Read Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II Online
Authors: Keith Lowe
In Hungary and Austria the plight of women was worse still, and in some areas truly horrific. Again, the cultural differences between the two sides were considerable, but in this case Soviet antagonism was fuelled by the fact that the Hungarians and Austrians, unlike the Romanians, were still at war with the USSR when the Red Army arrived. Many women in the area around Csákvár, just west of Budapest, were raped so violently that their backs broke under the force of the men’s attacks. Alaine Polcz, a twenty-year-old Hungarian from Transylvania, received painful but thankfully impermanent spinal injuries in this way. She was raped repeatedly over a period of several weeks, and frequently lost count of the number of men who attacked her during the course of a night. ‘This had nothing to do with embraces or sex,’ she wrote later. ‘It had nothing to do with anything. It was simply – I just now realize, as I am writing, that the word is accurate: aggression. That is what it was.’ She was also consumed with the knowledge ‘that this was going on throughout the entire country’.
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But it was in Germany that the most widespread cases of rape occurred. In East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania tens of thousands of women were raped and then killed in an orgy of truly medieval violence. Marie Naumann, a young mother from Baerwalde in Pomerania, was raped and then hanged by a mob of soldiers in a hayloft along with her husband, while her children were strangled to death with ropes on the floor beneath her. She was cut down, still alive, by some Polish civilians, who asked her who had done this to her but when she told them it was the Russians they called her a liar and beat her. Unable to bear what had happened she tried to drown herself in a nearby creek, but was unable to complete the job. Soaking wet, she went to an acquaintance’s apartment where she came across another Russian officer who raped her again. Shortly after he left her, four more Soviet soldiers appeared and raped her ‘in an unnatural way’. When they had finished with her they kicked her into unconsciousness. She came to when another pair of soldiers entered the room, ‘but they left me alone as I was more dead than alive’.
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Thousands of similar stories have been gathered by German oral history projects, church archives and also the German government. Soviet sources also back up these claims. Memoirs by Russian officers such as Lev Kopelev and Alexander Solzhenitsyn describe scenes of widespread rape, as do several reports of Soviet excesses made by their secret police force, the NKVD, in 1945.
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The raping continued as the Red Army advanced through Silesia and Pomerania towards Berlin. In a huge number of cases the women were gang raped, often again and again on successive nights. Vasily Grossman interviewed a woman in Schwerin who told him she had ‘already been raped by ten men today’.
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In Berlin, Hannelore Thiele was raped by ‘Seven in a row. Like animals.’
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Another woman in Berlin was caught hiding behind a pile of coal in the cellar of her building: ‘Twenty-three soldiers one after the other,’ she said afterwards. ‘I had to be stitched up in hospital. I never want to have anything to do with any man again.‘
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Karl August Knorr, a German officer in East Prussia, claims to have saved a few dozen women from a villa where ‘on average they had been raped 60 to 70 times a day’.
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And the list goes on.
Accounts of rape in 1945 become truly sickening, as with accounts of other atrocities during the war, because they are so numerous. The stories documented in the Eastern Archives in Koblenz read with the same monotony as the descriptions of Jewish massacres during the Nuremberg trials – it is the endless repetition of horror that becomes most difficult to bear. In parts of central Europe rape was not a collection of isolated incidents, but a mass experience endured by the entire female population. In Vienna 87,000 women were reported by clinics and doctors to have been raped.
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In Berlin it was even worse, and about 110,000 women are thought to have been victims.
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In the east of the country, particularly in those areas near to Soviet barracks, the constant threat of attack continued until the end of 1948.
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In Germany as a whole almost 2 million German women are thought to have been raped in the aftermath of the war.
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Figures for Hungary are harder to find. While the rape of German and Austrian women was meticulously documented after the war, in Hungary the phenomenon was never admitted by the postwar Communist administration. It was not until after 1989 that proper studies could be made, by which time much of the information was difficult to come by. Rough estimates based on hospital records suggest that between 50,000 and 200,000 Hungarian women were raped by Soviet soldiers.
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The figures in western Europe, though much lower, are still significant. The United States Army, for example, stands accused of raping as many as 17,000 civilian women in North Africa and western Europe between 1942 and 1945.
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The consequences of sexual violence and exploitation after the war were huge. Despite the 2 million illegal abortions that were carried out each year in Germany, between 150,000 and 200,000 ‘foreign babies’ were born to German women, some of whom were the result of rape. Many of these children were obliged to suffer the resentment of their mothers for the rest of their lives.
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A high percentage of women became infected with venereal disease – in some areas as many as 60 per cent. This was generally incurable, since the price of a single injection of antibiotics in Germany in August 1945 was two pounds of real coffee.
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Along with such physical problems came the emotional and psychological consequences – not only for those who had suffered directly, but for women as a whole. When so many had been reduced to items of war booty, the message that all women received was that they were never safe, and that a male-dominated world valued them for only one thing. Women in huge areas of Europe were therefore forced to live in a permanent state of anxiety.
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We must not forget that men were also affected by this mass phenomenon. Many men were forced to watch while their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters were raped. Those who tried to intervene were often shot, but in general Germany’s menfolk simply sat by, and tormented themselves ever afterwards for their impotence. Thus, in Hungary, Austria and Germany especially, the experience of mass rape was not only a violent and degrading experience for the women but an emasculating one for the men. Even those men who were away from home during the liberation were affected when they returned home to find their wives and sweethearts irreversibly transformed by their ordeal. Many were unable to cope with the change and left their wives, thus compounding the distress of their womenfolk. The fear of their husband’s response led many women to keep their experiences secret, and a huge number concealed the fact that they had contracted venereal disease, had had abortions, or had even given birth to ‘Russian babies’.
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As a consequence of the various stresses on marital relationships, divorce rates doubled in postwar Germany compared with before the war – as indeed they did across Europe.
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Finally, it is important to remember the effect that routine rape and exploitation of women had on the soldiers who indulged in this behaviour, especially since the majority of them received absolutely no punishment whatsoever for their actions. The fact that the incidence of rape was high for several years after the war suggests that it was not motivated solely by revenge as many people contend – instead we are confronted with the far more worrying suggestion that many soldiers committed rape merely because they could.
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Statements by soldiers at the time betray a belief that they had a right to sex, and would get it by force if necessary: ‘We liberated you, and you refuse us a mere trifle?’ ‘I need a woman! I spilled my blood for this!’ ‘[T]he G. I. and the Tommy have cigarettes and chocolate to give the Frauleins, so they need not rape. The Russian has neither.’
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In an environment where soldiers had unlimited power over women, where there was little threat of punishment, and where all one’s fellow soldiers were indulging in sexual violence, rape became the norm. Thus, for example, when one of Vasily Grossman’s fellow war correspondents raped a Russian girl who had come to their rooms to escape the mobs of drunken soldiers outside it was not because he was a monster, but merely because he was unable to ‘resist the temptation’.
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The men the Americans now call ‘the Greatest Generation’ were not all the selfless heroes they are often portrayed to be: a proportion of them were also thieves, plunderers and abusers of the worst kind. Hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers, particularly those from the Red Army, were also serial rapists. As Lev Kopelev argued at the time,
[N]ever mind the disgrace – what about those soldiers who queue up by the scores for a German woman, who rape little girls, kill old women? They’ll be going back to our own cities, our own women, our own girls. Thousands and thousands of potential criminals, and twice as dangerous, since they’ll be coming back with the reputation of heroes.
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After their military service, these men melted back into the community of Europe, but also returned to Canada, America, Australasia and other countries all over the world. The effect, if any, that these men had on attitudes towards women within their own countries after the war would make a truly interesting study.
Given the atmosphere that existed in the aftermath of the war, it is unsurprising that there were widespread concerns over how Europe’s children were growing up. Not only were they in constant physical danger – we have already heard stories of children playing on ammunition dumps, crossing minefields to get to the raspberries that grew on the other side, or even firing Panzerfausts they had found abandoned by the road – but the moral dangers were just as considerable. The psychological damage they had suffered was evident in the games that they played. Mothers despaired as they watched their children play games of ‘air raids’, or ‘Frau komm’ (the phrase used by Russian soldiers when they picked German women they wished to rape)
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In Berlin, Lieutenant Colonel William Byford-Jones was shocked to see a simple drawing of a man being hanged repeated fifteen times around three sides of a building. According to a worker in a Salvation Army orphanage, the German children he worked with always dressed their dolls in uniforms, while most of the displaced orphans screamed if they saw a man in uniform approach them.
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As I have already noted, it was fairly rare for children ever to see a man out of uniform – indeed, in some parts of the continent it was rare for them to see any men at all. This lack of male role models, coupled with the reduction in adult authority figures, had a stark impact on children’s behaviour. In Britain the amount of juvenile delinquency went up by almost 40 per cent during the war, especially crimes of breaking and entering, malicious damage and theft (which more than doubled).
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In Germany too, according to figures circulated by Martin Bormann, youth crime had more than doubled between 1937 and 1942, and was still rising in 1943. In some cities, such as Hamburg, juvenile delinquency tripled during the war.
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By the middle of 1945 groups of ‘child gangsters’ were reported in the Soviet zone mugging and sometimes killing people for food and money: the lack of parental supervision, and in some cases the lack of parents altogether, had made them into ‘little savages’.
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It was the German children who caused the most concern. Some people believed that they were innately threatening, simply by virtue of their German blood. In Norway there were massive demands to deport any children who had been fathered by German soldiers, on the grounds that they might grow up to become a Nazi fifth column in years to come. The same eugenic principle that made the Nazis believe they were the master race was now applied to German children to identify them as a future threat.
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Within Germany itself, the Allies were more worried about teenagers than infants. The German teenagers of 1945 had been indoctrinated with Nazi ideology throughout their whole lives, both through twelve years of schooling, and through compulsory Nazi youth groups like the League of German Girls and the Hitler Youth. Many feared that this generation of children might be irredeemable. British soldiers who fought in 1944 and 1945 often noted that ‘the younger the German, the more arrogant and “masterful” he was’. In an extraordinary article in the
Daily Express,
Major R. Crisp stated that the ordinary German soldiers he used to come across had been replaced by an army of fanatical fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who appeared incapable of anything but brutality.
There is nothing that is decent, or gentle, or humble to be read in them. Everything that is beastly and lustful and cruel. This is a generation of men trained deliberately in barbarity, trained to execute the awful orders of a madman. Not a clean thought has ever touched them … Every German born since 1920 is under this satanic spell. The younger they are the more fiercely impregnated are they with its evil poison. Every child born under the Hitler regime is a lost child. It is a lost generation.