The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (34 page)

In the typical case, one or more armed soldiers en- tered a German house, either by force or by stratagem (such as a pretense of searching for German soldiers), and engaged in sexual intercourse with one or more of the female occupants. Sometimes the act was accom- plished through the application of direct force, at other times by submission resulting from the occupants’ fear for their lives. Housebreaking, larceny, the shooting of firearms, and the commission of various violent crimes upon the occupants, were common concomitants of these rapes and an increasing occurrence of acts of sodomy upon the rape victims was noted.

The JAG report claimed that “it was only in a very ex- ceptional case that the German victim vigorously re-

sisted her armed attackers…. In the great majority of cases, there was no such resistance. The German vic- tims were apparently thoroughly cowed by the threat- ened use of the weapons in the hands of members of the conquering army. Their mortal fear was not entirely groundless, as demonstrated in a number of cases in which the Germans who sought to prevent the sol- diers from carrying out their designs to commit rape were mercilessly murdered.” This lack of resistance became a puzzle for the military court: “if a soldier, armed as he was required by orders to be, enters a German home and engages in sexual intercourse with a German woman, who submits to his lust through fear (fear of his weapons and fear sometimes engendered by Nazi propaganda), giving no outward signs of re- sistance, is this rape?” Even though German accusers told the courts that “it was best not to resist; otherwise we would be killed,” the courts believed that in some cases, a failure to resist might indicate some degree of consent; or at least it could undermine a finding of intent to rape. Generally, however, the Army courts- martial found that the context mattered: armed men, in a country under military occupation, had enormous power as well as enormous responsibility. “A man who enters a strange house, carrying a rifle in one hand, is not justified in believing he has accomplished a seduc- tion on the other hand.”
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The Judge Advocate General’s report referred to the increase in rape cases as an “avalanche,” though the actual number of cases it considered—552—seems small when one considers that 1.6 million U.S. soldiers were in Germany at the end of the war. To be sure, as the JAG’s report acknowledged, “many more rapes undoubtedly occurred than were reflected in general court-martial records.” Rape charges were often set- tled on the spot by officers; unknown numbers were never reported. This was an embarrassing subject for the Army and it was not one they wanted aired in pub- lic. When on March 14, a Stars and Stripes reporter filed a story about the widespread prevalence of rape in the Rhineland, it was promptly suppressed by Army censors. That piece noted that “since the records of such assaults come from reports of the Germans them- selves to U.S. Military Government officials or other Army authorities, it is probable that the total number of rape cases is considerably higher” than the number that had made it through Army channels.
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Yet there may be another reason that cases of rape were not as numerous as the overall size of the U.S. military pres- ence might have predicted: U.S. soldiers who wanted sex did not have to resort to the use of force. They could buy sex, cheaply.

From the moment American troops put their boots on

German soil, they sought out German women. The frat- ernization ban that General Eisenhower had imposed in September 1944 never worked. As early as October 1944, the editor in chief of Stars and Stripes, Major Ar- thur Goodfriend, prepared a devastating critique of the policy and passed this up to his superiors. Goodfriend, who was then passing through the Army in the guise of “Private Arthur Goodwin” in a bid for good story material, wrote that American soldiers found it easy, and even enjoyable, to talk to German civilians; if they were to be punished for doing so, the Army would have a massive disciplinary challenge on its hands. In towns outside Aachen, Goodfriend saw American soldiers help German housewives with their chores, play with children, and “through other acts of friendship make living more tolerable through the creation of a friendly atmosphere.” In the eyes of the GI, the Germans fared well when compared to the French: said one trooper, “’these people are cleaner and a damn sight friendlier than the frogs. They’re our kind of people.’” One com- manding officer of a battalion told Goodfriend, “’ When I see two or three thousand old and fear-crazed and feeble women and kids with all their belongings and their houses and futures all shot to hell, I can’t help but feel pity…. We have no qualms about knocking down a city, but we do have pity for the old and weak.’” Sol- diers were looking for companionship, a respite in “the

agreeable cleanliness and warmth of German farms and homes,” and a “sanctuary from the misery and indignity of living and fighting through a winter cam- paign.”
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Soldiers were not looking chiefly for the company of elderly farmers. Saul Padover of the Psychological War- fare team put the situation bluntly. “ To a man bored and fed up with the company of other men, almost anything in skirts is a stimulant and a relief, and German women were not just skirts. They were undeniably attractive in a wholesome, physical, sexy way. They were what the boys called ‘easy’…GI and Fräulein were magnet and steel.”
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American troops, now fanning out into the cities and towns of Germany and setting up barracks and camps as part of the occupation administration, found German women willing to exchange sex for food, cigarettes, chocolates, soap, and other luxuries. As the historian Petra Goedde has noted, “the border line be- tween love affairs and prostitution became blurred” in occupied Germany. German girls, who lacked so many goods, “used their bodies as bargaining chips.” They resorted to prostitution “to save themselves and their families from starvation” or to gain access to scarce goods and cigarettes.
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And the GI had an astonishing quantity of goods to offer. The Army provided him with candy, coffee, cigarettes in limitless abundance, soap,

towels, writing paper, pens and ink, clothing, and six quarts of liquor a month. In the post exchange (PX), the soldier could buy at reduced price whatever little luxu- ries he might desire, and in clubs, mess tents, barracks, and snack bars that were erected for his comfort, he could get doughnuts, coffee, ice cream, theater tickets, haircuts, and recreation. With his pockets filled with desirable and scarce goods, the GI found himself able to buy sex with the greatest of ease.
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This illicit sex economy threatened to erupt into a major health crisis, as venereal disease rates soared among GIs once they moved into Germany. Medical Corps officials complained that the fraternization ban deterred GIs from getting checkups at prophylactic stations for fear that they would be fined for fraterniz- ing. Eisenhower on June 11 had to issue a special or- der that made nonsense of his own nonfraternization policy: “the contraction of venereal disease…will not be used directly or indirectly as evidence of fraterni- zation.” Soldiers who got treatment for VD would be spared the sixty-five-dollar fine that those caught frat- ernizing had to pay. (How one could contract VD from a German in the absence of fraternization remained un- clear.) Another factor helping to spread VD: in summer 1945, the Army suddenly found itself facing a condom shortage—supplies fell from six per man to four per

man each month. VD rates skyrocketed. In June 1945, Army VD rates were at the highest they had ever been, with ground forces hitting a record rate of 140 cases per 1,000 men, or 14 percent; by September 1945, the figure reached 190 cases per 1,000 men. The alarmed chief surgeon of the U.S. forces, European Theater, Major General Albert W. Kenner, noted that with two million men in the European Theater, he might have as many as 380,000 VD cases on his hands. In November, American aircraft flew in emergency doses of penicil- lin for the treatment of gonorrhea among German civil- ians. VD rates did not subside until the middle of 1946. Clearly, the American soldier liked to fraternize.
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On June 2, General Eisenhower made an important gesture. He cabled his superior in Washington, Gen- eral George Marshall, seeking approval for an easing of the ban on talking to German children. “Everyone must recognize,” he wrote, “that the American soldier is not going to be stern and harsh with young children, but on the contrary feels an inner compulsion con- stantly to make friends with them.” General Marshall agreed, and replied that “there is a natural tie between the soldier and small children”; an order revising the ban on fraternization with German children was soon issued.
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But this only opened the floodgates; a wave of press criticism erupted, as reporters wrote stories de-

picting “hourly” breaches of the fraternization ban. In the British zone of occupation, it was “common knowl- edge” that it was being ignored.
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On June 25, the New York Times ran a long piece by Drew Middleton report- ing that senior officers in the U.S. Military Government opposed the ban; it was simply unenforceable. “Ger- man girls wait on the roads near the woods outside the occupied towns and villages for soldiers who stroll out of town with their pockets stuffed with candy, chewing gum and cigarettes.” According to one GI, “’girls throw themselves at you if you give them half a chance.’”
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On July 14, Eisenhower conceded the fraternization policy was a failure by rescinding restrictions on public con- versation with German adults, though GIs had been openly defying the ban for months. In October, all re- strictions on fraternization were lifted.

The lifting of the ban merely acknowledged the close and intimate ties that had sprung up between Ameri- cans and German women. A Time magazine reporter, himself evidently taken by the charms of the Ger- mans, asked a few women in a Bavarian lakeside town their reaction to the news. “Ilse Schmidt, a gor- geous 19-year-old brunette with a figure designed to make men drool,” seemed bored by the conversation and asked the reporter for a cigarette. “A 28-year-old blonde, blousy German girl named Helga” who had

been sharing a hotel room with an American GI for over a month was pleased that the two did not have to hide their romance anymore. Two other girls leaning out of the window of the hotel, Brigitte Heidenrich and Ingeborg Gassau, both twenty-one, “were giggling like bobby-soxers” when they were publicly propositioned by two GIs. One of the soldiers shouted up, “Hey there Brigitte, how ya doing, baby? How about us coming up? It’s not verboten anymore!’” The door swung open and in he went.
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AD LOVE CONQUERED all? It is tempting, in light of these stories about German-American sexual relations, to depict the first summer

of the occupation as suffused in a pink glow of love, lust, and giggling intimacies between youthful girls and brawny GIs. The sweet passions of the heart had triumphed, it seemed, over ideological foulness. The German girls were not only pretty; they were “so neat and clean in their freshly washed and pressed sum- mer dresses, their bobby-socks and their long braids,” gushed an enthusiastic reporter. Overall, the American soldier was amazed at how “surprisingly well dressed and healthy” the former enemy was. Germans also worked hard. “In a matter of weeks, cities that had been

deathly ruins” were transformed into “neat piles of brick and stone; bombed houses, patched with scraps from neighboring heaps, became habitable hutches.” In a short time, “the angers of battle, the horrors of the death camps, were wearing off.” The dutiful Germans and the big-hearted Americans seemed inclined to for- give, forget, and move on.
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Certainly many Germans initially seemed pleased by the remarkably forgiving attitude the Americans and British demonstrated toward them. The Strategic Bombing Survey conducted 3,711 interviews with civil- ians in thirty-three western German cities in the sum- mer of 1945. Though their intention was to uncover the impact of wartime bombing on civilians, the first ques- tion Germans were asked was, “How is it going with you now under the occupation?” Invariably, the answer was, “good.” Germans were enormously relieved by the end of the war and the end of the terrible bombing. They were pleased to find themselves under American or British control rather than Russian. And they were amazed at the leniency with which they were treated. They had been pumped full of horrible propaganda in the final months of the war, dark invocations of rapes, kidnappings, forced labor, extermination that lay in store for a defeated people. The reality was wholly dif- ferent. “ We were delighted that the war had ended,”

said a fifty-three-year-old housewife from Münster. “I’ve had enough of raids. I’m scared stiff of them.” The occupation, said a twenty-four-year-old house cleaner from Witten, was “going quite well. One has rest finally and one doesn’t have to run into the cel- lar.” The foreign troops were “quite friendly.” The oc- cupation was “much better than I expected,” said a re- lieved housewife from Dortmund. “ We were told that the most terrible things would happen—rape, looting, robbery—even that our own children would be taken away from us, and we would be systematically starved.” But she had no such problems. A forty-year-old lawyer from Munich was distressed at the criminal behavior of DPs (displaced persons), but the Americans had been “very well behaved.” A former clerk in the highway of- fice in Munich said he was “satisfied, and delighted the Americans came.” A sixty-three-year-old worker in an aluminum factory in Neumünster said that he “really could not complain. If I ever feel anything disagreeable, I only think that the war is over due to those occupa- tion troops, and therefore those terrible air attacks on Neumünster stopped. I greeted the allied troops as lib- erators from those bad bombing attacks.” A housewife from Kempten, in the Rhineland, told her interviewers that when the Americans did not kidnap her children and prove to be villains, the women of the town “broke out laughing, and couldn’t stop, their fear had been so

great. I laughed more in the last few weeks than I have for years.” A thirty-eight-year-old housewife from Dortmund who had worked in a factory in the last stag- es of the war thought “the troops would despise us and that they might even be cruel to us. But they are very friendly and helpful. I can’t get accustomed to being treated so well by your men.”
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