SCHULTKA: The things that are happening today are really beyond the pale. For example, some paratroopers stormed a house in Italy and killed both of the men there. They were both fathers, and one had two daughters. They screwed both of them, really gave them a going over, and then killed them. The house had those wide Italian beds. They tossed the daughters on the bed, stuck the men’s dicks in and gave them another real screwing.
CZOSNOWSKI: That’s inhuman. But it’s common for guys to tell stories about things they never really did. They’re colossal braggarts.
SCHULTKA: Then there’s the one about the tank trenches in Kiev. There was a guy from the Gestapo, a high-ranking SS leader, who had a Russian, pretty as a picture. He wanted to screw her, but she didn’t let him. One day later, she was standing in front of the trench. He mowed her down himself with his MP and then screwed her when she was dead.342
Even if some of the sexual horror stories were, as the listener in this excerpt suspected, made up, atrocities of this sort did take place in reality.343 Reports of rapes rarely elicited surprise, to say nothing of condemnation. Even rapes of German women by the enemy were accepted, as the following story illustrates:
LANGFELD: Near BABRUYSK, it happened that a bus containing 30 female news agency assistants was attacked by partisans. The bus was driving through the woods, and the partisans shot at it. Tanks arrived but too late. They got the bus, the girls and the partisans. But in the meantime, the girls had all been gone through, given a real good screwing. Some of them were dead. They’d rather spread their legs than get killed, that’s understandable. It took three days until they were found.
HELD: They sure had a lot to fuck.344
At this point enough has been said about the reports of sexual violence. The stories recorded in the surveillance protocols clearly reveal the omnipresence of sexual desires and sexual violence in the war. The previous two excerpts, from protocols made in the United States, speak volumes about soldiers’ view of women as mere means of satisfying sexual desires. Soldiers not only took for granted that sexual opportunities should be used. Talking about it was also nothing unusual or out of the ordinary:
KOKOSCHKA: There was this disgrace of a private who held a pistol to an Italian girl’s head so that she’d fuck him.
SAEMMER: Yeah, that’s what privates are like.345
