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

Merridale, Ivan’s War , p. 267.

Ibid., p. 268.

Gaby Zipfel, ‘Ausnahmezustand Krieg?’, in: Insa Eschebach and Regina Mühlhäuser (eds.), Krieg und Geschlect: Sexuelle Gewalt im Krieg und Sex-Zwangsarbeit in NS-Konzentrationslagern (Berlin 2008), pp. 55–74; see also Miranda Alison, ‘Sexuelle Gewalt in Zeiten des Kriegs: Menschenrechte für Frauen und Vorstellungen von Männlichkeit’, in: Eschebach and Mühlhäuser (eds.), Krieg und Geschlect , pp. 35–54.

John Horne, ‘Masculinity in Politics and War in the Age of Nation-States and World Wars, 1850–1950’, in: Dudink et al., Masculinities , p. 33.

Angela Koch, ‘Die Verletzung der Gemeinschaft: Zur Relation der Wort- und Ideengeschichte von “Vergewaltigung”’, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 15, 1 (2004), pp. 37–56, here p. 46.

Roberts, What Soldiers Do , pp. 62–3.

Ibid., p. 7.

Ibid., p. 9.

This is still disproportionate to the percentage of African American soldiers in the military: ibid., p. 196.

Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations 1945–1949 (New Haven and London 2003), p. 83.

Karen Hagemann, ‘Heimat-Front: Militär, Gewalt und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Zeitalter der Weltkriege’, in: Hageman et al. (eds.), Heimat-Front , pp. 13–52, here p. 40.

Quoted in Goedde, GIs and Germans , p. 84.

Ibid., pp. 220–1.

Staatsarchiv München, Zur Sicherheitslage, Wochenbericht Bürgermeister von Bad Wiessee an den Landrat Miesbach, Wochenbericht 23–29 July 1945, LRA 148574.

See Christian T. Müller, US-Truppen und Sowjetarmee in Deutschland: Erfahrungen, Beziehungen, Konflikte im Vergleich (Paderborn 2011).

Ibid., pp. 220–1.

Staatsarchiv München, LRA 214430 Traunstein 16 May 1946.

Staatsarchiv München, LRA 148575.

Staatsarchiv München, LRA 148576.

Federal Minister of Justice to the German Child Protection League on 21 September 1946.

BayHStaA, MInn 91951, Sicherheitsstörungen ausländischer Streitkräfte allg. 1959–1961.

Der Spiegel , 45 (1963); online archive www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-46172639.html.

Polizeidirektion Würzburg, 13 April 1952, BayHStA, MInn 80209.

BayHStA, MInn 80209, letter of 28 December 1951.

Bavarian President to Oron J. Hale on 11 January 1952, BayHStA, MInn 80209.

Sicherheitsstörungen durch Angehörige der Besatzungsmacht, Bayerisches Innenministerium on 30 January 1953, BayHStA, MInn 80209.

Innenministerium to Bayer. Staatskanzlei on 17 October 1953, BayHStA, Minn 80209.

Köpp, Warum war ich bloss ein Mädchen? , p. 137.

Margret S. on 12 December 1958 to the Federal Minister for Social Affairs, BA Koblenz B/126/5548.

BA Koblenz B/126/5548, petition to the Federal Ministry of the Interior of 12 June 1951, allowance for children resulting from enemy rape.

Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Amt für Verteidigungslasten Düsseldorf, BR 2076 No. 412.

Pfister, Das Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs , p. 923; see also Susanne zur Nieden, ‘Erotische Fraternisierung: Der Mythos von der schnellen Kapitulation der deutschen Frauen im May 1945’, in: Hagemann et al. (eds.), Heimat-Front , pp. 313–25.

Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Die amerikanische Besatzung Deutschlands (Munich 1996), p. 188.

See Petra Goedde, ‘From Villains to Victims: Fraternization and the Feminization of Germany, 1945–1947’, in: Diplomatic History 23, 1 (winter 1999), pp. 1–20.

The Bodleian Library (ed.), Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany , issued by The Foreign Office, London, pp. 42–3, 63.

See Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German–American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill and London 2002), particularly pp. 126–54.

Fränkischer Tag of 21 September 1945, quoted in Peter Zorn, ‘“Ami-Liebchen” and “Veronika Dankeschön” – Bamberg 1945–1952: Deutsche Frauen und amerikanische Soldaten’, in: Geschichte quer 11 (2003), pp. 39–42, here p. 41.

See also Barbara Willenbacher, ‘Zerrüttung und Bewährung der Nachkriegsfamilie’, in: Martin Broszat, Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Hans Woller et al. (eds.), Von Stalingrad zur Währungsreform: zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland (Munich 1990), pp. 595–614.

Almuth Roelfs, ‘“Ami-Liebchen” und “Berufsbräute”: Prostitution, Geschlechtskrankheiten und Besatzung in der Nachkriegszeit’, in: Günter Kronenbitter et al. (eds.), Besatzung, Funktion und Gestalt militärischer Fremdherrschaft von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn et al. 2006), pp. 201–10, here p. 205.

Pfister, Das Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs , p. 668.

Ibid., p. 832.

Henke, Die amerikanische Besatzung Deutschlands , particularly pp. 190–6.

Sagan, Kriegsende 1945.

Even if there were a large number of unreported cases, this was ‘not a lot given the fact that, for example, 900 people were convicted of rape in 1939 or that in 1950 the police in Bavaria alone investigated over 500 German citizens on charges of rape. These figures are a clear indication of the relative lack of violence by the US army towards the civilian population during the occupation of Germany.’ The comparison is false, of course. For one thing, the author uses area as a parameter (instead of the male population), which makes no sense because the Americans were not stationed all over Germany. In addition, the cases of rape reported to the police before and after the war cannot be compared with the documented cases at the end of the war, because it was almost impossible for German civilians to report crimes. See Henke, Die amerikanische Besatzung Deutschlands , pp. 1038–9.

Ibid., p. 44.

Dietrich Güstrow, In jenen Jahren: Aufzeichnungen eines ‘befreiten’ Deutschen (Munich 1983), p. 34.

Letter from a soldier in the Field Artillery Battalion of the 99th Infantry Division, quoted in Henke, Die amerikanische Besatzung Deutschlands , p. 195.

Thus, in my opinion, the assumption that there were few cases of rape among the American occupiers, but rather consensual sexual relationships, is based on extremely unclear sources. Testimony at the time was almost always given by biased witnesses: by men who had been defeated in battle and transformed their military defeat into a moral defeat by their women, or by soldiers in the conquering army flaunting their heroic sexual exploits. The reports of allegedly consensual sexual contacts also come from soldiers who had been infected with venereal diseases and had to endure highly embarrassing questions from doctors, or – another often cited source – from clerical or other authorities (for example, the American anti-prostitution feminists, representatives of the American ‘social purity movement’), who also had their own moral agenda.