Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (28 page)

Sexual violence is a war crime people like to ascribe to the enemy. The mass
rapes of German women by
Red Army soldiers at the
end of World War II are a standard element of Germans’ recollections of that conflict. The same, however, cannot be said of sexual crimes committed by the SS and the Wehrmacht. In this area, the myth of the
honorable German fighter remains intact. Sociologist
Regina Mühlhäuser has recently investigated the various sexual facets of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
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They include not just sexual violations of women as the Wehrmacht occupied towns and villages and in the run-up to mass executions, but also the swapping of sex for favors and the relationships between soldiers and
Ukrainian women, some of which resulted in pregnancies or marriages.

It is hardly surprising that sex plays such a major role in war. Sexuality is one of the most important aspects of human existence, especially
male human existence. Conversely, it is positively bizarre that
sex has so rarely been examined in research on war and violence—be it in the form of
rape, “consensual” exploitation of relations of
power,
prostitution, or homosexuality. This blind spot is by no means the result of lack of good, available sources. It shows how removed from everyday reality sociology and
history sometimes can be. Wartime soldiers are by and large youngish men who have been separated from their real or would-be partners and freed from many social restraints. When stationed in occupied areas, they are given the sort of an individual power they would never enjoy in civilian society. Moreover, the sexual opportunities presented by this situation occur within a reference frame of masculine
camaraderie, in which bragging about sexual prowess is a normal part of everyday communication.

We should not mistakenly see every form of sexual violence perpetrated by soldiers as an exotic exception, made possible by the unusual situation of war. Everyday life offers no shortage of opportunities for various forms of
sexual escapism, provided one can afford them in a financial and social sense. They begin with “boys’ nights out” and extend to affairs, visits to prostitutes, and open violence in the form of fights. In other words, like physical violence and all other forms of excess, sexual escapism is anchored in everyday society. It is normally unleashed only within specific formats such as Carnival or niche cultures such as the pornography industry or swinger clubs. The sociological and historical blinders toward this underside of everyday social reality, which manifests itself in millions of ways, is what exoticizes the wartime acts in which soldiers live out their violent and sexual impulses. But strictly speaking, this is nothing more than a shift in the framework that gives the more powerful the opportunity to do things that they already enjoy doing or would like to do.

Mühlhäuser’s study is not the only evidence we have of cases in which women were coerced into giving sexual favors with promises that they would not be killed—only to subsequently be taken out and shot. In the
British POW camp
Latimer House, German sailor
Horst Minnieur told his previously cited story about the “pretty
Jewess,” who became a victim of a mass execution after doing
forced labor in a German
barracks. What occurs to his listener to say next is the following:

It seems to have been common, accepted practice to execute Jewish women after
sex so that soldiers would not have to worry about sanctions following a “racial crime,” and Minnieur apparently finds nothing scandalous in admitting that he, too, abused the Jewish victim. In a study of the
German occupation of parts of the Soviet Union, historian
Andrej Angrick has determined that officers of
SS Einsatzgruppe Sk 10a habitually raped Jewish women to the point where they fell unconscious.
³¹⁸
Historian
Bernd Greiner has documented similar cases in the
Vietnam War.
³¹⁹

Mass executions alone weren’t the only opportunities to perpetrate
sexual violence. The same also applied to more everyday situations such as women being forced to strip naked for
interrogations at which multiple male soldiers were present.
³²⁰
There were also “
theater groups.” These consisted above all, in Angrick’s description, of “pretty
Russian women and girls who wanted better food rations … After performances, the girls danced and drank with [SS men], and agreements were eventually reached. Outside of town, the commando leadership would arrange get-togethers of this sort in occupied houses and named ‘custodians’ who were to ‘watch over’ the buildings. There were also suggestions of other sorts of sexual amusements—love affairs with the daughters of the local mayor, ‘song evenings’ with alleged Russian singers, village festivals and nights of excessive drinking.”
³²¹
Willy Peter Reese wrote:

Medicinal statistics document the level of sexual activity among soldiers. At a field
hospital in
Kiev, for example,
doctors spent most of their time treating skin and
venereal diseases. After inspecting the facility, the SS doctor
Karl Gebhardt acidly remarked that “the emphasis no longer lay on clinical and surgical procedure.”
³²³

The surveillance protocols are full of references to
sexually transmitted disease. For example, a navy lieutenant proclaimed:

That percentage does not seem to have been exceptionally high. In cities like
Minsk and
Riga, so-called
sanitary salons were set up. Soldiers were supposed to visit them after having sex in order to ward off potential infections. An account from
Mühlhäuser’s study describes them as follows: “The ‘sanitization’ consisted of being washed with soap and water and cleansed with sublimate solution whereupon a small disinfecting rod was inserted into the urethra. A balm was used to combat potential
syphilis. Afterward, the physician would record the treatment in his ‘troop sanitization book’ and issue the soldier a receipt, proving he had done his duty.”
³²⁵

The mere fact that such institutions existed, together with a whole bureaucracy concerning venereal disease, shows how widespread and well known soldiers’ sexual activity was. Other than the “
racial crime” of having sex with Jewish women, little was kept secret. Some soldiers even boasted about the number of venereal diseases they had contracted.
³²⁶
The sanitary services in any case had their hands full trying to prevent infections and keep soldiers fit for battle.

Nonetheless, since neither disciplinary measures nor appeals to soldiers’ sense of duty could prevent rampant excess, the Wehrmacht hit upon the idea of running their own
brothels. An official announcement from the Security Service in the occupied Soviet Union read: “For the purpose of restricting the spread of sexual diseases, the possibility for enemy agent activity in the everyday interactions between German and Russian persons and the resultant eradication of the necessary distance to persons within the Russian arena, it is being considered whether or not to establish Wehrmacht bordellos in a variety of cities.”
³²⁷

The history of how these institutions were set up and how “racially suitable”
prostitutes were identified and coerced would demand a chapter of its own. In any case, those details did not concern the POWs in the surveillance protocols. They simply told of their experiences in bordellos:

The administrative framework wasn’t always clear, as emerged from a discussion between twenty-four-year-old Captain
Wilhelm Dette and Lieutenant Colonel
Wilfried von Müller-Rienzburg about the legal consequences of
gonorrhea infection:

Leaving aside the disciplinary complications they could have, bordello visits clearly were among the more pleasant aspects of warfare:

Historical research has thus far shed very little light on this everyday fact of warfare. That’s hardly surprising since soldiers didn’t mention such goings-on in their letters home to their loved ones, and postwar memoirs usually intended to justify the authors’ actions rarely include descriptions of whorehouses. Postwar prosecutors’ investigations were only concerned with
rapes in the context of
mass executions. Other forms of potential
sexual coercion were legally irrelevant and thus do not crop up in the investigation files.

But without doubt, sex was part of soldiers’ everyday existence—with a whole series of consequences for the women involved:

Excerpts of this sort contain more information than may be immediately apparent. Sauermann’s reference to “their Frenchwomen, their Czechs” implicitly makes it clear that the women in question were not voluntarily prostituting themselves to German soldiers.
³³²
Conversations about “bordellos” and “girls” are always about forced prostitution and sexual violence, but those concepts are never directly addressed in the protocols. From the soldiers’ perspective, it was simply a given that foreign women were at their sexual disposal, especially considering that they weren’t allowed to “hit up German girls.”

Clearly, sexual violence in war is not always spontaneous and unregulated. Sometimes, as in the example of the “
sanitary salons,” it was officially administered. In any case, sex was one of the central aspects of soldiers’ experience of war—all the more so since it can be safely assumed that the U.S. and British officers who made the protocols had no interest in recording the endless discussions on the topic of women. As neither the British nor the Americans likely thought the subject to be of much use in the war, the surveillance activities tended to concentrate on discussions more relevant to military strategy, conversations about aircraft, bombs, machine guns, and miracle weapons. But it seems entirely plausible that groups of mostly young men would have been just as interested in women as technology, and that the POWs would have talked just as much about sex as about military hardware. One excerpt from the protocols speaks volumes: