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

The rape question took a private turn because the thesis that all men were potential rapists and all women potential victims provided an explanation for female oppression and the massive recruitment of women for the feminist project. In addition, the war-related rape was seen in Germany primarily as a problem of the Red Army and hence part of the East–West conflict. The New Women’s Movement was a product of the New Left, however, and could not or did not want to burn its fingers by touching on this theme. It is in this way that the 1970s feminists lost the opportunity to address the largest mass rape in history, of which their own mothers had been the victims. [79] A report by a victim in a special issue of the feminist newspaper Courage from 1980 about the everyday life of women during the war is one of the few exceptions in this regard; Helga Born, ‘Das Vergewaltigen war noch im vollem Gange’, Courage, aktuelle Frauenzeitung special issue 2, 3 (1980), online edition of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, pp. 57–61. The rape problem remains today one of the greatest feminist works in progress. The majority of incidents are still unreported because the victims’ moral conduct would be shown up in court in an embarrassing manner. Until the late 1990s, the criteria for rape were extremely rigid. For a rape to be recognized at all, there had to be a considerable amount of violence involved. Within a marriage and also with prostitution, it was not considered a criminal offence if prior consent to sexual intercourse had been given: ‘The restrictive interpretation of rape is particularly surprising given that rape is one of the most serious crimes in the laws governing sexual offences and signifies an extreme emotional burden for the victim. Judicial opinion on rape has not kept up with the development of social attitudes to sexuality and sexual delinquency. It remains dominated by patriarchal structures that have begun to lose their hold only in the last few years and by a traditional condemnation of prostitutes. All told, the attitude of the courts to rape may be regarded as backward.’ It was not a feminist who wrote these words about the lax interpretation of rape but a law professor at the University of Bonn: Johannes A. J. Brüggemann, Entwicklung und Wandel des Sexualstrafrechts in der Geschichte unseres StGB: Die Reform der Sexualdelikte einst und jetzt (Baden-Baden 2013), pp. 289–90.

It was to be almost another twenty-five years before a German feminist finally took the bull by the horns. Helke Sander had already drawn attention to herself in September 1968, when she appeared at a meeting of the Sozialistisches Deutsches Studentenbund [Socialist German Student Union (SDS)] in Frankfurt as co-founder of Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen [Action Committee for the Liberation of Women] and announced its manifesto. Women could not wait until after the revolution and the transformation of economic and political circumstances to achieve equality, she said to the hardly enthusiastic students. It was time to abandon in-fighting and place private and political difficulties in the right context: ‘Why do you speak here of class struggle and at home about orgasm problems? Isn’t that something of interest to the SDS as well?’ [80] Helke Sander’s historic speech can be read on the Internet at www.hdg.de/lemo/html/dokumente/Kontinuitaet-UndWandel_redeSandersZurNeuenFrauenbewegung . When her speech did not produce the hoped-for effect, one of Sander’s comrades-in-arms threw tomatoes at the next speaker. This act became the symbolic initial spark for the New Women’s Movement in Germany. [81] See Miriam Gebhardt, Alice im Niemandsland: Wie die deutsche Frauenbewegung die Frauen verlor (Munich 2012).

Her documentary and accompanying book BeFreier und Befreite in 1992 finally triggered discussion of the post-war rapes. The dispute she provoked emphasizes the importance of her pioneering act. She and her fellow researchers had attempted to reconstruct the main aspects of the events in minute detail, to deliver initial statistics, to interview not only the German victims but also Russian men and to fit what had happened into a contemporary feminist discourse on violence. As mentioned earlier, Sander probably exaggerated the numbers involved, but this does nothing to minimize the significance of her project. It was rather her exclusive focus on Berlin and the Red Army that made her treatment of the topic lopsided.

Surprisingly, however, this one-sided approach was never held against her. On the contrary, she was criticized for the way she dealt with the testimony, which she presented without commentary, including the crude statements by one interviewee, who compared the events with the Holocaust. She was particularly censured because she had allowed a Jewish victim to speak and in doing so, it was said, relativized the crimes of the Germans against the Jews by comparing them with the crimes of (Soviet) men against women. [82] Natascha Drubek-Meyer, ‘Griffiths und Vertovs Wiege: Dziga Vertovs Film Kolybel’naja (1937)’, in: Frauen und Film 54/55 (1994), pp. 31–51.

The American historian Atina Grossmann referred to earlier was particularly critical of Sander’s work. She accused her of wilfully calculating the number of victims so as to relativize the Holocaust and also countered Sander’s project with her own interpretation, whereby the women who had been raped and subsequently terminated their pregnancies had all been racists. In doing so she replaced the accusation of historical relativization with a relativization of her own. By assigning a Nazi ideology to the victims, she turned the women into perpetrators, who therefore deserved no sympathy. Once again, it is the credibility of the victims that was at stake.

Compared with the excessive criticism, the impact of the first large-scale systematic study of the war-related rape of German women was of short duration. Norman M. Naimark reckons that the controversy surrounding Sander’s work possibly did less to shed light on the mass raping than it did to address the complicity of women in the crimes of the Nazis, which were indeed subsequently studied more widely (a debate known as the ‘women historians’ dispute’). [83] Naimark, ‘The Russians and Germans’, p. 206.

Grossmann’s criticism of Sander’s study of the mass rape can be understood only in the context of the left-wing liberal problems with the German ‘victim discourse’. The concept of ‘victim discourse’ recalls that, after the war and until the 1950s, the Germans initially also styled themselves as victims of Nazis and the war and not as the perpetrators of the suffering, whose consequences they were now obliged to bear. [84] See Moeller, War Stories. It was quite common after 1945 to invert cause and effect and to offset the German losses against those of the enemy, the extermination of the Jews, Sinti and Roma and other minorities, and the war crimes of the Wehrmacht and SS. To cite just one example, Cardinal Josef Faulhaber said in the year of capitulation that the liberated concentration camps were certainly not a pleasant sight, but neither was Munich after the enemy air raids.

This post-war ‘victim discourse’ continues to give rise to suspicion today. The Germans are suspected of still emphasizing their own suffering merely to divert attention from their historical responsibility for the often much greater suffering they brought to half of the world. Critics of the ‘victim discourse’ claim that all talk of German suffering is ultimately revisionist, that books like Der Brand by Jörg Friedrich (2002) about the bombing of German cities, popular films like Die Gustloff (2008) about the sinking of a ship loaded with German refugees from the East with the loss of 9,000 people, or March of Millions (2007) about flight from the German territories in the East, or novels like Günter Grass’ Crabwalk (2002) were intended to relativize German guilt.