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

They make a connection in time between German unity, a dangerous recrudescence of national pride and a new version of the ‘victim discourse’. After a phase of ignorance directly after the war and ‘coming to terms with the past’ through (meaningless) remembrance rituals under the slogan ‘never again Auschwitz’, the subject of German war victims, say the critics, is now being used to ‘cast off the fetters of inherent guilt’, as the psychoanalyst and historian Gudrun Brockhaus puts it. [85] Gudrun Brockhaus, ‘Kontroversen um die “Kriegskindheit”’, in: Forum Psychoanalyse no. 26 (2010), pp. 313–24, here p. 315. The social psychologist Harald Welzer considered even the new interest in ‘war childhood’ merely as an invention and evasion by the 1968 generation, who just wanted to make themselves appear important. [86] Harald Welzer, in Hartmut Radebold, Werner Bohleber and Jürgen Zinnecker (eds.), Transgenerationale Weitergabe kriegsbelasteter Kindheiten (Weinheim and Munich 2009). Ultimately, he feared, everyone somehow regarded themselves as victims, thereby neutralizing the enormous suffering that the Germans had inflicted on the world.

To counter this suspicion, it has become customary for the few historians who have studied the mass rape of German women at all to precede their commentaries by long digressions on the similar crimes of the Wehrmacht, the army brothels and the forced prostitution in concentration camps. [87] See, for example, Jeffrey Burds, ‘Sexual Violence in Europe in World War II, 1935–1945’, in: Politics and Society 37, 1 (2009), pp. 35–74. Only after the misdeeds of the Germans have been spoken about at length is it allowed to discuss German victims. This rhetoric is comprehensible and sympathetic, although it is based on what I believe to be a problematic causality – the German women were raped because the Germans had caused so much devastation hitherto. This cause-and-effect argumentation falls short because the American and Canadian soldiers had no reason to take revenge on Germany in the form of rape, and in any case the logical connection must first of all be demonstrated. The Wehrmacht soldiers had not sexually assaulted the women on the other side of the Atlantic. And besides, one crime does not legitimize another. It is simply not ‘natural’ to act out rage against the enemy by assaulting women sexually.

The American historian Grossmann chose another way of distancing herself from the ‘victim discourse’. She relativizes what happened by saying that the raped German women were not ideologically without guilt. Her incorrect claim that women who had become pregnant through rape had aborted the offspring of ‘subhumans’ for racist reasons, namely on account of their abiding belief in the Nazi ideology, naturally blocks any sympathy whatsoever for the victims. It deprives the women of the moral right to consider themselves as victims. Grossmann’s basic assumption is already questionable, as we have seen above. But even if we accept the unlikely premise that the rape victims were all committed Nazis, what then?

To put it bluntly, a reversal of the perpetrator–victim perspective would be inadmissible and above all impossible. Since the 1990s, it has been no secret that German women and children were not only victims. Most of them espoused the Nazi ideology and were in the worst cases actively involved in the persecution and extermination policy. Without the countless denunciations by women, for example, the registration of the Jewish population and the looting, persecution and extermination would not have been possible. They were not slow in making supposedly inferior women and nations aware of the premise that German women were important for the survival of the Aryan race. There were women concentration camp guards, colonizers of the occupied territories, agitators, collaborators, profiteers and, at the very least, passive observers of the Nazi crimes.

Women who did not voluntarily perform war service, for example in the armaments factories, ‘stabilized the “home front” through their “functions” in the home, their energies within the family beyond requirements and their endurance until the end’. [88] Margarete Doerr, ‘Mittragen – Mitverantworten? Eine Fallstudie zum Hausfrauenalltag im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in: Hagemann et al., Heimat-Front , pp. 275–90, here p. 283.

Even supposedly apolitical housewives believed in the superiority of the German people and the justification for war, hoped for the final victory and kept the war machinery running. They sent packages and letters to the front and made it easier for the soldiers through their endurance: ‘On the one hand they would have preferred to hide their sons and husbands in the hinterland, on the other hand they didn’t want any “weaklings” or “shirkers” and regarded the fight as a “character-building matter” that “strengthened the soul”.’ [89] Ibid., p. 284. German women promoted a military masculine ideal, which they unfortunately became prey to through defeat.

Women at the time were just as persuaded as men by the toughening ideology, the need for objectivity and distance, and they brought up their children accordingly. We must assume that the average German women knew or could have known about the extermination of the Jews and the atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht. It was apparent everywhere: the persecution of dissidents and political opponents, the harassment and deportation of the Jews, the burning synagogues. They had contact with slave labourers and prisoners of war; they lived perhaps close to concentration camps or witnessed euthanasia actions and death marches and they read letters from the front.

It is evident that many rape victims were at least potential perpetrators. Even children were not always innocent, having participated in the harassment of slave labourers, mobbed Jewish schoolchildren and regarded themselves as members of a master race. Neither women nor children were ‘just silent and traumatized witnesses of this war nor simply its innocent victims’, as Nicholas Stargardt points out. [90] Nicholas Stargardt, ‘Maikäfer, flieg!’ Hitlers Krieg und die Kinder (Munich 2006), p. 13. But again, what does that have to do with their parallel status as victims? The answer is that, seventy years after the war, we must find a way of accommodating this ambiguity. We cannot avoid the pitfalls of revisionism by regarding the victims not as Germans but primarily as women, and hence supposedly innocent. This strategy led a few feminist historians astray in the 1990s. But we cannot either deny the German rape victims their status as victims because they belonged to the aggressor nation.

An empathic approach to the mass rapes requires that the categories of gender and ethnicity be seen together. The idea that the raped women stand as representatives of the ‘defiled’ nation is a product of the nineteenth-century nationalist thinking and no longer applies. We know that women from all of the warring and occupied nations were subject to sexual violence. They experienced rape as women and Germans, as the defeated and weaker nation. The story being told here is not a specifically German one. We are looking at the German chapter of this story only to examine how our society (or more exactly the German societies in the East and West) dealt with it, and what that says about a culture and its influence on subsequent generations.

The sexual violence at the end of the war was not a ‘collective experience’ for the victims, as some contemporary witnesses, and researchers even today, would like to claim. The women who were raped could not rationalize their suffering because they had been raped as German women. Even if this interpretation was helpful for some people in the West during the climate of East–West rivalry in the 1950s and 1960s, by the 1980s at the latest it had lost all significance as an exonerating strategy. This rhetoric was in any case unavailable to East German women.