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

I am grateful for the assistance provided to me while researching this book from Martina Böhmer, an expert in dealing with traumatized rape victims in geriatric care, and Jürgen Klöckler, city archivist in Konstanz. My thanks go also to the staff of the archives mentioned in this book, particularly Gerhard Fürmetz from the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv. The discussion and essays by students who attended my course at the University of Konstanz in the summer semester 2013 were a great inspiration.

I thank the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt for suggesting and handling this book, particularly Thomas Rathnow and Karen Guddas, and my agent Rebekka Goepfert and social media adviser Oliver Rehbinder.

Finally, I should like to mention my husband Anthony Kauders, to whom this book is dedicated, for his personal encouragement and professional support during the burdening research work.

The author can be contacted through www.miriamgebhardt.deand www.facebook.com/gebhardt.autorin.

A book project on the rape of German women at the end of the Second World War and during the occupation has first to confront certain prejudices. It is as if a single frame in a film has been frozen in our collective memory. It shows a Russian with Asiatic features yelling ‘Urri, Urri’, but demanding not only the watch but also the woman. We have all seen it on television: blonde woman, played by Nina Hoss, amid the rubble, with a slavering Mongol waiting in the shadows. Is there still anything important to say on this subject? The war is long over, the victims are very old or dead, and later generations find the war stories from Hollywood or Babelsberg more exciting. And then rape – is that not a relic, an archaic crime that always proceeds along much the same lines whether in Germany then, or in Iraq, Syria or South Sudan today? At best the subject offers a cheap platform for the eternal moralists and nationalists with their clear ideas about good and evil. Then it was the Russians who were the wrongdoers; today it is others – in any event, evil men once again.

While working on this book, I frequently asked myself why the wartime rape of German women was still of interest to me today, more than seventy years later. The simple and half-true answer is that the lens through which we look at this time is in urgent need of cleaning.

We historians neatly talk of a ‘gap in research’ when we find very little reliable information about a topic. But the historians’ demand for full accountability is not a sufficient argument for me. There must be more important reasons for descending into such a dark valley.

One such reason could be the demand for fair treatment. The legitimacy of the recollection of the events that took place after the arrival of the Allies is still questioned. There are still voices that say that the investigation of the mass rape of German women is inevitably designed to make up for the crimes committed against victims of German aggression and hence to relativize the Holocaust. [1] See Atina Grossmann, ‘A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers’, in: Robert G. Moeller (ed.), West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Michigan 1997), pp. 33–52. Others contest the relevance of the subject itself, claiming that German society is just deluding itself into thinking that it has a blind spot in this regard. It is a pseudo-taboo, they say, that is repeatedly broken so that it can be erected again. [2] Laurel Cohen-Pfister, ‘Rape, War, and Outrage: Changing Perceptions on German Victimhood in the Period of Post-Unification’, in: Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Weinröder-Skinner (eds.), Victims and Perpetrators: 1933–1945, (Re)Presenting the Past in Post-Unification Culture (Berlin, New York 2006), pp. 316–36, here p. 318. And there are those who doubt the credibility of the victims, as the recent discussion of the diary by ‘Anonymous’ entitled A Woman in Berlin has shown. [3] Jens Bisky, ‘Wenn Jungen Weltgeschichte spielen, haben Mädchen stumme Rollen: Wer war die Anonyma in Berlin? Frauen, Fakten und Fiktionen – Anmerkungen zu einem grossen Bucherfolg dieses Sommers’ in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , 24 September 2003, p. 16.

But for me the main reason for addressing this fundamental mistrust is that a considerable number of those affected have never been recognized as victims. According to my calculations, at least 860,000 women (and a good number of men) were raped after the war. At least 190,000 of them, perhaps even more, were assaulted by US soldiers, others by British, Belgian or French. Nothing has ever been said about these victims. Just as the misdeeds of ‘big brother’ were swept under the carpet in East Germany, West German society also kept silent about the attacks by its democratic liberators. The women raped by Russian soldiers were at least afforded some recognition, even if it was manipulated for ideological ends, being used to point a finger in the East–West conflict. The women violated by GIs, British and French soldiers, by contrast, were, if anything, punished with contempt. Under the Sword of Damocles of the public condemnation of ‘fraternizing women’ – i.e. women who allegedly prostituted themselves to the ‘enemy’ and thus stabbed their own nation in the back – it was practically impossible for the victims of Western sexual aggression to have their stories told. The same applied to the women in the Soviet occupied zone and East Germany. In those cases, too, the experience of violence, if mentioned at all, was put down to their own character weakness.

There have been only two books to date that have reached a wider audience: the diary by ‘Anonymous’ mentioned earlier, which was made into a film in 2008, and the first study by the feminist and film-maker Helke Sander in 1992. Both projects had the same setting – Berlin – and the same perpetrators – members of the Red Army. However worthy these two studies were, they reinforced the belief of most Germans that the wartime sexual violence was a problem of the Soviet soldiers, whereas the other Allies had rather to be protected from lovelorn German women. Thus Sander and ‘Anonymous’, and also the journalist Erich Kuby with his series ‘The Russians in Berlin’, which appeared in the German news magazine Der Spiegel in the 1960s, helped confirm the stereotype. As a consequence, the way people recall the mass rape at the end of the Second World War has become a right–left question: on the one hand, the revisionists and right-wing functionaries representing the German refugees from Eastern Europe, for whom the suffering of women was part of the dream of a Greater Germany, and, on the other hand, the left-wingers, who wanted to defend the reputation of the Soviet ‘liberators’ by playing down the rape by the Soviet army. This remains the greatest prejudice in dealing with this subject today.

But ignoring the crimes does not make them go away. There are still women (and possibly men as well) living in old people’s and nursing homes who remain haunted by their painful memories. They only need to hear a word in English or to be washed roughly by their carers for the memory to return. For that reason, Martina Böhmer, a specialist in geriatric care and trauma therapist, has been touring Germany for years in an attempt to raise the awareness of the staff of those institutions that they might be dealing in their daily work with victims of traumatizing wartime sexual violence. [4] Martina Böhmer, Erfahrungen sexualisierter Gewalt in der Lebensgeschichte alter Frauen: Ansätze für eine frauenorientierte Altenarbeit (Frankfurt 2011).