Sexual Violence in Europe in World War II, 1939—1945

• Date: 01 March 2009
• Author: Jeffrey Burds
• Published date: 01 March 2009
• DOI: 10.1177/1059601108329751
• Subject Matter: Articles

Sexual Violence in Europe

in World War II, 1939–1945*

JEFFREY BURDS

Focusing in particular on the German-Soviet war in the East, this article explores

variations in patterns of sexual violence associated with armed forces in Europe

during and immediately after World War II. Besides soldier violence perpetrated

against civilian populations, a significant role was also played by irregular

forces: most notably, by partisan guerrillas and civilian vigilantes. Ethnic nation-

alist partisan forces perpetrated especially brutal sexual violence against women

and girls of “enemy” nationalities. Likewise, after liberation civilian reprisals were

fairly common throughout Europe against so-called “sexual collaborators”—that

is, against women excoriated for providing “sexual comfort” to the enemy during

the German occupation.

Keywords: World War II; gender; violence; rape; sexual violence; Europe; Soviet

Union; Germany

35

I would like to express my thanks to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, which has gener-

ously supported this research. I am grateful to the following archivists and scholars who provided

assistance in Russian research collections: S. V. Mironenko, V. A. Kozlov, and D. N. Nokhotovich in

the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF); Vadim Altskan and Michlean Amir of the

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and Crispin Brooks of the USC Shoah Foundation

Institute for Visual History and Education. Special thanks to Jared McBride for his assistance in

securing additional materials, to Dariusz Jonczyk for help with Polish sources, to Mary Nolan for her

excellent editorial suggestions, and to Elisabeth Wood for encouraging me to reflect more broadly

about patterns of sexual violence in World War II. I also want to express my gratitude to Biljana

Bijelic, Tom Jay Cinq-Mars, Tom Havens, Elizabeth Hillman, Amelia Hoover, Hiroaki Kuromiya,

Meghan Lynch, Dieter Pohl, David Stone, Kimberly Theidon, Lynne Viola, and Debbie Zoldan.

POLITICS & SOCIETY, Vol. 37 No. 1, March 2009 35-74

DOI: 10.1177/1059601108329751

© 2009 Sage Publications

*This article is part of a special section of Politics & Society on the topic “Patterns of Wartime Sexual Violence.” The

papers were presented at the workshop Sexual Violence during War held at Yale University in November 2007. For

more information, please refer to the Introduction to this section.

36 POLITICS & SOCIETY

I. GERMANY AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN THE EAST

We are war. Because we are soldiers.

I have burned all the cities,

Strangled all the women,

Brained all the children,

Plundered all the land.

I have shot a million enemies,

Laid waste the fields, destroyed the churches,

Ravaged the souls of the inhabitants,

Spilled the blood and tears of all the mothers.

I did it, all me.—I did

Nothing. But I was a soldier.

In his diary Wehrmacht soldier Willy Peter Reese wrote that he entered

Russia in summer 1941 with a sense of shock at the excesses of his fellow sol-

diers. By autumn 1944, just weeks before his death at age twenty-three, Reese

was among those fleeing the Soviet Union for Germany, and he reflected in this

frenzied entry just how transformed he had been by the war. Stumbling over a

rich cache of food, alcohol, and cigarettes abandoned at a railway station near

Gomel, Belorussia, Reese and his mates fell into a bacchanalia of consumption

and excess that bordered on hysteria:

We sang over claret and liqueurs, vodka and rum, plunged into intoxication like doomed

men, talked drunkenly about sex and science, reeled by the railroad cars, sat outside over

campfires, were made ill by the cheap spirits and the sudden rich diet, and carried on

anyway, made grotesque speeches about war and peace, grew melancholy, talked about

our lovelornness and homesickness, started laughing again, and went on drinking,

whooped and skipped over the rails, danced in the cars, and fired into the air, made a

Russian woman prisoner dance naked for us, greased her tits with boot polish, got her

drunk as we were. . . .1

“I’m collapsing under so much guilt—and I’m drinking!” Reese wrote. He and

his mates decimated the Soviet Union, its resources and its peoples as they fled

the Red Army following the battle at Stalingrad in 1943. His diary is a confession,

his guilt the guilt of all German soldiers in the East. In Russia, he had truly

become “a stranger to myself.”

In more ways than one, the war on the Eastern Front differed profoundly

from the conduct of war in World War II in other parts of Europe and around the

globe. Omer Bartov, among others, has written about the “brutalization of war-

fare” in the East during World War II. Violent actions toward local civilians that

would have led to courts martial and a possible firing squad in occupied France

were everyday experiences of the average Wehrmacht soldier in the East.2 While

JEFFREY BURDS 37

Soviet writers complained bitterly of German atrocities in the East, many of

these excesses were muted in standard western studies of the Eastern war.3

The same contrasts apply to Soviet versus western accounts of sexual vio-

lence on the Eastern Front, where “looting the Russian civilians was not called

‘plundering’ and not prosecuted, and . . . raping Russian women was not con-

sidered to be a ‘moral offense.’”4 While from the start the Soviets underlined the

singular character of German sexual terror in the East, it is only recently that

western scholars have begun to explore the mountain of Soviet and post-Soviet

data on wartime sexual crimes.5 With the discovery of the culpability of the

Wehrmacht for atrocities against civilians has come the growing awareness of

the central role of sexual violence in German-occupied zones in the East.

German sexual atrocities in Soviet zones were driven by two main factors: a

distinct racial policy that encouraged mistreatment towards non-Aryan civilian

populations and growing soldier stress associated with staunch Soviet resistance

from the first weeks of the war. This soldier stress only rose as Wehrmacht morale

plummeted in the wake of the humiliating defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943.

German Views of Race and Gender

Paragraph 2 of the 1935 Nuremberg Law unequivocally prohibited sexual

contact between Aryans and Jews: “Extramarital intercourse between Jews and

subjects of the state of German or related blood is forbidden.”6 Although such bans

were strictly imposed against sexual contact with Jews, the “mixing of the bloods”

(Rassenschande) of Aryans with other races was a major concern in the Third

Reich’s racial policies, where there were various kinds of strict prohibitions against

“illegal associations.”7 In the Nazi hierarchy of racial purity, Aryans were the purest

and Jews were the basest of racial types. But Slavic Untermenschen (sub-humans)

from the East were—in Nazi racial ideology—little better than Jews.

At home, Reich authorities strictly proscribed sexual contacts between

Germans and other races. In the midst of an aggressively pronatalist policy that

encouraged the birth of Aryan babies in greater Germany, there was a special

concern about sexual fraternization between German women and girls and for-

eign workers, especially POWs and forced laborers from the East. Approaching

some 3.5 million forced laborers by 1945, these Eastern workers (Ostarbeiters)

were a major source of Nazi racial anxieties. Typical were these guidelines

issued by the Reich Ministry of Justice on June 14, 1943: “German women who

engage in sexual relations with prisoners of war have betrayed the front, done

gross injury to their nation’s honor, and damaged the reputation of German

womanhood abroad.”8 But with so many German men away at the front, and as

German war casualties mounted, legal prohibitions had little effect preventing

such illicit associations between foreign workers and German women and girls.

Rassenpolitsches Amt reported: