Russian

An “Ordinary Story” of the Second World War: Discourses of Sexual Violence Against Women in Occupied Territories

The main purpose of this article is to analyze gaps in the study of sexual violence during the Second World War and to identify possible directions for further research. The article discusses several key themes: the role of the oppositions between “civilization” and “barbarism,” and between “East” and “West,” in discourse about sexual violence during and after the war; the reasons for silence about sexual violence on the Eastern Front in Germany; and the tabooing of the subject in Russian historiography. Although remembrance of the Second World War is governed by the slogan “no one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten,” the article shows that this memory is highly selective and in practice consigns to “eternal oblivion” events that do not fit the interpretations formed on both sides of the front after the war. Russian historiography is not free from dominant social judgments: the pathos of memory of the Great Patriotic War pushes women’s experience to the margins, while German memory of the war is burdened by memories of the suffering of Germans under occupation, so sexual violence adds emotional force to the image of the German people as victims.

When war is being discussed, violence tends to be taken for granted; sexual violence in occupied territories is therefore treated as an inevitable consequence of military invasion (Gestrich 1996). Discussion consequently shifts noticeably toward social policy — helping victims of violence and overcoming traumatic experience. Against the unprecedented scale of violence during the Second World War and a degree of brutality that exceeded human imagination (Gleichmann, Kühne 2004), sexual violence remained in the sphere of the private in public discourse and only in recent decades has become a subject of active attention by historians and psychologists in Western Europe, often at the center of major media scandals (Dowling 2008).

In German collective memory of the war, descriptions of mass rape have a special status precisely because the victims are German women. Oral-history research has shown that in German villages and small settlements, even sixty years after the war, residents could almost name one by one the local women who had suffered at the hands of occupying troops (Satjukow 2008: 338). In the final decades of the twentieth century the topic was actively instrumentalized by European mass media and discussed in Germany within a discourse of the “catastrophe of the final period of the war” and the victimhood of German civilians (Jureit, Schneider 2010).

On the one hand, victims of violence are understood as needing assistance and rehabilitation. On the other, emphasizing certain acts of violence while silencing others can, as shown below, become a mechanism for manipulating memory or a strategy for constructing a particular politics of memory. I propose to analyze how sexual violence becomes an object of memory politics in two different contexts: postwar Germany and the Soviet Union. To do this, the article examines the basic tropes through which wartime sexual violence has been studied in the two countries, demonstrates the selective character of memory about sexual violence, and shows how this memory is connected with postwar social policy in both societies.

Basic Tropes of Historiography

In European memory of the Second World War, Soviet soldiers became the principal perpetrators associated with sexual violence (Henke 1995: 200–201). German-language scholarship also contains individual studies of violence committed by American, French and British occupation troops (Gebhardt 2015; Ahrens 2011; Dörr 1998: 375–447). In the absence of reliable statistical data, however, the conviction that Soviet soldiers raped more women remains a commonplace of public discourse:

“Of course … soldiers of the other Allied armies advancing from the West were also guilty of sexual violence. But most specialists believe that the problem was most acute in eastern Germany. Historians estimate that in the final months of the war almost two million German women and girls were raped, many of them repeatedly” (Dowling 2008).

According to the American scholar Atina Grossmann, the figure of two million cited here “looks like an obvious exaggeration,” yet it continues to be used as an argument. In her assessment, 110,000 is a more realistic figure (Grossmann 1995: 110). Why do such numbers retain their almost magical influence in European public discourse and even, to some extent, scholarly discourse? In most cases they are not invoked for quantitative comparison but in order to emphasize the scale of what occurred. The key element in the discourse of sexual violence is its mass character. In postwar West German discourse, the mass rape attributed to Soviet soldiers was used to create an emotional counterweight to the mass crimes of the Nazis: both sides thereby become victims and, in the larger picture, no one is guilty (Münch 2009).

For a contemporary reader, mass rape is unmistakable barbarism: the violence is directed at “weak” women and young girls and is also bound up with a particularly painful form of humiliation. The subject therefore automatically evokes a comparison between a “civilized Western world” and “Eastern barbarism” (Baberowski 2012: 438). Even prominent historians of violence can fall into this trap. Jörg Baberowski, for example, explained mass rape in the Soviet zone by claiming that “Soviet men were trying to obtain at least some satisfaction for their inferiority complex before a civilized nation” (Baberowski 2012: 437). Although most German historians would hardly agree with this view (Koenen 2012: 81–88), the remarkable persistence of this interpretation points to the absence in European historical scholarship of an established and generally accepted analytical mechanism for the topic, as well as to a German need for emotional confirmation of “explanations” for the extraordinary brutality of the Second World War.

On the Russian side, wartime sexual violence remains stubbornly taboo. Interest in the subject appears mainly as a defensive reaction to reports in European media. The passage from Der Spiegel quoted above, for example, circulated repeatedly through Russian news sites and blogs. Yet this burst of activity was followed by no serious analysis, and even sexual crimes committed by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union are studied primarily by German scholars (Römer 2011: 331–352; Nolte 2009: 113–133; Eschebach, Mühlhäuser 2008).

When Russian historians do compare sexual violence on the Eastern Front with the better-studied history of sexual violence in occupied Germany, in the overwhelming majority of cases the purpose is not to seek an analytical tool, as in the work of Hans-Heinrich Nolte (Nolte 2009: 129), but to reproduce the trope of the Red Army as an army of liberation. The absence of research on sexual violence on the Eastern Front cannot be explained simply, or even chiefly, by a “narrow source base” (Nolte 2009: 129). As early as 1995 the American historian Norman Naimark effectively closed the question by asserting that “[t]he subject of sexual violence during the Second World War was taboo in the USSR; neither memoirs nor any other literature of the period discusses it” (Naimark 1995: 85).

This assertion is extremely widespread in historiography despite abundant opportunities to establish the opposite. Rape is one of the central topics in wartime diary entries by officers and soldiers (Budnitskii 2009: 629–682). It became taboo after the war, not during hostilities: both Soviet and German soldiers wrote in their front-line notes about sexual contacts with women in occupied territories. The source base of Regina Mühlhäuser’s study of sexual violence and intimate relations of German soldiers in the Soviet Union in 1941–1945, for example, consists of German soldiers’ diaries, letters from the front, eyewitness testimony and correspondence from various agencies, including Wehrmacht field courts (Mühlhäuser 2008). The lack of scholarship on sexual violence was therefore connected less with a shortage of sources than with a lack of willingness to study the subject.

“No One Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Forgotten”: The Selectivity of War Memory

There is nothing new about an unwillingness to remember or a desire to forget. Yet in public discourse about the Second World War, both Russia and Germany invoke the opposite appeal: “no one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.” Commemorative practice nevertheless shows that such memory is selective and consigns to permanent oblivion all events that do not fit the interpretations formed in the postwar years. Museum exhibitions marking the 65th anniversary of victory in Russia and the scandal surrounding the 1995–1997 German exhibition Crimes of the Wehrmacht are revealing examples.

In the Russian case, memory excludes everything that does not serve a heroic representation of the war. Even projects intended to show “another face of war” reproduce the legacy of Soviet ideology with Orwellian ease, without critically examining how the ideological image itself was constructed (Voronina 2011). The heroic ethos is so powerful that neither material about repression nor the front-line letters of Yefim Khozumov, who sent money to his family starving deep in the rear, disturbs it: “[w]hat we still have before us is not the tragedy of people who participated in the war, but an object of their pride and greatness” (Voronina 2011).

In the German case, society readily follows the old trope of “telling about the war while remaining silent about the crimes” (Rosenthal 1995: 651–663). Guilt is shifted onto special SS units, while the Wehrmacht — that is, the majority of the army — remains in collective memory unstained by crimes against civilians. It was precisely this myth of a “clean Wehrmacht” that the organizers of the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition tried to break, provoking resistance and indignation from a considerable part of society. The exhibition, opened in Hamburg in 1995, displayed photographs and documents showing German soldiers’ abuse of Soviet civilians. It caused a public scandal and was eventually closed, only to reopen two years later in Bremen. The persistence of the conflict has many sources that can be revealed by careful analysis of the instrumentalization or silencing of sexual violence. Historians too are not free from dominant social assessments, whether the Russian trope of an “army of liberators” or the German trope of a “clean Wehrmacht.”

For someone raised in the Soviet Union, the very existence of such a myth can seem unimaginable. Unlike the GDR, where Soviet troops were represented in public memory as liberators and the population of socialist Germany as antifascists, West German memory displaced Nazi crimes on the Eastern Front. The two most terrible and closely connected crimes of Nazism — the Holocaust and the military campaign on the Eastern Front — developed differently in the wartime memory of the FRG and the GDR. In West Germany, remembrance of Nazi crimes concentrated on the murder of the Jews; official GDR memory of the war formed around Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union (Morina 2008: 257–258).

Polemically minded organizers of the Wehrmacht-crimes exhibition, such as Hannes Heer, speak of a shift toward a new form of commemoration: the German people as victims of the Third Reich. His 2004 book was titled The Disappearance of the Perpetrators: The War of Annihilation Took Place, but Nobody Was There (Heer 2004). He was targeting a trend that had become dominant in scholarship in recent decades: the study of the suffering of German civilians during the war. Since the 1990s, an increasing number of German books have dealt with the so-called Bombenkrieg, the destruction of German cities at the end of the war, as well as looting by occupation troops and the expulsion of German civilians from the Baltic region and territories that are now part of Poland. Contemporary German memory of the war is heavily laden with memories of Germans’ suffering during occupation and the postwar years. Sexual violence adds powerful emotional force to the image of the German people as victims.

Only in the 1980s did the Federal Republic begin to speak openly of a Vernichtungskrieg, a “war of annihilation,” the German term for the Nazi eastern campaign. Wolfram Wette’s 1987 article in Die Zeit, “Conquer, Destroy, Eradicate. The Burden of 1941. The Campaign Against the Soviet Union Was a War of Plunder and Annihilation from the Beginning,” opened the subject to debate in the German press (Wette 1987: 49–51). Conferences and studies of Nazi crimes on the Eastern Front followed, helping establish the term Vernichtungskrieg firmly in German historiography (Jahn, Rürup 1991).

Sexual violence played a special role in this process and, as Elizabeth Heineman has shown, was used to emphasize a distinction from the Soviet Union (Heineman 1996: 354–394). Mass rape was said to reveal a mentality that appeared wild and alien to Europeans. Official Cold War discourse attributed to Soviet troops an “Asian” mentality that reduced women to the status of a “deserved prize for the victor.” Because Soviet forces included men from Asian republics, the myth appeared even more convincing to Germans. Even in contemporary German works, authors representing the Soviet soldier — most likely unconsciously — tend to select images not of blue-eyed blond men but of dark-haired men with narrow eyes and broad cheekbones. The first photograph opening a chapter on the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the former GDR, for example, presents the German reader with an image of the Other: a dark-haired soldier in an ushanka with narrow eyes and broad cheekbones (Satjukow 2008: 9). In Cold War memory, the rape of German women by Soviet soldiers in 1945 was represented as an “Asian” violation of European norms, while the retreat of German troops was stylized as an “Asian” assault on the traditions and values of Western civilization. Raped women thereby functioned as a potent metaphor for the oppression of the German people as a whole (Heineman 1996).

According to Christina Morina, memories of crimes on the Eastern Front remained excluded from official memory in West Germany for many years (Morina 2008: 258). During the Cold War the Soviet Union represented the principal threat to the West — Communism. A civilizing, or colonial, discourse was also activated: civilized Western society struggling against dangerous barbarians. This made it possible for the myth of a “clean” Wehrmacht to become established.

Within the heroic discourse of the Red Army as liberator, sexual violence had no useful place. This may have been connected with the tense Soviet attitude toward any public discussion of sexuality and with the active instrumentalization of the woman primarily as mother. Wartime posters and appeals show that the Soviet Union, much more than, for example, during the war against Napoleon (“The Fatherland Is in Danger”), instrumentalized the image of the Motherland as mother (“The Motherland Calls”), whereas the German word for homeland is above all Vaterland — literally the “land of the father.”

Soviet war memory “ignored women’s experience.” As Olga Nikonova writes, the multi-million-strong army of women who took part in the war “dissolved in official memorial culture,” together with their distinctive everyday experience, becoming “invisible soldiers of the Great War”: “the pathos and monumentalism of the myth of the Great Patriotic War still avoid the female gaze and alternative models for interpreting wartime experience” (Nikonova 2005: 289). Civilian suffering could add no pathos to this myth. Even stories of celebrated martyrs such as Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya were represented without concentrating attention on bodily suffering or sexual connotations. The famous photograph of Kosmodemyanskaya’s mutilated body with a breast cut off, though included in a photographic album about the Great Patriotic War, was little known in the USSR and would have been unthinkable on displays of the Pioneer organization named after her.

Silencing Sexual Violence and the Return to Patriarchal Order

Where, then, does the boundary of silence about sexual violence lie? Despite the painful nature and difficulty of studying sexual violence during the Second World War, monographic research on the subject began appearing in Germany as early as the 1970s (Brownmiller 1976). The Spiegel article cited at the beginning of this paper addressed the subject in connection with the 2008 release of the Polish-German film Anonyma — A Woman in Berlin. The memoir on which the film was based had been published in English in 1954 and in German in 1959 (Eine Frau in Berlin 1959), but at the time found little readership. After the author’s death in 2001 it was republished and became a bestseller. This indicates a change in European social attitudes and the emergence of new points of commemoration in relation to the war.

Regina Mühlhäuser, a scholar of sexual violence on the Eastern Front, notes a general tendency in German mass media: “[i]n contrast to the silencing of the Wehrmacht’s sexual crimes, which remain very poorly researched to this day, rapes committed by Soviet soldiers are a constant subject of press scandals” (Mühlhäuser 2008). She traces the growth of this tendency from Barbara Johr and Helke Sander’s film BeFreier und Befreite (1992), followed by the 2003 republication of Anonyma — A Woman in Berlin and the two-part ZDF television film Die Flucht (2007). The makers of these projects explain their heightened attention to sexual violence against Germany’s population as an effort to break a taboo and finally speak openly. But, as Columbia University professor Atina Grossmann points out:

“Rape in this context is not simply rape; it is embedded in a particular historical context. Germany in 1945 is not Bosnia in the 1990s, nor the streets of contemporary New York, nor someone’s marital bed” (Grossmann 1995: 112).

It is therefore dangerous to describe the event solely from the victim’s perspective, for whom it forms part of a personal tragedy; the broader historical context must also be considered.

In Germany, the subject of rape was ideologically charged from the beginning of public discussion. It was not silenced either during the occupation itself or after the war. As Grossmann shows in detail, during the first months of occupation German women spoke freely about rape not only in diaries and memoirs but openly among themselves, for example while standing in line for water (Grossmann 1995). Before Soviet troops even entered Berlin, Nazi propaganda had already warned them of impending violence. Propaganda represented Soviet forces as merciless wild hordes of Genghis Khan who would destroy everything in their path. The image of the wild “Mongol,” omnipresent on propaganda posters, was used by the Nazi authorities as a specter to keep the population fighting even when the war was obviously lost (Henke 1995: 87).

Grossmann writes that even if the German population had not been informed in detail about crimes on the Eastern Front, it suspected and knew from rumor that the behavior of Wehrmacht and SS troops in the Soviet Union had crossed the bounds of previously familiar wartime brutality, and therefore expected revenge (Grossmann 1995: 113). Nazi propaganda actively used Ilya Ehrenburg’s calls for revenge or the article “Kill the German,” published in Pravda on 14 April 1945, to show German civilians the horrors supposedly awaiting them under Soviet occupation. In memoir literature, particularly diaries written during the events themselves, Soviet officers often described how deserted and frightened they found Germany, as well as acts of revenge by Soviet troops against German civilians (Kopelev 2004). Prepared in advance by Nazi propaganda, German civilians who then witnessed looting or violence became even more convinced that the “Asian hordes” had arrived.

From the outset, sexual violence in Germany was recognized as a social and medical problem. Rape victims received medical treatment and the opportunity to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Paragraph 218 of the Nazi criminal code, which prohibited abortion, was in practice ignored from the beginning of the occupation and was officially suspended in the Soviet sector (Ericsson, Simonson 2005: 174). Gradually the German population learned to live alongside occupation troops and negotiate with them.

Sexual relations between soldiers or officers and German women took different forms: direct violence, cohabitation for pragmatic reasons, and romantic attachments. Vladimir Gelfand describes courting a German girl in his diary:

“The girl’s mother was pleased with me. Of course she was! On the altar of trust and goodwill from her relatives I had laid candy and butter, sausage and expensive German cigarettes. Half of these products alone would be enough to give one every basis and right to do anything one wished with the daughter in front of her mother, and the mother would not object. Food today is more valuable even than life, even the life of such a young and lovely sensual creature as the tender beauty Margot” (Gelfand, 26 October 1945).

Sexual violence was not silenced or tabooed until men returned from the front and the old patriarchal social order began to be restored (Budde 1997: 244). Working women were removed from their posts to make room for men. The experience of rape had not been shameful within the context of occupation but was later suppressed “for the sake of the socially recognized female role, which women themselves also strove in every way to fulfill” (Grossmann 1995: 118; Zipfel 1995: 460–474).

Sexual violence by German troops against Soviet civilians likewise was not hidden and was openly discussed immediately after liberation. At the Nuremberg Trial, testimony was presented from women who had witnessed rape. One statement in the trial materials reads:

“Sixteen-year-old L. I. Mechnikova was taken by soldiers, on the order of Officer Hummer, into the forest, where they raped her. Some time later other women, who had also been 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” (Der Prozess… 1984: 502).

Sexual violence was treated as part of the Nazis’ mass crimes in the Soviet Union and, as in Germany, became a “family problem” only when men returned from the war.

This mechanism is well shown in the film The Women’s Kingdom (1967). At the beginning of the film a German soldier attempts to rape a fifteen-year-old girl, Dunyasha. The women present discuss Nazi atrocities in neighboring villages and try to reassure themselves that they have been assigned a “good German.” One of them, Nastya Petrenko, throws herself to the German soldier “like a piece of meat” in place of the girl, who would otherwise “certainly hang herself afterward.” Although the episode becomes a tragedy for Nastya, in the “women’s kingdom” her personal “shame” does not become public shame. She is able to live with the experience until her beloved Kostya Lubentsov abandons her after learning what happened. Only then does the experience become “worse than death” for her, and she attempts suicide.

In the postwar period patriarchal society was rebuilt, and in this context sexual violence experienced by women in occupied territories became a problem for men. Women’s suffering functioned as a latent accusation against men who had failed to protect their homes: “you left us to the Germans as booty,” says one heroine of The Women’s Kingdom.

Because patriarchal value categories were actively restored after the war, with active participation by the state, sexual violence was displaced from official discourse in the Soviet Union. It appeared only briefly as a marginal topic during the Thaw, amid a rethinking of the suffering war inflicted on the “ordinary person.” The Women’s Kingdom belongs precisely to this period.

***

To conclude, I repeat that sexual violence has a special status in memory of the Second World War, and the study of its connotations and instrumentalization therefore requires delicacy. Sexual violence here is embedded in a particular historical context and cannot be studied apart from it. Despite many years of attempts to address this painful subject, researchers continue to return to it and even in 2015 find that public discourse remains covered in myths, while source analysis still reveals a blank spot (Gebhardt 2015: 12–13, 44).

Researchers are caught in a vicious circle. By constructing the narrative of this “ordinary story” from the victim’s perspective, an author inevitably gives it enormous emotional force and thereby loses academic balance. By studying the question only within a national discourse, the author either falls into one of the existing instrumentalizations of the topic or becomes absorbed in debunking myths, while remaining at the surface level of the discourses being analyzed.

Research on sexual violence is marked by selectivity in its sources, which either gives a particular coloring to memory politics or reflects that politics in German scholarly work. In contemporary Russia the Soviet tradition of silencing the topic in writings about the war continues, thereby sustaining an exclusively heroic version of memory politics. The most productive approach appears to be to study sexual violence on both sides of the front, on the basis of available official documentation and personal sources. Such work is most likely to succeed through international scholarly cooperation and recognition of the need to study the dark pages of a shared past.

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