historischen Hintergrund von Helke Sanders Film BeFreier und Befreite’, in: Frauen und Film 54/55 (1994), pp. 14–28, here pp. 19, 21; Grossmann, ‘A Question of Silence’; Hsu-Ming Teo, ‘The Continuum of Sexual Violence in Occupied Germany, 1945–1949’, in: Women’s History Review 5, 2 (1996), pp. 191–218, here p. 193; Sibylle Meyer and Eva Schulze, Wie wir das alles geschafft haben: Alleinstehende Frauen berichten über ihr Leben nach 1945 (Munich 1993), p. 64; also sceptical of the resilience thesis: Naimark, Die Russen in Deutschland , pp. 162–3.

This is in clear contradiction to the sources recently examined by me, in which there is little mention of resignation or a miraculous collective resilience by the victims. It is true that the women were not unprepared for the event, which had been extensively predicted by Nazi propaganda, particularly with respect to the Soviets and black colonial soldiers. It is also probably true that many women resigned themselves to their fate, because they had no other choice. But there are also numerous reports of women offering resolute resistance in spite of the armed superiority of the soldiers. We must bear in mind that the records of the rapes reflected the way such acts of violence were described and interpreted at the time and that the reporters were influenced by the gender stereotypes of the male conqueror and the passive female booty. This might help to explain why there is almost no mention of the fact that boys and men were also raped, possibly with the participation of women soldiers. [19] Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the former Minister for Family Affairs, who organized massacres and encouraged sexual assaults on Tutsi women. There were also women soldiers in the Red Army who were at least approving bystanders. In civilian life, women are also instigators, accomplices and perpetrators of sexual violence against women and men. In a group rape in Munich in 2014, two teenage girls lulled their two female victims into a false sense of security before abusing them sexually and then handing them over to male rapists.

Even less plausible to me is the view that rape victims coped with what had happened because they saw their suffering as women’s collective fate. The most prominent advocate of this thesis was a post-war journalist. Erich Kuby was one of the first Germans to write about the credibility of eyewitnesses in a series in Der Spiegel and in a monograph about the mass rapes. His sometimes crude views still influence discussion today. [20] Erich Kuby, ‘Die Russen in Berlin’, in: Der Spiegel 19/1965–24/1965; Kuby, Die Russen in Berlin.

At the time, Kuby focused only on Berlin and the Soviet Army, where women, on recognizing the danger of assault, showed incredible ingenuity in their defensive measures and tricks to avoid the impending disaster. They made themselves up to look old, disguised and disfigured themselves, pretended to be sick or carried other people’s babies as a shield. Others acted in a fearless or particularly hard-nosed manner, seeking a strong protector to keep other potential rapists away. In Kuby’s opinion, these women even showed something of an understanding for the soldiers and officers, who believed they had free rein in fascist Germany. [21] Kuby, Die Russen in Berlin , p. 213. The Soviet soldiers were intoxicated by victory and by the experience of Western civilization and naturally eager for sex after all the joyless years on the front. In Kuby’s depiction, the German rape victims became understanding mothers, who afterwards could not suppress ‘a quiet, very feminine smile’ about the rowdy but always potent soldiers – ‘These wild boys didn’t impress them that much.’ [22] Ibid., pp. 314–15.

When it was over, claims Kuby, the victims kept quiet about it, processing their experience of violence as a ‘collective fate’ and coping with it in some cases ‘surprisingly quickly’. They got used to speaking in a matter-of-fact way, talking ‘not of themselves, but of the basement, house, apartment block, hospital, authorities or whichever community the narrator felt comfortable with’. The wellbeing of the community was more important than the individual experience. For the men, it was completely different. They spoke of it as if the terrible things had happened to them.

A close examination of Kuby’s texts quickly reveals, however, that he was not interested in the rape victims but in the Germans, or more precisely the German men, who at the end of the war had formed a group of ‘passively patient and suffering’ people. [23] Ibid., p. 308. The raped women served as a contrast; they were the vital sex offering promise for the future, distinct in the author’s rhetoric from the supposedly weak and weakened male nation.