Rapes
Rapes were allowed in practice by the German military (officially forbidden, however) in eastern and southeastern Europe, while northern and western countries were relatively spared.
[75][76] In
Occupied Denmark, which initially agreed to collaborate with Nazi Germany, rapes were not widespread, and German officials promised to punish them.
[75] By contrast thousands of Soviet female nurses, doctors and field medics fell victim to rape when captured, and were often murdered afterwards.
[17]
German soldiers used to
brand the bodies of captured partisan women – and other women as well – with the words "Whore for Hitler's troops" and rape them.
[77] Following their capture some German soldiers vividly bragged about committing rape and rape-homicide.
[78] Susan Brownmiller argues that rape played a pivotal role in Nazi aim to conquer and destroy people they considered inferior such as Jews, Russians, Poles
[79] An extensive list of examples rapes committed by German soldiers was compiled in so called "Molotov Note" in 1942. Brownmiller points out that Nazis used rape as a weapon of terror
[80]
Examples of mass rapes in Soviet Union committed by German soldiers include:
- Smolensk: German command opened a brothel for officers in which hundreds of women and girls were driven by force, often by arms and hair.[81]
- Lviv: 32 women working in a garment factory were raped and murdered by German soldiers, in public park. A priest trying to stop the atrocity was murdered.
- Borissov in Belarus: 75 women and girls attempting to flee at the approach of the German troops were captured by them. The Germans first raped and then savagely murdered 36 of their number. By order of a German officer named Hummer, the soldiers marched L. I. Melchukova, a 16-year-old girl, into the forest, where they raped her. A little later some other women who had also been dragged into the forest saw some boards near the trees and the dying Melchukova nailed to the boards. The Germans had cut off her breasts in the presence of other women.
- Kerch:imprisoned women were raped and tortured;breasts were cut off,stomachs ripped open, limbs cut off and eyes gouged out. A mass grave full of mutilated bodies of young women was found after Germans were driven out of town.
- Lviv-Germans soldiers raped Jewish girls, who were murdered after getting pregnant[82] It is estimated that over a million children were born to Russian women, fathered by German soldiers.[83]:56 [84]
Author Ursula Schele, estimated in the Journal "
Zur Debatte um die Ausstellung Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944" that in one of ten sexual intercourse with German soldiers would have led to pregnancy and therefore its probable, while not provable that up to ten millions women in the Soviet Union could have been raped by the Wehrmacht.
[85]:9
Birgit Beck, in her work
Rape: The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmacht, 1939–1944, describes the leniency in punishing sex crimes by German authorities in the East, at the same time pointing out heavy punishments applied in the West.
[86] If a soldier who committed a rape was subsequently convicted by a court-martial, he would usually be sentenced to four years in prison
[87] The German penal code was also valid for soldiers in war.
[88] However, until 1944 only 5.349 soldiers of the Wehrmacht on all fronts were sentenced because of indecency offence "Sittlichkeitsvergehen" or rape "Notzucht".
[89] Historian Mühlhäuser believe that sexual assault was not an exception but common, and that the actual number of rapes committed by German soldiers are without question much greater.
[90]
Other sources estimate that rapes of Soviet women by the
Wehrmacht range up to 10,000,000 incidents, with between 750,000 and 1,000,000 children being born as a result.
[83][84][85][91]
In Soviet Russia rapes were only a concern if they undermined military discipline.
[86] Since 1941, rape was theoretically punishable with the death sentence, although, rapes were rarely prosecuted in practice and rapes by Germans of non-German women were not taken seriously, nor was it punishable by death, especially in the eastern European territories.
[83]:288 In October 1940 the laws on rape were changed, making it a "petitioned crime" – that is a crime for which punishment had to be requested. Historian Christa Paul writes that this resulted in "a nearly complete absence of prosecution and punishment for rape".
[83]:288 There were rape cases in the east where the perpetrators were sentenced if the rape was highly visible, damaging to the image of the German Army and the courts were willing to pass a condemning verdict against the accused.
[83]:289
According to the historian Regina Mühlhäuser, the
Wehrmacht also used sexual violence and undressing in numerous cases of interrogations.
[92] Mühlhäuser adds that the number of illegitimate children born in the occupied regions did not exceed the prewar time. She comes to the conclusion that rapes on the Eastern front were not singular cases but has to admit that the state of source material is very poor.
