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

Friedmann and other contemporary commentators performed bizarre contortions to understand the acts of the GIs. An explanation such as the fact that men in the USA were used only to ‘diluted’ alcohol and were bored in Germany was already plausible enough for them. In October of the same year, following the rape of two women by two US servicemen in a doctor’s surgery in Hohenlinden near Munich, the Süddeutsche Zeitung ( SZ ) commented wryly that it was unfortunately a fact that

young soldiers of all nationalities… seek some kind of physical compensation after completion of their more or less righteous war work. But this romanticism stops with the reading of the daily police reports: taxi drivers robbed, passers-by deliberately run over, women raped. And so forth. Could it be because the soldiers from overseas come here with the wrong ideas about us? It is possible that some of them arrive from the Texas hinterland with the notion that we are still living in 1945 and that they are least likely to draw attention to themselves with their glib cowboy act. They are wrong! They should… rather teach the occupying troops and if possible not send out-and-out footpads and bushwhackers. [68] Süddeutsche Zeitung , 24 October 1952, ibid.

The midnight curfew introduced at the end of 1953 for American soldiers did nothing to change the situation in Munich. This prompted the renowned SZ journalist Ernst Müller-Meiningen junior to describe the Americans as a ‘tribe of savages’: ‘Tensed up by their historical fate and their own guilt, Germans require an object lesson – based on the values and not the absence of values of the great American people…. The situation to date has not been ideal: the GIs, who had too much leisure time and money, whose huge cars and cigarettes were readily for sale, the inexpensive “Veronikas” and the entertaining bars offering a glittering life – compared with their private situation – were particularly conducive to excesses.’ [69] ‘Die Amerikaner in Deutschland’, Ernst Müller-Meiningen in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , 25/26 April 1953, ibid.

This has the tone of an anti-Americanism that was later to be voiced not only in East Germany but also increasingly in the West. Criticism of the hegemonial policy, the supposed lack of culture and the materialism had already been heard in the discussion of fraternizing German women and was at least one of the underlying issues in German–American relations, along with the great admiration for the American way of life. The rapes by US soldiers were seen as the typical features of a nation of boorish philistines, undisciplined, licentious and ignorant, and often arrogant in their attitude to the German population. [70] Müller, US-Truppen und Sowjetarmee in Deutschland , p. 75. In this way, trivializing gender stereotypes were combined with stereotypical images of the Americans.

Towards the end of the 1950s, public criticism of breaches of the peace by the American forces became more vocal. The acquittal of a soldier accused of raping a 12-year-old girl produced a flood of indignant letters in the Münchner Merkur. [71] BayHStaA MInn 91951, breaches of the peace by foreign armed forces. On this occasion, the newspaper also reported on a rumoured recruitment poster in the USA aimed specifically at black men. As soldiers, said the poster, they could travel abroad and earn more than the local population, with the result that white girls in Germany and Britain were queuing up for black GIs. The rumour was taken so seriously that members of parliament and church leaders wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asking the American people to change this form of recruitment for the sake of the safety of German women and girls. The Ministry replied that posters of this type had never existed and they were merely Communist and Nazi propaganda. [72] Müller, US-Truppen und Sowjetarmee in Deutschland , pp. 78–9. Even if it is true in this case, we now know that a potential war premium in the form of a European woman was indeed used as a recruitment argument by the US Army. But the time was not ripe for a conflict with ‘big brother’, neither in the East nor in the West.

The subject of rape in general, and in war in particular, did not attract any great attention until the 1970s, at a time when the need was perceived to discuss the connection between the two problems, gender roles and war. The new attitude resulted from the recent feminist movement in the USA. The journalist Susan Brownmiller published the standard reference, Against Our Will , in 1975, in which she discussed the significance of rape in upholding the patriarchal society. [73] Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York 1975). She backed her thesis with historical events, including the mass rape during and after the Second World War. It was this pioneering feminist work that first made it possible to put the phenomenon of rape in a historical perspective – in other words, to remove it from its biological and quasi-natural framework and to link it with a particular form of rule, namely patriarchy.

Brownmiller described sexual violence as one of the earliest forms of male bonding, and gang rape as men’s basic weapon of force, the principal agent of his will and her fear:

His forcible entry into her body, despite her physical protestations and struggle, became the vehicle of his victorious conquest over her being, the ultimate test of his superior strength, the triumph of his manhood. Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. [74] Ibid., pp. 14–15.

War provided men with the perfect psychological backdrop for giving vent to their contempt for women. The very maleness of the military, the brute power of weaponry exclusive to their hands, the spiritual bonding of men at arms, the manly discipline of orders given and orders obeyed, confirmed to them that women were peripheral: ‘A simple rule of thumb in war is that the winning side is the side that does the raping.’ [75] Ibid., p. 35. This also sends a message to the conquered country that the rape of ‘their’ women is the ultimate humiliation. [76] The relevance of this view was demonstrated last year in the Gaza war, when a professor at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv claimed in a radio interview that the only thing that would deter Palestinians from their suicide missions would be the fear that their women would be raped by Jews in revenge; see http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/202558/israeli-professor-suggests-rape-wouldserve-as-ter .

Surprisingly, Brownmiller already mentioned the rapes by US soldiers in the Second World War and occupation period as a historical example and criticized the paltry standard excuse by the army that more rapes take place during an occupation because the soldiers have lots of free time. Her attempt to explain rape as a form of female conditioning was also innovative. The mere learning of the word ‘rape’ by children, she claims, made them aware of the gender power structure. [77] Brownmiller, Against Our Will , p. 309.

It is interesting that the feminist discussion of sexual violence, which is one of the marks of the New Women’s Movement in Germany, failed to draw public attention to the war-related rape. Although the relevant publications and leading figures like Alice Schwarzer repeatedly bring up the topic of sexual violence, the focus is on civilian rape, and particularly sexual abuse among friends and in marriage. This needs to be explained, particularly given the fact that Schwarzer, the leading German feminist, writes in her biography that her mother narrowly escaped being raped by a US soldier. [78] A drunken GI tried to drag her mother out of the house while she was visiting Stadtlauingen. For this ‘attempted rape’, the soldier was court-martialled and shot by the American military police. One might wonder whether an attempted abduction like this would have prompted such a reaction at the time. At all events, Schwarzer cites it as one of the reasons for her feminist position on violence: Alice Schwarzer, Lebenslauf (Cologne 2011), p. 31. Thus, if the old feminists of the 1970s had just asked their own mothers – quite literally – they would have had enough grounds for indignation and empathy. But for a variety of reasons, it was not possible for them at the time to address this obvious issue.