This is an excerpt from testimony in a postwar investigation of the crimes of the SS. It depicts how SS men exploited the situation of a war of extermination to commit acts of sexual violence. Wehrmacht soldiers of all stripes were also interested in exploring various sexual opportunities.
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.316 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:
HARTELT: I bet she let you sleep with her too?
MINNIEUR: Yes, but you had to take care not to be found out. It’s nothing new; it was really a scandal, the way they slept with Jewish women.317
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
