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

The narration strategy in many accounts of the conquest of Berlin is highly structured and clearly written for an outside audience. The experiences of personal violence and powerlessness are designed to illustrate what happened to the Germans as a whole – namely a humiliating defeat by a despised enemy. The authors’ feelings are difficult to differentiate from the assumptions as to how society expects such a narration to be. In brief, diaries such as these cannot be read purely as sources of recalled facts. They are rather documents of the way raped women wished themselves and what they had suffered to be regarded by others.

For all the limitations of autobiographical testimony (and other sources, for that matter), it is remarkable in the case of ‘Anonymous’ that fifty years after the mass rape by Allied troops the credibility of an eyewitness could be questioned on the basis of the minor philological problems it raises. Even in 2003, it still appeared provocative that women not only regarded the entry into Berlin of the Red Army as an exhilarating ‘spring of liberation’ (Bisky) but were also at least ambivalent, if not prejudiced in their political judgements and undecided in their feelings and needs. The forced revelation of her identity, the investigation of her political background and the men around her indicate that the political implications of the rape at the end of the war are still a highly sensitive issue today. It is regrettable for the coherence of our own worldview that doubts should be cast on the reputation of the author and publishers – a tried and tested method for eliminating an undesirable truth.

Apart from the mental and psycho-historical conditions in the post-war era, at the political level it was the power constellations after 1945 that for a long time stood in the way of gradual awareness-raising of the mass rape. After all, the armies of the perpetrators were also the armies of the liberators and the new allies. In the Soviet occupied zone and later East Germany, the behaviour of the Red Army as it advanced towards Germany was justified early on by citing the ‘original guilt’ of the Germans. [61] Silke Satjukow, Befreiung? Die Ostdeutschen und 1945 (Leipzig 2009), p. 7. The liberation of the German people from fascism by the Soviets was an axiomatic truth in East Germany and nipped any complaint about mass rape in the bud. Some, as Konrad Jarausch writes, also honestly believed that the Communists had brought the most effective break with the Nazi past, reason enough to overlook the mistakes by this occupying power. [62] Jarausch, Die Umkehr , p. 150.

The liberation myth affected the way people dealt with one another; the Soviets and East Germans explained away their victims by claiming it was the price to pay for victory over fascism and inferred from it a sense of cohesion and loyalty to one another. In a congratulatory telegram on the founding of East Germany in 1949, Stalin stated that both peoples had made great sacrifices in the war and shown the greatest potential ‘for performing great acts of global importance’, which made them the victors of history. [63] Ibid., pp. 15–16. The people of East Germany were barely able to escape the idea of the global significance of the victory of the Red Army: it was part of their everyday life, anchored in rituals, not only on 8 May but also in monuments, school textbooks and political education. The monumental statue of the Red Army soldier with a child in his arms in Treptower Park quite literally overshadows the less heroic personal experiences of people with the Soviet soldiers. There was therefore no chance that the idea of ‘big brother’ would be revised in East Germany.

In the Soviet occupied zone and in East Germany, there was not even the cynicism prevalent in the West, whereby women had either been victims of the ‘Red beasts’ or behaved like immoral Yank lovers. The act itself – the countless assaults by the Red Army – was not even open to discussion in the non-democratic East German society. On account of the course of the fighting in the East, there were few indicators regarding assaults by Western soldiers. Nothing was said in East Germany about the Western allies acting in the same way as the marauding and raping Red Army soldiers. The subjugation of Germany as a heroic victory against fascism was enough of a raison d’être.

According to Silke Satjukow, the SED crudely stifled the few attempts to talk in public about the experiences of the women victims. As a functionary in the Ministry of Culture put it:

In many cases there was no ‘rape’; the German women, who had been destabilized by the war, ‘threw themselves’ at the soldiers in order to obtain food. The odd incident and the occasional child were quickly forgotten. …to those who insisted in 1945/46, we argued, perhaps a little harshly, that making children, even if not quite voluntarily, was better than killing them. [64] Egon Renztsch, head of the Literature and Book Department in the Ministry of Culture on 27 September 1961, quoted in Birgit Dahlke, ‘“Frau Komm!” Vergewaltigungen 1945: Zur Geschichte eines Diskurses’, in: Dahlke et al. (eds.), LiteraturGesellschaft DDR: Kanonkämpfe und ihre Geschichte(n) (Stuttgart 2000), pp. 272–311, here p. 293.

There is an analogy here with the judgement of women in the West as ‘Yank lovers’, in which the nuances of violence, need and consent are ignored. Evidently, sexual contact with one’s own allies, one’s own ‘big brother’, was always particularly reprehensible. Jarausch interprets this, the sexual contact with the ‘liberators’, as a particularly painful symptom of the loss of power. [65] Jarausch, Die Umkehr , p. 46.

As mentioned earlier, the cases of rape by the Western allies did not cause any great indignation in West Germany either. The Cold War demanded of both sides, the West Germans and the East Germans, ‘an unequivocal domestic and foreign policy statement in favour either of the “free world” or of Socialism’. [66] Ibid., p. 159. The Western politicians mostly passed on complaints about assaults as polite requests, which they justified as being in the interests of the occupiers and the reputation of the Western occupying troops in the joint project of democratization and allying Germany with the West. This was an argument that would make sense to the Americans, British and French, who had undertaken to re-educate and democratize Germany.

In the 1950s, there were at best quiet mutterings, as was the case with Werner Friedmann, who wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in January 1952 in connection with the assaults by American soldiers that the recently increasing numbers of US soldiers coming to Bavaria were now being called defence forces rather than occupying forces, which was intended to assuage misgivings within the population. At the same time the number of assaults by soldiers on Germans was rising. For that reason, a dark shadow had been cast recently on life together with the ‘ambassadors of American defensive preparedness’, so much so that it was unclear

whether these soldiers were indeed here to protect us or whether we might sometimes need to protect ourselves against them. Assaults on taxi drivers, women on their own and citizens are going up throughout the country. Acts of violence and brutality are being reported daily. In Munich alone there were 222 serious incidents in 1951, including eighty assaults, not counting minor episodes.

Even if these figures were considered impartially, he continued, with account taken of the fact that soldiers are coarse types who spend their free time with alcohol and dubious women, there was still an urgent need for something to be done. This was not, incidentally, to ignore the helpfulness and genuine friendship frequently encountered in members of the occupying forces. [67] Süddeutsche Zeitung , 9 January 1952, BayHStaA, breaches of the peace, newspaper cuttings, MInn 80210.