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Warning: extremely disturbing content and graphic images.
…approximately 2 million German women were raped at the end of World War II and in the post-war period by Allied soldiers and members of the occupying forces.
These estimates represent more rapes against a defeated enemy than any other war in history…
Red Army soldiers, American GIs, British, French, Belgians, Poles, Czechs and Serbs all took advantage of the conquest of Germany to plunder and then to rape German women…
The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War are remembered as liberators. But for millions of German women and girls, the ‘men’ who arrived after the fighting stopped brought another kind of terror with them.
German women and girls became victims of one of the largest waves of mass sexual violence in modern history and the rapes did not simply stop when Germany surrendered. They continued during the occupation, after the war was officially over and after these women were supposedly living in peace again.
Some people have heard about the mass rape of German women after World War II but they usually associate it almost entirely with the Soviet Red Army. The implication is that Soviet troops committed these atrocities while the Western Allies arrived as the civilized liberators.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
The Western Allies (American, French and British) were just as cruel and sadistic as the Red Army.
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RAPES COMMITTED BY THE WESTERN ALLIES
The actual number of rapes of German women by American troops far exceeds what was reported by the U.S. Army.
After the war ended, German police had virtually no power to investigate Allied soldiers accused of rape, let alone prosecute them. So when a German woman accused an occupying soldier of raping her, there was very little the local police could actually do about it.
And we know these accusations were being made because the reports still exist.
The Bavarian Ministry of the Interior collected police files documenting sexual assaults against German women, many of them involving American soldiers. When you read through these reports, they are strikingly similar to accounts of what Red Army soldiers were doing to women in eastern Germany and Berlin.
The difference was that Germans already knew what was happening as the Red Army advanced from the East. They were not expecting the Americans to do it too.1
The legal situation in post-war Germany made it almost impossible for the German police to investigate rape and prosecute the perpetrators. In the first years of the occupation, a German policeman would not have been able to report anything even if he had burst in on an American gang rape.
He could not have intervened, let alone arrested the soldiers, because the military police were responsible for crimes against the German population.
Nor, incidentally, would German civilians have been entitled to come to the aid of the victims, as the Germans were forbidden from attacking members of the occupying forces or proceeding against them in any other form. The occupying power had sole responsibility for charges and investigations involving its soldiers, with the result that in most cases no charges were ever brought in the first place. The perpetrators could also not be arraigned before a German court. Here, too, the military courts had jurisdiction.2
There were fewer reports of German women being raped by American soldiers than by Soviet soldiers, but that needs some context.
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Germany had been destroyed. Women were starving, children were hungry, and families were desperate for food and basic necessities. American soldiers had access to things German civilians desperately needed, and some used that enormous imbalance of power to obtain sex from women in exchange for food and other necessities.
Calling that simply “consensual sex” ignores what was actually happening. If a woman is hungry, her children need food, and the man controlling access to those supplies expects sex before he will give them to her, that is sexual coercion. He could have simply done the morally decent thing and given a starving woman and her children the food they needed to survive. Instead her desperation became something that could be exploited for sex.
So the fact that these encounters did not necessarily appear in police records as rape does not mean the women were freely choosing them. For some women, the “choice” being offered was sex in exchange for survival.
And perhaps nothing exposes this mentality better than what an American provost marshal actually said about rape in occupied Germany.
In December 1945, Lt. Col. Gerald F. Beane reportedly told The Christian Century:
… rape represents no problem to the military police because ‘a bit of food, a bar of chocolate, or a bar of soap seems to make rape unnecessary.’ Think that over if you want to understand what the situation is in Germany.3
So it’s not rape anymore if you give her some food or a bar of soap first? What if she’s a 10-year-old girl? Does the chocolate somehow make that okay too?
I mean, really think about the mentality behind this statement. He isn’t talking about whether these women actually wanted to have sex with American soldiers. He’s saying rape was “no problem” because starving and desperate women could be persuaded with food and basic necessities.
Disgusting.
German women, many with children to feed, were often forced to become slaves to Allied soldiers in order to survive.
A British soldier later admitted:4
I felt a bit sick at times about the power I had over the girl. If I gave her a three-penny bar of chocolate she nearly went crazy. She was just like my slave. She darned my socks and mended things for me. There was no question of marriage. She knew that was not possible.
“She was just like my slave.”
He literally said it himself. He knew exactly what was happening. This woman was so desperate that a three-penny bar of chocolate was enough to make her “nearly go crazy,” and he was fully aware that her desperation gave him that kind of control over her.
At least he had enough self-awareness to admit how sick this truly was.
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Charles Lindbergh wrote that an Army officer told him there had been more than 6,000 reported rapes in Stuttgart alone. He also recorded something else he had been told about what was happening inside the French occupation zone:
I had been told that in French-occupied territory it was required that a list of the occupants of every building, together with their ages, be posted outside, on the door, and that both the Senegalese and the French soldiers, drunk at night, would go from door to door until they found girls’ names listed of any age they wished to rape.
As we drove through Stuttgart we saw that each main door of the habitable buildings contained such a list—white sheets of paper tacked onto the panel—a column of names, a column of birth dates. And most of the women of Stuttgart show in their faces that they have gone through hell.5
This is horrifying. Imagine living through it.
RAPES COMMITTED BY THE RED ARMY
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a young captain in the Red Army when his regiment entered East Prussia in January 1945. He later described just how normalized the rape and murder of German women had become among Soviet troops:
For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction.6
Solzhenitsyn wasn’t describing a few soldiers secretly committing crimes they knew would horrify the men around them. He was describing an atmosphere in which raping and even killing German girls could be treated almost like a “combat distinction.”
Solzhenitsyn fiercely opposed what was being done to German civilians and openly condemned the rape of German women. He would soon be arrested and sent into the Soviet gulag system for these views.
As the Red Army pushed through East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania toward Berlin, reports of rape followed. German women were gang-raped, sometimes repeatedly and over successive nights. One woman interviewed in Schwerin reported that she had “already been raped by 10 men today.” A German officer in East Prussia claimed to have rescued several dozen women from a villa where, according to his account, “on average they had been raped 60 to 70 times a day.”
One woman in Berlin described what happened to her:
Twenty-three soldiers one after the other. I had to be stitched up in a hospital. I never want to have anything to do with any man again.7
There really isn’t much commentary I can add to that. Twenty-three men raped her one after another and left her so badly injured that doctors had to stitch her back together.
Churches offered no protection either.
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A priest from Neisse described women and nuns being raped for hours while soldiers actually formed lines waiting for their turn:
The girls, women and nuns were raped incessantly for hours on end, the soldiers standing in queues, the officers at the head of the queues, in front of their victims. During the first night many of the nuns and women were raped as many as 50 times. Some of the nuns who resisted with all their strength were shot, others were ill-treated in a dreadful manner until they were too exhausted to offer any resistance. The Russians knocked them down, kicked them, beat them on the head and in the face with the butt-end of their revolvers and rifles, until they finally collapsed and in this unconscious condition became the helpless victims of brutish passion, which was so inhuman as to be inconceivable. The same dreadful scenes were enacted in the hospitals, homes for the aged, and other such institutions. Even nuns who were 70 and 80 years old and were ill and bedridden were raped and ill-treated by these barbarians.8
Seventy and eighty years old. Sick and bedridden.
And according to this priest, even collapsing unconscious did not make it stop.
Another priest managed to smuggle a letter out of Breslau on September 3, 1945. By then Germany had surrendered almost four months earlier.
He wrote:
In unending succession were girls, women and nuns violated. Not merely in secret, in hidden corners, but in the sight of everybody, even in churches, in the streets and in public places were nuns, women and even eight-year-old girls attacked again and again. Mothers were violated before the eyes of their children; girls in the presence of their brothers; nuns, in the sight of pupils, were outraged again and again to their very death and even as corpses.9
Eight-year-old girls.
Mothers raped in front of their children. Girls raped in front of their brothers. Nuns raped in front of their pupils. Some women were assaulted until they died and the abuse continued even after death.
Women and girls were reportedly told by a Russian soldier to take shelter inside the Catholic cathedral, supposedly to protect them from rape. Hundreds went inside believing they had found somewhere safe. Instead, Russian soldiers entered the cathedral and, while “playing the organ and ringing the bells,” reportedly spent the night raping the women inside, some more than 30 times.
A Catholic pastor in Danzig stated:
They even violated eight-year-old girls and shot boys who tried to shield their mothers.10
I could go on and on, but I’ll stop here. There are only so many accounts of women being gang-raped, little girls being assaulted and mothers being raped in front of their children that you can read before the sheer scale of what happened becomes almost impossible to comprehend.
The mass rape was so horrific that countless German women committed suicide. Poison became one of the preferred methods, and many women in Berlin reportedly obtained poison before the “liberators” arrived because they already knew what could be waiting for them.
I think the point is pretty clear: The Red Army committed horrific atrocities against German women. So did the Western Allies. And it’s about time we’re honest about that.
And the rape of German women was only one part of what happened to German civilians and prisoners after the war.
If you missed my previous article detailing the Holocaust the Allies committed against the Germans at the end of the Second World War, I highly suggest you read that next. It goes into the concentration camps Germans were thrown into after the war, where they were deliberately deprived of food and left to starve to death. You can find that below and it’s free to read:
Relevant reading:
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Gebhardt, Miriam, Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War, Malden, Mass: Polity Press, 2017, p. 92.
Gebhardt, Miriam, Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War, Malden, Mass: Polity Press, 2017, p. 15.
Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. 64.
Botting, Douglas, From the Ruins of the Reich—Germany, 1945-1949, New York: Crown Publishers, 1985, p. 294.
Lindbergh, Charles, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970, pp. 945, 967-968.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Vol. 1), New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 21.
Lowe, Keith, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012, p. 54.
Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, Colo.: Aberdeen Books, 2010, p. 84.
Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War Against the German People, Torrance, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. 58.
Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War Against the German People, Torrance, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. 58.
THIS is what I tell people about when they try to sell me the idea about how the USA are "the good guys".
And these men returned home to their wives and girlfriends to have families that became the baby boomer generation. Presumably 100s of 1000s of German women ( those that survived) bore unloved children, endured monstrous shame, internal injuries, venereal disease and generational trauma. Horrific. Utterly horrific.