I read several autobiographies from German soldiers who fought on the Eastern Front. Obviously these will be biased towards the German perspective, but one theme that is brought up is that the average German soldier behaved well towards women in Eastern Europe. Rape was virtually a non-occurrence. Again, these are autobiographies from German soldiers and maybe not fully truthful. One of these autobiographies mentioned that German troops would exchange food for sex. Due to the incredibly poor food situation in some places, some Soviet women provided sexual services in exchange for food, but I don't believe this constitutes as rape.
I understand the Germans set up military brothels, where some Eastern European girls were kidnapped and forced to work at these brothels, which I believe constitutes rape.
However I'm more interested in sexual violence on the field, as opposed to a brothel setting. Let's say a squad of German soldiers occupied a village in some part of the Soviet Union, how likely would a woman in that village be raped by a German soldier?
And if a German soldier was caught raping a woman in this manner, what would usually happen? Would a blind eye be turned by his superiors? Or would the soldier go through a court martial and receive punishments?
Content Warning: Sexual violence and rape
Part 1
but one theme that is brought up is that the average German soldier behaved well towards women in Eastern Europe. Rape was virtually a non-occurrence.
That was most certainly not the case. As one historian wrote "Rape needed no pretext for the Germans on the Eastern Front" and the amount of children born from these incidents of sexual violence as well as the amount of Soviet persecutions tell a story of rape as a mass phenomenon – one that German military and civlian courts in the occupied territories routinely refused to persecute.
As a preface on the difficulty of the topic:
As every criminologist and sociologist dealing with the matter will tell you, rape is one of the most under reported crimes there are for a variety of reasons, chief among them social stigmatization of the victim and social discourse on sexual violence. Recent studies estimate that only 4-5% of all occurring rapes are reported in the US. For historical societies we are forced to assume the same or an even worse number in terms of reports, more likely worse given historical discourse in the 1940s on the issue. So, reviewing the number of historically reported instances of rape will only ever represent a tiny fraction of all rapes that occurred.
Rape is defined broadly as sexual intercourse without consent of one party. That seems pretty straightforward at first, but the question of consent always involves the context of the relationship between the parties involved. Various lawmakers around the world have introduced laws akin to a statutory rape statute that protects those who can not legally give consent but also offers particular protection to persons in a relationship of dependency because they assume a higher thread of potential coercion in such relationships.
Now, when we review the historical context of a liberating and occupying army coming to a territory, this issue becomes a bit difficult in that the relationship between two parties in such a situation is almost never equal. On the one hand you have an army of men with weapons who replace law and order in whatever territory someone lives in. On the other hand you have a population that is in their interaction with the former group very much at the personal mercy of whatever armed member of an occupying army they encounter. Such a relationship is by its very definition unequal and thus the issue of consent – which assumes adults of sound mind and of basically equal relationship to make an informed decision about whether they want to engage in intercourse – becomes muddled.
Consider, a women in a country that not only lost a lot if its men in a war but where public order has broken down and completely or partially replaced by an armed occupation is talked into intercourse by a member of the occupying army based on the impression he conveys to her that she needs a protector from other soldiers. Can we in such a relationship where one party holds the potential power over life and death of the other party, whether they use it consciously or subconsciously, assume that consent can even exist? Can this hypothetical woman even make a decision that is not based on implicit or explicit coercion by her hypothetical partner?
I have previously mentioned the social stigma attached to sexual violence, which is exacerbated by the fact that within this context, the Allied armies came as liberators from Nazism and especially in the case of German women, they were viewed by occupiers and historians alike as part of a group of perpetrators at worst. This form of bias is displayed in that there were very early attempts to establish facts about the sexual violence excreted by the Red Army but little done in regards to the Western Allies. With the Red Army it fitted the narrative and the rate of incidences of sexual violence committed by them was much higher than with Western Allies. The convergence of these two factors leads to the current situation where we have a clearer (although not entirely clear for reasons stated above picture) of the sexual violence committed by members of the Red Army in WWII than in the case of other armies.
In a similar vein, historians who would have had the chance to establish a clearer picture in general through techniques such as interviews with victims did not do so because the issue of sexual violence and the stigma attached to it lead to it being ignored for a very long time by many a historian. It was and in part remains a topic inconvenient on some level in both academia and history politics.
Researching sexual violence on the Eastern Front, Pascale R. Bos in her article "Feminists Interpreting the Politics of Wartime Rape: Berlin, 1945"; Yugoslavia, 1992–1993 Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2006, vol. 31, no. 4, p.996-1025 cites a German survey from 1942 in which the Wehrmacht estimates that 750,000 babies had already been born from contact between German soldiers and Russian women. This is a conservative estimate and covers only the time frame up to 1942. While not all of these might have come from rape it shows how endemic the problem was. Together with Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen and her PhD thesis Victims, Heroes, Survivors. Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War II, University of Minnesota 2004, the estimation of war time rapes and other incidents of sexual violence inflicted by the Germans in the Soviet Union is somewhere between 2 and 3 million. This lead to historian Nina Tumarkin writing in her book The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, that the Germans in the east “tortured and murdered civilians at the slightest pretext. As for rape–there was no need for any pretext.”
Here, a word about the brothels: not only does the kidnapping and forced prostitution of women certainly constitue rape, these brothels were also part of a system that can only be described as systematic sexual slavery. Frequently ignored by many a historian, Gertjejanssen dedicates a whole chapter of her thesis to the topic of German military brothels and the thousands of victims of their underlying system of state- and military driven sexual slavery. She points out that the Wehrmacht even as far as establishing mobile brothels touring the front lines and averaging 32 visitors between 4pm and 9pm on a normal day. Gertjejanssen estimates that "During the war Germany controlled at least 569 military brothels throughout the entire Reich in which I believe at least 50,000 women worked." The staff of these brothels was recruited in a variety of ways. Gertjejanssen:
To begin, they recruited women and girls who were already working as prostitutes and forced them to work on Nazi terms. Some females auditioned or applied to work as a prostitute, believing this could save their own or their family's life. Other women and girls were forced, either by gunpoint or by being given the choice of death or work as a prostitute. New women and girls were constantly recruited. Women and girls forced to serve military men sexually did not always live that long due to illness, pregnancy, suicide, and murder. (...) The Germans established an extensive system of sexual slavery in which women and girls were forced to be sexual slaves for their military machine. The women and girls, many of them from eastern Europe, were expected to perform with the constant threat of murder or concentration camps. When the Germans occupied a village or city they routinely assessed the local population, established ghettos for the Jews, and forcibly recruited able-bodied women and men for labor. In addition to digging trenches, doing agricultural work or being maids, women also were forced to be sexual slaves for the Germans. Very often these women were "young and pretty" whom the Germans picked from their well-organized and long lines of local civilians.
These assertions of Gertjejanssen are backed with a wealth of evidence, including regimental and divisional orders proving that institutionalized rape at gun point was part of an institutionalized occupational policy of the German Wehrmacht and state.