V. S. Dubina

THE PAINFUL QUESTION OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR'S HISTORY: REMEMBERING SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN RUSSIA AND GERMANY

Vera Sergeevna Dubina, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor, Department of History and Theory of Culture, Russian State University for the Humanities

For the study of an event on the scale of the Second World War, the subject of sexual violence may appear marginal. Yet over the last decade it has become a subject of active discussion in the European media. Descriptions of horrific scenes of mass rape and of other suffering endured by German civilians during the occupation form part of a relatively new discourse of German victimhood. The Russian media, for their part, continue the old Soviet tradition of bashfully avoiding questions of sexual violence. The general tone of the Russian-language Internet, and of the extremely rare informational publications on the subject, can be characterized as a defensive psychological reaction ranging from bewilderment to extreme aggression. The danger inherent in such emotionally charged approaches is obvious to the international scholarly community.

Moving the Second World War's “site of memory” onto this “sore spot” contributes neither to mutual understanding among the countries that took part in the war nor to an increase in knowledge. A revealing example was the painful reaction on the Russian Internet to an excerpt from a translated article in the German magazine Der Spiegel, which spoke of the particular brutality of the occupying forces. It also asserted that “in the final months of the war almost two million German women and girls were raped, many of them repeatedly.”[1]

Der Spiegel raised the subject in connection with the 2008 release of the Polish-German film A Woman in Berlin, which tells the story of a young German woman who is raped repeatedly and decides to enter into a relationship with a Soviet officer in order to protect herself from sexual harassment by Soviet soldiers. In a modern world where people watch television more often than they read, such images can hit an unprepared viewer like wine hitting a teetotaler. Yet, despite all the painfulness and complexity of the subject of sexual violence during the Second World War, monographic studies of the issue had already begun to appear in the 1970s.[2]

The memoir by the woman on which the film was based was published in English in 1954 and in German in 1959.[3] At the time it caused no stir among the German public; indeed, it was received negatively. After the author's death in 2001, however, the memoir was republished and suddenly became a bestseller. This points to a change in the mood of European society and to the emergence of new points of “commemoration”[4] in relation to the Second World War.

One of the leading scholars of sexual violence on the Eastern Front, the German historian Regina Mühlhäuser, characterizes the general tendency in the German mass media as follows:

“In contrast to the silence surrounding sexual crimes committed by the Wehrmacht, which remain very poorly studied to this day, rapes committed by Soviet soldiers repeatedly become the subject of media scandals. The growth of this tendency can be traced from Helke Sander and Barbara Johr's film BeFreier und Befreite [Liberators Take Liberties] (1992), through the 2003 republication of A Woman in Berlin, to the two-part ZDF television film Die Flucht [The Flight] (2007).”[5]

The makers of such media projects say that their chief aim is to break a taboo and finally speak openly about sexual violence against the German population. Der Spiegel cited the experience of German psychiatrist Philipp Kuwert and the work of physician Monika Hauser, who helped women and girls subjected to sexual violence in conflict zones. Both expressed the hope that women who watched A Woman in Berlin would remember their repressed experiences of wartime sexual violence and seek help.[6] In an interview with Der Spiegel, Philipp Kuwert emphasized in particular:

“From a scientific point of view it is immaterial whether we are speaking about a Russian soldier in Germany or a German soldier in the USSR. We maintain contact with researchers doing the same work in Eastern Europe, in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk and in St. Petersburg. We are therefore studying the question not only from a German point of view.”[7]

Despite the doctors' good intentions, their public statements provided a “scientific basis” for a new narrative of memory of the Second World War in which the rape of German women occupies a key place. For a psychiatrist it may make no difference whether the subject is Russian soldiers in Germany, German soldiers in the USSR, or Serbs in Bosnia who raped Muslim women on a mass scale; but it matters greatly to the memory of people today. As Columbia University professor Atina Grossmann has observed, rape here is embedded in a specific historical context.[8] In her view, therefore, it is inappropriate to describe the event solely from the point of view of the victim, for whom it forms part only of her personal tragedy. Regina Mühlhäuser distinguishes three positions in the perception of the rape of German women during the war:

1) a revisionist position, according to which the mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers confirms the inevitability of Germany's war against the “uncivilized” Soviet Union;

2) a moderate position, which does not glorify Germany's war but opens a “back door” to perceiving the country as a passive and innocent victim, by analogy with the raped woman;

3) a position of naive feminism, according to which a woman can always, and especially in wartime, become the victim of rape by a man. According to Mühlhäuser, this position forgets that many women were themselves members of Nazi organizations, participated in their crimes, and therefore cannot simply be regarded as “passive” victims.[9]

For historians the danger of recasting the memory of the Second World War through the emotionally charged image of rape is obvious. Hans Heer, for example, gave his 2004 book the characteristic title Vom Verschwinden der Täter: Der Vernichtungskrieg fand statt, aber keiner war dabei — “The Disappearance of the Perpetrators: The War of Annihilation Took Place, but Nobody Was There.”[10] Without entering into all of the controversies surrounding Heer's work,[11] what matters here is that the provocative title takes aim at the dominant trend of focusing on the suffering of German civilians during the war.

In recent decades an increasing number of books and broadcasts in Germany have been devoted to the so-called Bombenkrieg, the bombing and destruction of German cities at the end of the war. Their authors also readily discuss looting by occupation troops, the expulsion of German civilians from the Baltic region and the territory of present-day Poland, and German suffering in the postwar years.[12]

In an attempt to create a discourse about the Second World War within which “painful subjects” could be discussed without inflaming passions, German historians turned to the careful study of violence committed by German troops in occupied territories. Hans-Heinrich Nolte, for example, proposes comparing Russian and German experiences.[13] The Russian historian Gennadii Bordiugov supports the same approach, although for different reasons.[14] In any case, scholarly study of sexual violence during the Second World War must include active research on both sides of the front.

In Russian society the impulse toward such comparison has often been a wounded, defensive reaction: “They committed atrocities here too — look at the materials of the Nuremberg trials!” Nolte justifies comparison by the inadequacy of the source base. In 1999 he interviewed Soviet women who had survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and were living in the Dnipropetrovsk region; the women were unwilling to answer his questions. For a long time, the absence of research on sexual violence on the Eastern Front was explained by the claim that the subject simply could not be studied.[15]

Yet sexual relations were one of the central themes in wartime diaries written at the front by both Soviet and German officers and soldiers,[16] and some of these memoirs had long since been published. Regina Mühlhäuser's recent monograph Eroberungen. Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1945 draws on soldiers' front-line notes, letters from the front, eyewitness testimony, and correspondence from various institutions, including Wehrmacht field courts.[17]

Mühlhäuser considers an open discussion of sexual violence committed by members of the Wehrmacht, SS, and police in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe absolutely necessary. Several recent studies have begun to indicate directions for further analysis.[18] In March 2010 Der Spiegel published excerpts from Mühlhäuser's book and a review in which the figure of two million raped German women was described as a clear exaggeration.[19] The exact number of Russian women who were victims of rape is no more possible to establish than the number of victims during the final phase of the war in East Prussia. In any event, such figures by themselves prove nothing.

The central aim of Mühlhäuser's book is to dismantle the myth of the “clean” Wehrmacht, supposedly unstained — unlike the SS — by shameful actions against civilians. The very existence of such a myth seems inconceivable to someone who grew up in the Soviet Union. I myself was deeply shocked when a German friend, a history student, expressed indignation that Russian partisans had “shot innocent young German men — Wehrmacht soldiers sent to war by their government — in the back.” She was not a right-wing extremist; rather, she judged the war through a memory of the past that had been shaped differently in Germany and the former Soviet Union, and differently again in West and East Germany. In West Germany, Nazi crimes on the Eastern Front were pushed out of wartime memory. Christina Morina writes:

“The two most terrible and closely interconnected crimes of Nazism — the Holocaust and the military campaign on the Eastern Front — developed differently in the memory cultures of the Federal Republic and the GDR. Whereas in West Germany memory of Nazi crimes concentrated on the murder of the Jews, official wartime memory in the GDR was formed around Germany's attack on the Soviet Union.”[20]

According to Morina, this can be attributed above all to the Cold War, in whose discourse the Soviet Union appeared as the principal threat to the West: the threat of communism. A civilizing, colonial discourse was added to this — a “struggle of civilized Western society against dangerous barbarians.” All of this made possible the establishment of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, “carefully cultivated by the middle class in West Germany.”[21]

Only in the 1980s did West Germany begin openly to speak of the Vernichtungskrieg, the “war of annihilation.” In 1987 Die Zeit published Wolfram Wette's article with the revealingly long title “Conquer, Destroy, Exterminate. The Repressed Burden of 1941. The Campaign in Russia Was a War of Plunder and Annihilation from the Beginning.”[22] A number of conferences and studies of Nazi crimes on the Eastern Front followed. The term Vernichtungskrieg eventually became firmly established in German historiography of Nazism.[23]

As Elizabeth Heineman has shown, the subject of sexual violence was used in Cold War discourse to emphasize the separation of the West from the Soviet Union.[24] In this discourse, mass rape allegedly testified to an “Asian” mentality alien to Europeans, reducing women to the role of the victor's “deserved prize.” Because Soviet forces included soldiers from Asian peoples, the myth that they violated European norms of behavior seemed persuasive to many Germans. Raped women functioned in this discourse as an effective metaphor for the suffering of the entire German people.[25]

In the pursuit of sensation, press discussions of sexual violence during the Second World War can make the subject appear to have surfaced only now; research literature easily disproves this impression. Immediately after the war the subject was not silenced at all. As Atina Grossmann shows, during the first months of the Soviet occupation German women discussed it not only in diaries and memoirs but openly, for example while standing in queues for water, devising strategies that might help them avoid violence. Even before Soviet troops entered Berlin, Nazi propaganda had prepared them to expect wild hordes of Genghis Khan destroying everything in their path. The Nazis used this image as a bogeyman to compel the population to continue fighting even after the war was clearly lost.[26]

Calls attributed to Ilya Ehrenburg such as “Kill the German,” or articles in Pravda of 14 April 1945, seemed to confirm those expectations. It is not difficult to imagine how such appeals affected Soviet soldiers who had seen burned villages and murdered or tortured compatriots and relatives throughout the war.

Memoir literature records how deserted and frightened Germany appeared to Soviet officers.[27] German civilians, confronted with looting and violence, became even more convinced of the myth of the “Asian hordes.” Yet the sight of suffering German women and children, together with orders from the center, gradually cooled the Soviet troops' desire for revenge. “Germany's grief, deserved grief, passed before my eyes, and I swore not to harm the wife or child of my enemy,” David Samoilov wrote in his wartime diary.[28]

Gradually, German civilians learned to adapt to the occupation forces and negotiate with them. Sexual relations between Soviet soldiers or officers and German women took various forms: direct violence, cohabitation for pragmatic reasons, and romantic attachments. Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand wrote in his diary about courting a German girl by feeding her; in his words, “even half of these provisions would be enough to give one the fullest basis and right to do whatever one wished with the daughter in front of the mother, and she would say nothing against it.”[29] According to Atina Grossmann, in the first months of occupation sexual violence was regarded by German civilians as one of the unavoidable consequences of war. The experience of rape during occupation was not initially perceived as shameful; it became so when men returned from the front.[30]

Sexual violence by German troops against Soviet civilians was likewise not concealed, and during the first period after liberation it was openly discussed. The records of the Nuremberg trials preserve testimony by women who witnessed rapes. One such testimony states:

“Sixteen-year-old L. I. Mechnikova was taken into the forest by soldiers on the orders of Officer Hummer, where they raped her. Some time later other women, who were also taken into the forest, saw boards nailed to a tree with Mechnikova's body fastened to them. In front of the women, the Germans cut off her breast.”[31]

Sexual violence was treated as one element of the Nazis' mass crimes on Soviet territory. It began to be silenced, as in Germany, only after men returned from the war. This mechanism is well illustrated by the Soviet film A Woman's Kingdom (Babye tsarstvo, 1967). At the beginning of the film a German soldier attempts to rape Dunyasha, a girl of about fifteen. One of the women, Nastya Petrenko, throws herself “like a piece of meat” to the German soldier in order to save the girl, who otherwise, the women say, would “certainly hang herself.” In the “women's kingdom,” Nastya's act does not bring shame upon her. But Kostya Lubentsov, who loves her and returns from the front, abandons her when he learns of her relationship with a German. Only then does what she endured become “worse than death” for Nastya, and she attempts suicide.

In the postwar Soviet Union a patriarchal society was re-established, and the sexual violence women had endured became a problem for men as well. Women's suffering functioned as an implicit accusation against men who had failed to protect their homes. “You left us to the Germans as booty,” one heroine of A Woman's Kingdom says. As a result, sexual violence was pushed out of official Soviet discourse for a long time. It resurfaced only briefly during the Thaw and again during perestroika, amid a broader reconsideration of the suffering that war brings to the “ordinary person.”

In Germany during the 1950s rape likewise entered a period of taboo. But with the development of feminist research in the 1960s and 1970s, the German woman as victim of war moved to the center of attention, a status that was ultimately extended to the nation as a whole.[32]

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the subject became increasingly prominent in the German media, helping to establish the discourse of “the German people as victims of the Third Reich.” The crimes of the Wehrmacht on Soviet territory therefore require study not merely as a counterweight to campaigns in the European media but also in order to remove, or at least substantially reduce, their ideological burden. Such work is most likely to succeed through international scholarly cooperation in illuminating the dark pages of a shared past.

Notes

1. See: “Sexual Violence during the Second World War” (Der Spiegel). On the study in Germany of psychological trauma caused by rapes sixty years earlier: http://www.inosmi.ru/panorama/20081024/244888.html (accessed 5 January 2011).
2. Brownmiller, S. Against Our Will: Man, Woman and Rape. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1976.
3. Eine Frau in Berlin. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen. Geneva; Frankfurt: Kossodo, 1959.
4. “Commemoration is defined as a process that mobilizes diverse discourses and practices in the representation of an event ... and serves as an expression of group solidarity.” See: Pierre Nora, Mona Ozouf, Gérard de Puymège, and Michel Winock, France — Memory, Russian translation by D. Khapaeva. St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University, 1999, p. 95.
5. Mühlhäuser, R. “Konkurrierende Erzählungen zu sexueller Gewalt im Zweiten Weltkrieg, in DDR, Bundesrepublik und nach 1989,” Phase 2, http://phase2.nadir.org/rechts.php?artikel=576&print (accessed 5 January 2011).
6. “Studie zu sexualisierter Kriegsgewalt des 2. Weltkrieges startet an Universität Greifswald,” press release, http://idw-online.de/pages/de/news284259 (accessed 5 January 2011).
7. See “Sexual Violence during the Second World War.”
8. Grossmann, A. “Eine Frage des Schweigens? Die Vergewaltigung deutsche Frauen durch Besatzungssoldaten,” Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen, 1995, no. 24, issue 2, p. 112. The original of this widely discussed scholarly article: Grossmann, A. “A Question of Silence. The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,” October, no. 72, 1995, pp. 42–63.
9. See Mühlhäuser, R. “Konkurrierende Erzählungen.”
10. Heer, H. Vom Verschwinden der Täter: Der Vernichtungskrieg fand statt, aber keiner war dabei. Berlin, 2004; Morina, C. “Vernichtungskrieg, Kalter Krieg und politisches Gedächtnis: Zum Umgang mit dem Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion im geteilten Deutschland,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 34, no. 2 (Apr.–Jun. 2008), pp. 252–291.
11. Dirk, R.; Heer, H. Review/discussion of Vom Verschwinden der Täter, H-Soz-u-Kult, 1 June 2004, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen... (accessed 5 January 2011).
12. See, for example, Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. B. Niven. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
13. Nolte, H.-H. “Vergewaltigungen durch Deutsche im Russlandfeldzug,” Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte, 2009, no. 1, pp. 113–133, quotation on p. 129.
14. “The Wehrmacht and the Red Army against Civilians,” Ekho Moskvy radio, http://www.echo.msk.ru/programs/victory/572480-echo/ (accessed 5 January 2011).
15. See, for example, Naimark, N. The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949. Cambridge, 1995, p. 85.
16. Oleg Budnitskii analyzes this subject using Soviet officers' diaries. See Budnitskii, O. “The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2009, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 629–682.
17. Mühlhäuser, R. Eroberungen. Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1945. Hamburg, 2010.
18. Beck, B. Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt. Sexualverbrechen vor deutschen Militärgerichten 1939–1945; and “Handlungsräume. Sexuelle Gewalt durch Wehrmacht und SS in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion 1941–1945,” in Regina Mühlhäuser and Insa Eschebach (eds.), Krieg und Geschlecht. Sexuelle Gewalt im Krieg und Sex-Zwangsarbeit in NS-Konzentrationslagern. Berlin: Metropol, 2008, pp. 167–185.
19. Friedmann, J. “Schlagkraft statt Sühne. Eine neue Studie untersucht die sexuellen Übergriffe deutscher Soldaten während des Krieges gegen die Sowjetunion und zerstört die Legende von der sauberen Wehrmacht,” Der Spiegel, 22 March 2010, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-69628953.html (accessed 5 January 2011).
20. Morina, C., “Vernichtungskrieg,” pp. 257–258.
21. Ibid., p. 264.
22. Wette, W. “Erobern, zerstören, auslöschen. Die verdrängte Last von 1941. Der Russlandfeldzug war ein Raub- und Vernichtungskrieg von Anfang an,” Die Zeit, 20 November 1987, pp. 49–51.
23. Peter, J. P.; Rürup, R. (eds.), Erobern und Vernichten. Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, 1941–1945. Essays. Berlin: Argon, 1991.
24. Heineman, E. “The Hour of Women. Memories of Germany's Crisis Years and West German Identity,” American Historical Review, 1996, no. 1, pp. 354–394.
25. Ibid.
26. Grossmann, A. “Eine Frage des Schweigens?,” p. 112.
27. See, for example: Gelfand, V. N. Diaries 1941–1946, Military Literature, http://militera.lib.ru/db/gelfand_vn05.html (accessed 5 January 2011); Kopelev, L. To Be Preserved Forever. Moscow: TERRA–Book Club, 2004, vols. 1–2.
28. Samoilov, D. Daily Notes, vol. 1, 1934–1964. Moscow: Vremya, 2002, pp. 209–210.
29. Gelfand, V. N. Diaries 1941–1946, entry for 26 October 1945.
30. Grossmann, A. “Eine Frage des Schweigens?,” p. 118.
31. Der Prozess gegen die Hauptverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, 14.11.1945–01.10.1946. Munich; Zurich, 1984, vol. 7, p. 502 ff.
32. Grossmann, A. “Eine Frage des Schweigens?,” p. 118.

Published by the Publishing Center of the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, 2011. © Russian State University for the Humanities, 2011. © Newsland.