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

The difficulties with estimating the number of victims are undeniable. The crimes could not be recorded and investigated by the German authorities at the time. This is why I have had to make do with estimates. It is understandable that the reliability of my proposed figures should be questioned. However, I am occasionally criticized for basing my figures ‘only’ on reports by the victims themselves. It is the word ‘only’ that disturbs me. Of course, there might have been the occasional false accusation. But this fundamental suspicion is not only a further form of disrespect for the victims and their suffering but also a reflection of the old patriarchal idea that the word of rape victims should be doubted in principle.

This book answers this criticism by detailing the insurmountable barriers faced by victims when they attempted to talk about the violence inflicted on them: their own personal sense of shame, society’s moral values, and fear of how their husbands and families might react. If a woman gave birth to a child, she had to deal with the dilemma of whether to speak out and tell the truth or to keep silent and protect her child’s welfare. Many women preferred not to tell their children how they were conceived. Women who ventured to speak about the violence faced grave social consequences. Rape victims were generally suspected of having provoked or even desired the intercourse, particularly when the attacker was a white Western soldier. Understandably, the victims usually didn’t want to risk having their honour and dignity violated again. Given the fact that rape victims very often had to remain silent for decades because they knew that no one would believe them, I cannot accept the criticism that the statements and reports were ‘only’ those of the victims.

Sexual aggression against boys and men is also absent from my calculations because of the lack of data. The fact that not only girls and women are raped in wartime is easily overlooked. Rarely is sexual aggression against men studied, with few exceptions such as the Bangladesh war in 1971 between West Pakistani groups and Bengali Moslems, or more recently the disturbing images of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where female soldiers were also involved in abuse and sexual aggression.

Sexual assaults against men are played down or reinterpreted by the victims themselves more frequently than attacks on women. In post-war Germany, aggression against ‘defenceless” women could be exploited politically, whereas male victims of sexual aggression fell outside the binary patriarchal framework of heroic men and passive women victims. [35] Branche and Virgile (eds.), Rape in Wartime. Isolated references to the rape of men and boys can be found nevertheless in source material and are striking. The biographer of the actor Horst Buchholz, for example, relates that, while the twelve-year-old Buchholz was in flight from Silesia to Berlin, he arrived in a Red Cross camp near Magdeburg, where he had to harvest onions with other boys. One of the supervisors is said to have indecently assaulted them several times. [36] Werner Sudendorf, Verführung und Rebell: Horst Buchholz, Die Biografie (Berlin 2013), p. 23.

The State Ministry of the Interior reported on 19 June 1946 on the abuse of two boys by two American soldiers in Upper Franconia. The GIs had forced the thirteen-year-olds to perform oral sex. The offence was listed in the files as ‘sexual offence with children’ and not as ‘rape’. [37] Landeserkennungsamt Bayern, 19 June 1946, BayHStA MInn 80207, Bd. 1 betreff Besatzungsmacht, Ereignisse und Sicherheitsstörungen.

Adult men were also victims. A 48-year-old dentist from Bad Kissingen was invited by four American soldiers in the night of 4–5 December 1951 to join them in a round of schnapps. They then offered to drive him home. On the way they stopped to relieve themselves. The dentist, A. P., also got out of the car. One of the soldiers grabbed his head and forced him down with the words ‘Du leck!’ (‘Suck me!’). A second soldier attempted the same thing. A. P. struggled and was beaten up. With a bleeding head he walked 2 kilometres to the next village. The police chief, who forwarded the case to the regional authority of Lower Franconia, concluded his report with the explicit remark that nothing adverse was known about the victim (meaning homosexuality) and that his statement appeared credible. [38] Stadtpolizei Bad Kissingen on 7 December 1951 to Regierung von Unterfranken, BayHStA MInn 80208.

In my research in the Freiburg State Archive, I found a particularly disturbing case of a further male rape victim. W. H., a shoemaker from Haslach, made the following report to the Inland Revenue Office in Freiburg in February 1960, fifteen years after the event. [39] Staatsarchiv Freiburg Einzelfälle D 5/1 11.6.30/5537. In summer 1945 he visited a Moroccan barracks with a friend, who knew some of the colonial soldiers. While he was conversing with the soldiers, one of the men persuaded him to enter a side room, locked the door, took him by the throat, pulled his trousers down and raped him. Because he had no physical injuries, he only told his friend about it, but not his parents or his sister, ‘because I was ashamed’, as he wrote. The reason he reported it after all, fifteen years later, and requested compensation was that he now had ‘third-degree syphilis (cerebral palsy)’.

The Inland Revenue Office, which could only approve compensation where there were witnesses or other evidence, attempted to locate the friend, who was now living in North America, and received the following written confirmation of the story: ‘W. could not defend himself because he was absolutely unprepared for the attack and the Moroccan was three times as strong as he was and threatened him with a knife when he tried to resist. W. showed me the bruises and scratches on his arms and neck.’ The friend also explained why the victim had not reported the affair earlier:

First, a fifteen-year-old growing up under the influence of the Third Reich knew nothing about homosexuality or venereal disease, topics not taught at school. Second, he was ashamed to report it to his parents because he simply didn’t know about the risk of infection. Third, he couldn’t go to the German police for help, because in those chaotic times there were only a few police officers in our town and they had no authority whatsoever over the occupying troops.

As in most other cases, the claim for compensation was refused for lack of evidence.

These examples tell us nothing about how frequently men were victims of sexual aggression in the post-war period. It is nevertheless unquestionable that there were also male victims of such attacks and that they suffered extremely as a result.

Research into the mass rape of German women began too late for oral history methods to be used – in other words, the systematic evaluation of eyewitness interviews. But, apart from biological reasons and the considerable problems of critically analysing biographical recollections that are so far in the past that they have been revised many times and reshaped by the media, I have another reason for not interviewing the victims. As modern psychological findings tell us that the recollection of such events can lead to a new trauma, I believed that in this particular case the interview method would be too risky.

This topic also called for a careful approach to the sources for another reason. There are inevitably few official records of these sexual aggressions. The German authorities had no leverage, and the military authorities were not informed, as far as possible, as the acts were strictly forbidden and in some cases severely punished, even with the death penalty. When such incidents were nevertheless brought to the attention of the military authorities, the court proceedings followed their own self-serving rules, which were not necessarily in the interests of the victims, as we shall see later. Military court files are therefore of limited value as sources. Descriptions by the perpetrators themselves are rare, and in any case highly biased.