Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (10 page)

German Atrocities: Their Nature
and
Philosophy
by one Newell Dwight Hillis, a volu.me that was simultaneously published in Great Britain, the United States and Canada in
1918,
is a vintage example. The author, a popular Brooklyn clergyman in his day, lovingly built his own amazing construct as to why German

WAR
j
4)

soldiers committed rape. None of it had anything to do with hostility toward women, naturally.

Should the average American return home at night to find that his wife and children had been massacred and mutilated in his ab sence, he would not go to the office on the following morning . . . and weeks would pass before he could steel his hand to the accus tomed task. Now the German war staff fully realized the true value of the atrocity as a military instrument. Their soldiers ran no risk in

. . . raping young girls, but they hoped that when the news of their crimes reached the armed opponent, the atrocity committed upon his wife or child would break his nerve and leave him helpless to fight.

The
Reverend Hillis reported the desperate cry of a French soldier:

"The Germans have been in my land for a year. . . . My little house is gone, and gone my little shop! My wife is still a young woman! My little girl-she is just a little, little girl! Why, I never thought of her as a woman! And now our priest writes me that my young wife and my little girl will have babes in two months by these brutes!"

Af ter which the author intoned,

Such devastations of the soul are why there must be no incon clusive peace. Unconditional surrender is the only word.

Hi1lis was adept at painting a graphic picture:

When the Germans ruined a village near Ham, they carried away some fif ty-four girls and women between the ages of fourteen and forty. These girls were held behind the lines among the camp women, kept for the Huns. One chilly morning last April a French boy, lying on a board on the bottom of his trench, heard the wild shrieks of a girl. Standing on tiptoe he peeped over the top. . . . One week of cruelty had driven the girl insane. The German sol diers had lif ted her out of the trench, and with their bayonets had pushed her in the direction of the French lines. . . . What the French soldiers saw was a young woman, clothed in a dark blue skirt, her waist torn, her bosom exposed, her hair loose upon her shoulders. She was standing bewildered in No Man's Land. Now she

46
AGAINST OUR WILL

poured forth the pealing laughter of a maniac. . . . So terrible was the scene that for the moment the Frenchman and German alike forgot all warfare! Finally a German lif ted his rifle to the shoulder, and as the girl, rising to her feet . . . screamed, "The Boche! the Boche!" his rifle cracked, and the young woman sank slowly down.

And then the clincher:

That is why the fire sparkles in the eyes of the Allied soldiers when ever you suggest peace by negotiation, or a peace without victory.

But the masterpiece of German
Atrocities:
Their Nature and Phi losophy was this convoluted paragraph:

Many Americans have looked with horror upon the photograph of the mutilated bodies of women. Sacred forever the bosom of his mother, and not less sacred the body of every woman. Not content with mutilating the bodies of Allied officers, of Belgian boys, they lif ted the knife upon the loveliness of woman . . . . When the Hun joins the army . . . a few drops of blood are taken from the lef t arm, and the Wassermann blood culture is developed.
If
free from disease, the soldier receives a card giving him access to camp women, who are kept in the rear for the convenience of the German soldier.
If,
however, the Wassermann test shows that the German has syphilis . . . he must stay away from the camp women upon peril of his life . . . he will be shot like a dog. Having syphilis himself, the German will hand it on to the
.
camp girl, and she in turn will contaminate all the other soldiers, and that means the Kaiser would soon have no army. Therefore, the soldier that has this foul disease

. .
.
. has but one chance, namely to capture a Belgian or French girl; but using her means contaminating her, and she in turn will con taminate the next German using her. To save his own life, therefore, when the syphilitic German has used a French or Belgian girl, he cuts off her breast as warning to the next German soldier. The girl's life weighs less than nothing against lust or the possibility of losing his life by being charged with the contamination of his brother German.

Af ter reading this kind of emotional propaganda it might be said quite seriously that the raped women of France and Belgium, by the way in which their violation was cleverly turned to Allied advantage, played a real role in the ultimate defense of their countries. But if a reader believes that this unusual contribution far beyond the line of duty has been duly recognized in history, please be disabused of that notion. There was one further way to play with rape in World War I, and of course that happened, too. The final step was to deny that rape occurred at all.

When the war was over, a wholly predictable reaction set in. Scholars of the newly refined art of propaganda set about to un ravel its mysteries by trying to separate fact from fiction.
It
was inevitable that a deep bias against women ( particularly against women who say they have been raped ) would show in their en deavor. There had been some gross lies in the manufacturing of Allied propaganda and these were readily brought to light by the experts. Among the most famous of the fabricated wartime stories was the tale of German soldiers who spitefully cut the hands off Belgian children to render them unfit for fighting when they grew up. A few widely circulated atrocity photographs were shown to have been lif ted from other theaters of war. Some German Army

·excesses
were indisputable, even if they had been blown out of proportion for propaganda purposes. Yes, the cathedral at Rheims had been burned, and yes, the library at Louvain had truly been vandalized. But what about the rape of all those women? The crime that is by reputation "the easiest to charge and the hardest to prove" has traditionally been the easiest to disprove as well. The rational experts found it laughably easy to debunk accounts of rape, and laughably was the way they did it.

One lengthy study,
Atrocit y
Propaganda, 1914-1919, pub lished by the Yale University Press in 1941, expended no more than a few skimpy sentences to construct a witty dismissal of rape. They are worth examining as a perfect example of between-us-men logic in a serious work that ironically purports to explore the nature of propaganda. The author, James M. Read, reported that in French accounts of the German terror the phrase des
viols
et des
vols
( translation: rapes and thef ts ) cropped up with frequency. ( A police detective in any American city would hardly find such a combination startling since rape and thef t are of ten committed together if an opportunity arises. ) Read jumped on des
viols
et des
vols
as something suspicious if not downright sinister-a "eu phonious concatenation"-and lef t the reader to speculate that if any crime had been committed, it was probably the French sin of alliterative exaggeration!

48
I
AGAINST OUR WILL

Having thus delivered a mortal blow to rape, Read finished it off in another half paragraph. Addressing himself to the validity of 427 depositions of atrocity taken in northern France during Oc tober and November of the first year of the war, after the German forces had retreated, he wrote, "Three hundred were sworn state ments; approximately
100
were not attested, while the remainder lacked even names. The latter cases were those of women who had been attacked. One or two of these were almost ludicrous in the paucity of facts, such as the declaration of 'Dame X, 38 years old, at Compiegne.' " Professor Read then availed himself of the opportu nity to reprint Dame X's testimony, which even he admitted was atypical: "I swear to tell the truth, and I consent to make a declaration to you of the facts of which I have been a victim, but I would be crushed if my deposition were made public . . ." To hammer home the point, Read wrote, "After this somewhat non committal statement followed four rows of dots."

The reluctance of Dame X to have the story of her humilia; tion set in type and publicized is far from an unusual attitude, even for our present day. Af ter all, she had to live in Compiegne for the rest of her life. The dots do not refute her credibility; they merely deny authentic details to history. Other depositions, as we can see from Toynbee and Morgan, were obviously more specific. But the declaration of Dame X of Compiegne represents the sum total of
.
factual information on rape that Read presented in his otherwise heavily annotated study of fact and propaganda in World War
I.
To the professor the case of Dame X was enough ammunition to make his point that rape reports could hardly be taken seriously by a scholar of his most estimable stature.

WORLD WAR
II

As interpreted by the loyal philosopher-servants of the Third Reich, fascism's very nature was an exaggeration of the values that normal society held to be masculine. Goebbels himself had said as much, and before him
_
_
.
tzsch
that fount of inspiration, had instructed, "Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior." Therefore, it was not surprising that the ideology of rape burst into perf ect flower as Hitler's armies goose—

stepped over the face of Europe in the early days of World War

II.

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