Women as spoils of war at the end of World War Two | DW Documentary

In the house next door were women who’d been evacuated from Munich. Suddenly, in the night, I heard terrible screams and cries. I asked what had gone on there because I couldn’t sleep.

And they said: Yes, people had come and raped the women. The screams were so horrendous. To me it was a nationwide catastrophe, one that affected an entire generation.

Come Frau, Raboti. How often did I hear that 70 years ago, because I was a war trophy? That word conveyed all the horror.

We always said: I was ‘taken’ when we talked about it. You felt guilty. You felt dirty.

In general, you can say that not enough has been made of the fact that all troops committed acts of sexual violence: the Soviet Army, the Americans, the French and the British. I think that if we focusing primarily on the violent acts committed by the Red Army, we’ll remain stuck in a very simplistic explanatory model. Rape is an old cultural pattern in wartime.

With it, the victor shows the enemy soldiers: You can’t protect your women. It’s a way of dishonoring the men’s military honor. I was searching for my identity for 40 years.

The crazy thing is that this rape is what led me to being alive. In Europe, the Second World War had just come to an end. German cities lay in ruins.

In 1945, the months between the end of fighting and a new beginning were full of chaos, despair, euphoria, guilt, and hope. But this was also a time that proved to be especially dangerous for women. My conservative estimate is that there were close to 900,000 rape victims.

The number of rapes themselves could be much higher because many victims were raped multiple times. Women were raped by Allied soldiers in the first weeks and months after the surrender of Nazi Germany. Violated by those who came to Europe as 'liberators': American, British and French troops, and soldiers from the Soviet Red Army.

This means there’s likely no German family, or family that lived in Germany at the time, that wasn’t affected in some way: Either concretely through their own assaults, or at least through the fear that it could happen to their own family members. Only when she was over 80 did Maximiliane Heigl’s mother Margot speak of her childhood memories of soldiers and awful screams. In the spring of 1945, after air raids, the US Army occupied the Bavarian town of Landshut.

Four-year-old Margot, her mother and a female cousin sought shelter in a cellar. The women lived together, more or less without men. And then, in April 1945, when the bombardments in Landshut became too severe, they fled to a house in Pfarrgasse, right next to the church.

When the Americans arrived, they forced their way into the house. There were several of them and they were heavily armed. They searched the house from top to bottom.

And then, in a cupboard in one of the bedrooms, they saw a Wehrmacht uniform hanging on a hanger. And then they asked ‘where is this man? Where is this man?

Where is the soldier? ’ And then they grew more and more aggressive and drove the women into the bedroom. And then, in the bedroom, one of the soldiers threw my grandmother onto the bed and tried to take her clothes off.

Margot stayed silent for decades. In her family, no one ever spoke about the events that occurred at the end of April 1945. It was only her daughter Maximiliane who, upon learning of her grandmother’s rape, decided to find out more about the time US troops entered Bavaria.

She began looking for witnesses to this history, especially in the villages and was met with a wall of silence. So, the first ‘field’ that I worked was in a small rural area on the border between Upper Bavaria and Lower Bavaria, in the district of Altötting. A very Catholic community with a lot of social control.

Back then I knew incidents had occurred. Yet it took almost a year to find women, and also men, who were willing to tell me what happened there. Man, we were so afraid of the soldiers.

Are the Russians coming? We’d heard terrible things about them and hoped the Americans would arrive before the Russians. It was May 1st and we were at the May devotions.

You could hear the sounds of the tanks and vehicles in the church. Suddenly, the priest said: the enemy has forced its way into our village. Go home.

The women and girls were to comport themselves with dignity vis-à-vis the enemy. They came upstairs to our place. Two young Americans.

And, of course, they saw my mother and my sister and attacked them right away. Rape is a weapon of war. And as long as army commanders don’t take strict actions against it, they’re tolerating it and perhaps even exploiting it for their military aims.

Because sexual violence is, in a certain sense, so intimate that it can rupture family structures, the connections, the social cohesion of a society in the long term. Leonie Biallas has written down the traumatic experiences she associates with February of 1945. Back then she witnessed the Red Army’s rapid advance into Breslau the historical capital of Silesia, now known as the Polish city of Wrocław.

Many of the big cities were destroyed, but not Breslau. We rarely had air-raid warnings. And we always said: that’s why we’re in for it now.

And it was a disaster. The Russians formed a ring around Breslau, encircling the city. Breslau was surrounded and it was a fortress.

The city was supposed to serve as a bulwark and stop the Russians from advancing. So the order to evacuate came far too late. Leonie Biallas was just 14 years old at the time.

We were in Uncle Reinhold’s cellar. He was my father's youngest brother. In my mind, I can still see us sitting there.

In a circle, like this. I sat here and my mother was next to me. On Mom's other side sat my brother Winfried, my youngest brother.

They stormed in. And we just sat like this. I don't know if we screamed or cried.

We trembled sitting there. One came in, looked around, saw me and yanked me towards him. And Mother cried out.

I know exactly how he threw me on the floor. And then, on the doorstep, it happened. Only my mother screamed.

And then we lay in one another’s arms and sobbed. Leonie and her mother were among around 1. 4 million women who were raped while fleeing East Prussia or Silesia often more than once.

Nazi propaganda about the 'Red Menace' meant fear of the Soviet soldiers was especially great. Folks were more afraid of the Slavic peoples, because in the racist hierarchy of the time, they were portrayed as monstrous, primitive, as beasts driven by physical urges. So accordingly, they triggered more fears.

Adolf Hitler and his entourage calculated their opponent’s eventual, awful revenge into their plans. In his diary, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels quoted Hitler as saying, not long after Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941: We have so much to answer for that we must win because otherwise our entire nation, with us at its head, will be eradicated along with all we hold dear. So let’s get to work!

’ The Nazi leadership, the heads of the Wehrmacht and even individual soldiers were certainly conscious of the German crimes committed in the Eastern territories. They ordered them, knew about them, saw them or even committed them. They knew all too well that if the Red Army came to Germany, then God have mercy on us.

At the start of 1945, the Russian Army stood 80 kilometers outside Berlin and was preparing its attack on the German capital. Close to three million people were still living there. Among the women, panic was growing.

Many saw killing themselves as the only way to evade the enemy. In April, the number of suicides in Berlin reached record levels, at close to 4000. On the 8th of May, 1945, Hitler’s Nazi Germany surrendered.

The last great battle of the Second World War on European soil was now over. Berlin was one huge war trophy. The soldiers were given free rein to enjoy their victory.

The victims of this flush of victory were the women. It’s said that a few Red Army soldiers carried a leaflet with them which said: Crush the Germanic women’s racial pride! Take them as your rightful spoils.

Well, revenge was certainly an important motive, perhaps the most important one. But other factors also came into play, especially the internal military culture in the Red Army. A ban on vacations, high casualties, poor cohesion, bad leadership by officers and sergeants who kept passing the pressure down from the upper ranks.

And then, to relieve this pressure, they’d let their own troops run wild. What was just as true for the Red Army as for the US Army was that troops had certain images of the moral depravity of German society and German women. And these seemed to justify not applying any moral standards in their dealings with them.

The advances of the US Army from the West seemed to worry the German population less. In March of 1945 , the Americans crossed the Rhine, and by April, they’d already reached Thuringia. In Kleinbartloff, the village priest wrote in relief: The Americans are coming!

There’s excitement, but no fright. An excitement between fright and joy but leaning more towards joy. A quarter of a year later, the troops would withdraw.

Nine months later, Konrad Jahr was born. Right after his birth, his mother put him in foster care. When he was 8, his foster sister told him the reason why.

She told me: In 1945, the Americans were in Altenburg and your mother got involved with one of those Americans. And he’s your father. That’s how you came to be.

For me, at first, that was actually more of a relief than a shock. Now I knew where I came from. I had red hair and gaps between my teeth.

From an early age, I had a kind of inferiority complex. I didn’t belong. I didn’t know where I was at.

And I had no protection, no one to protect me. No one supported me. In my childhood, no one ever took me under their wing.

Konrad was a cheeky kid who soon became a thorn in the side of the East German school system. His third-grade report card states that he constantly interrupted lessons and was proud to be a “foreigner. ” His family was implored to take action before it’s too late.

For me, my father was my anchor. I had a secret that belonged only to me, one that gave me strength. It was like I was on a kind of mission: Screw you, I’m an American.

One day I’ll leave here and join my father in America. US soldiers weren’t as widely feared, and they were expected to abide by their military leadership’s strict code of conduct. Germany was conquered enemy territory, and they were supposed to keep their distance from the German people.

Training films were shown to prepare American soldiers: In general, armies forbid fraternization out of concern that the informal contacts their soldiers have with the domestic population will lead to a weakening of the army. So, if they start to have personal contacts and, for example, have a beer at a bar together in the evenings, then they could lose sight of the occupying power’s goals. But the US soldiers’ advance didn’t always go smoothly.

The liberation of Bavaria took several weeks. While, in some places, Germans surrendered without a fight, just a few kilometers away Hitler’s ‘last contingents’ would continue to put up strong resistance. And that had consequences.

There were still young people who would take up arms and try to fight the US soldiers. It appears that the places most resistant to being taken over were the ones most affected by sexualized war violence. Take Moosburg near Freising.

There was a big prisoner of war camp there, where the US troops moving in could see how their comrades had been treated in Germany. This, in particular, seems to have triggered a lot of anger in the US soldiers. That led to an especially large number of sexual assaults, which were carried out systematically.

Apparently, they made marks on houses presumably inhabited by women essentially declaring them to be prey. This report about the troops’ arrival, written by the priest of the town of Moosburg, states: At the time, rectories were among the few German institutions still functioning. So the Bavarian priests’ reports on the Allies’ arrival remain an important source for historians, and journalists like Maximiliane Heigl.

Here we have the report from the St. Nicholas parish in Bad Reichenhall. On the one hand, it makes the blanket statement that a large number of women and girls were violated.

In parentheses here it’s been added that there’s talk of 200. Through his formulation, the priest makes it clear that he has no personal knowledge of the matter but is just relaying what the townsfolk are saying. And then comes the frequently confirmed information that, after the Americans marched in, there was relative peace.

But then the French troops were advancing, and the word was they were committing terrible crimes. Namely in moral terms, they committed terrible crimes against women and girls. Here they wrote, ‘Colored’ Moroccans would use gun violence to force their way in at night.

It was fairly typical to mention the skin color of the soldiers or fighters doing the plundering. The French regiments which included soldiers of North African descent made a particularly strong impression. De Gaulle’s troops were barbarous.

They stole and robbed and chased after the women. And the young girls locked themselves in the attic, so the soldiers couldn’t come in. At first, the French army also kept acts of sexual violence secret.

But when charges were pressed, the military courts doled out particularly harsh sentences to France’s colonial troops. The racism of societies back then not just the German, but also the British, French and American ones is reflected in the numbers of convicted and sentenced perpetrators. It was clearly so that, for instance in the US army, Black culprits were charged more often and also received much harsher sentences, including the death penalty.

The French occupied the territory near the French-German border. Here in southwestern Germany, it was mainly the French occupiers’ merciless retaliation that’s burned into people’s collective memory. After the Red Army, the French had the second-worst reputation with the German people, and that applied here, too.

Folks also feared there could be reprisals as revenge for the 4-year-long German occupation of France. And, in fact, there were many sexual assaults when the French marched into southwestern Germany. In the French occupation zone, children fathered by French soldiers had to be registered, by orders of the military governor.

So it’s on record that most of the rapes were NOT, in fact, committed by colonial troops. Anna-Rosa Adam, born in February 1946, was one of these “Frenchmen’s kids”. She grew up with her grandmother, in a village near Karlsruhe.

She knows nothing about the events surrounding her conception only that her father was a French soldier. At the age of ten, Anna-Rosa was suddenly sent to France, because she was deemed to be a “child of the French state. ” From the moment I had to leave, I was in shock.

There was this trauma. I was sent unprepared to a foreign country, with a foreign language, to live with nuns. That was a dramatic change for me.

I had to learn French. I was there for three years and became a Frenchwoman I was a forced Francophile. I was never asked what I wanted.

Nothing was ever explained to me. Up to the point in time when I learned that there was an archive in Colmar, a French archive, I knew nothing at all. And then I was outraged that I wasn’t unfamiliar to the French, but that I most certainly existed in the French archives.

All of the children fathered by French soldiers were archived “on the orders of General Koenig. ” From this document, Anna-Rosa also learned her father’s name: Robert. Yet, she’s never been able to find him.

Many thousands of women are thought to have been raped in the French occupation zone. By the summer of 1945, the consequences of that sexual violence had become all too clear. Many women wanted to have an abortion, but to be granted one they needed to have previously reported the rape.

But as this gynecologist noted: Female sexuality was basically viewed as unreliable. This meant that, when in doubt, the ruling always went against the woman. It was always thought that the woman seduced the man, that she didn’t have her own sexual desires under control.

Or that she was materialistic and wanted something from these soldiers and that she then gave herself or sold herself to get it. Anna-Rosa’s mother Monika also contravened the moral codes of the time. In Spring 1945, near the German city of Karlsruhe, she met the French soldier who would become Anna-Rosa’s father.

My mother was a very reserved woman. She wasn’t someone who’d have taken the initiative. So I think my mother had the opportunity to earn money from the French.

After Monica unexpectedly became pregnant by the French soldier, she was known in her home village as “the Frenchman’s darling”. Eventually, she was forced to leave. After the war, women normally weren’t permitted to have a relationship with a Frenchman, nor an American, nor an Englishman nor a Russian.

In France, they shaved the women’s heads and chased them through the villages. And it was no different in Germany. Women weren’t allowed to have liaisons with the enemy, but that didn’t stop relationships from happening.

After the “zero hour” struck, marking Germany’s surrender, people wanted to forget about the past. German women raped by soldiers were often held partly to blame, so most didn’t press charges. Too great was the shame and the feelings of guilt, towards their husbands and families as well.

Most of the women likely never spoke about it, not even with their husbands when they eventually returned. Plus, there was no intact infrastructure that could have dealt with this. There was no legal framework whatsoever from the German police or the German courts to take action against it.

In this respect, there was no systematic registration. It’s estimated that, between the early summer and fall of 1945, at least 110,000 women and girls were raped in Berlin alone. Many of them multiple times.

Though these figures are only estimates. This is done using old patient records and registration forms, like those found in the archives of Berlin’s Humboldt University. Files from the Empress Auguste Victoria House children’s hospital, for instance, show that 5% of the children born between the end of 1945 and the summer of 1946 had Russian fathers.

In many of these cases, the only entry on the line for ‘Father’ is ‘Russian’ and, in parentheses, the German word for ‘rape’. In the entire Soviet occupation zone, historians estimate that more than 500,000 women were raped during the first post-war years. American soldiers are thought to have committed over 190,000 sexual assaults.

The figures are still unknown for the British Allied troops. The Allies divided Germany and Berlin into four occupation zones. Over time, the “occupiers” became the “liberators”.

From then on, love affairs with Allied soldiers were no longer rare. Soon, no one was talking about the crimes committed in the weeks after the war’s end. Sure, for a long time, even to this day, people don’t like to talk about crimes committed by the Allies.

For two reasons: First, they’re our present-day allies. And second, especially on the German side, with all the crimes carried out in Germany’s name during World War II, it’s hard to point a finger at the Allies. Because very quickly you can risk relativizing or offsetting German guilt.

After years of rationing and shortages, Germans longed for stability. 1948 proved to be a decisive year. The Americans had been preparing the currency reform in the Western zones.

This effectively split Germany into two economic divisions and kick-started the economic miracle in the Western half. The political division followed just a year later. The Republic of Germany held its first parliamentary elections in 1949.

On their election posters, the Christian Democrats, or CDU, used stereotypical images of the enemy to stir up fears of the “Red Menace. ” CDU candidate Konrad Adenauer became the first Chancellor of the new Republic. The occupation status ended.

And Adenauer tied his country’s fate to the West. Now, at the latest, it was also in West Germany’s political interest that the guilt for crimes committed by the Allies was placed solely upon the Soviets. Especially during the Cold War in West Germany, Western Europe and the US sexual violence committed by Red Army soldiers was often scandalized, as allegedly being especially uncivilized or brutal.

The voices or memories of those really impacted, as well as their perpetrators, went unheard. Only in 1992 did a documentary once again take up the controversial topic of rapes committed by Allied troops in post-war Germany. Konrad Jahr was one of the contemporary witnesses, who recounted the story of his desperate search for his father.

In “BeFreier und Befreite”, also known as “Liberators Take Liberties”, director Helke Sander talks to victims, perpetrators and children born of rape. What the film makes clear: For decades, German society largely blamed these women and children for their fate. The film was viewed as a milestone when it came to confronting this history.

And, without a doubt, that was also because, up to that point in time, there’d hardly been any kind of reflection about it. And in my mother’s case, my stepfather did everything he could to suppress it. You found shocking examples.

Why was this such a taboo topic for so long? Firstly, women weren’t accustomed to talking about their own interests I think that’s the decisive factor. And no one made it easy for them, because if they tried to talk about it they’d wind up being punished all over again.

Many women said the conflict with their own relatives afterwards was much tougher to take than the rape itself. For his mother, Konrad Jahr’s very existence was proof of her so-called ‘shame. ’ The 22-year-old theology student was made to carry the blame for something over which he had no control.

In 1968, the rebellious young man once again drove to Cottbus, to see his mother and finally learn his father’s name. I planned to bring this American into play. She asked me to come into the kitchen and sat down.

I was just about to start when the door was thrown open and her husband was standing in the kitchen doorway. And he started yelling: Get out of here! Get out!

Skedaddle! You have no business here, no reason to be here. And leave our mother in peace.

We have absolutely nothing to do with you. Leave the room, scram! Leave our home and never come back.

Four years later, Konrad Jahr received a letter with a clear message. It was written not by his mother, but by her husband. Look for the blame in yourself, not in others.

We bear no responsibility whatsoever for you. That’s the letter. The lifelong search for an unknown father, for one’s own identity, for love and acceptance these things have also left Anna-Rosa Adam with deep, psychological scars.

You always have the sense that half of you is missing. And you always have the feeling that you don’t belong anywhere. That you don’t belong to France and you don’t belong to Germany.

In 1948, Anna-Rosa’s mother got married to a Frenchman. He, too, only ever saw Anna-Rosa as the “child born into shame”. He was strict, always very strict.

But we didn’t have any real relationship with him. And shortly before he died, he told me that he never could stand me. I said: Why?

I was always a good kid. It was like an electrical shock went through me, from top to bottom. It was that simple 3,200 children born of rape were officially registered in West Germany and West Berlin.

Still, the number of unreported cases was certainly much higher. In West Germany, the politicians and society denied responsibility for these women and children. The women weren’t recognized as victims of war and thus had no right to compensation.

That was off the table right from the start, because the state couldn’t have afforded it and didn’t want to either. It would have put women, who were essentially civilian war victims, on an equal footing with war-disabled soldiers. In East Germany, rapes conducted by Red Army soldiers were also a taboo topic.

Time and time again, Konrad Jahr provoked the communist authorities. In 1986, East German officials decided to deport him to the West. A day before the protestant minister was forced to leave the country, he drove to Cottbus one last time.

I wanted to visit my mother one last time for the sole purpose of having her tell me the name of the American. And she started to sob and cry something awful: I’ve no idea what you want. Why are telling me this?

There is no American. It was in Elsterwerda. I was at the black market, trying to trade a pair of shoes for food.

Then a truck drove in, filled with Russians. They jumped down and conducted a raid on the market. Then they drove me out to a field and threw me down on the ground.

One of the men held a machine gun to my temple while the other tore off my clothes and raped me. And then it was the other one’s turn. Yes.

Within 20 minutes I became Russian. And with that, my years-long dream that I was American went bust. I described the course of events in the months of February to June 1945 the way I experienced them at the time from the perspective of an almost 15-year-old.

Leonie Biallas lived to the age of 94. At the end of her life, she made her peace with the sexual violence she’d endured at 14. She says she became a happy person, thanks to the love of her husband.

Yes, he was very loving. Very loving and knew I was afraid of Mr Right, too. Yes, I also was afraid of the right guy.

But he never pressured me even when we were engaged. It took a really long time, yes. I have my husband Martin and my mother to thank for this.

That I to my own surprise can speak about it quite freely.