Except for a couple exceptions (one woman and an officer spoke standard Ukrainian they had learned in school), the Ukrainians I interviewed spoke a dialect that was difficult for even Ukrainians from other regions to understand. The language has a mix of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian words. An entire generation of children were never able to go to school because the German invasions and subsequent war. They either never learned standard Ukrainian or never used it, and spoke their local language.
I spoke Russian with my interpreter and recognized some of the standard Ukrainian words, but not the dialect. A Ukrainian service transcribed the interviews for me from the tapes. Afterward, I worked many months with a native Ukrainian woman in Minnesota to translate the interviews into English. I typed while she translated verbally. She came from another region of Ukraine, so very often the language was difficult for her to not only understand, but also to translate into English.
In her translations, the colloquialism of the original language comes through in the English. I never went in and correctly positioned the verbs or other awkward word order.
Process
Having attended a conference in Cherkasy, I then lived with the interpreter and his family in a small town in the region. My interpreter had some ideas of people we could speak with. A few people were in this town, but most were in the neighboring villages. While I was there, he kept making calls to find more people. We also asked at the interviews if the people knew anyone else. With many not having phones, we would show up at people’s doors spontaneously or ask people sitting on benches outside. A few times, we even stopped people on the road or walked past the house benches to ask babas sitting there. I remember him speaking loudly, sometimes even out of the car, “Baba! Do you remember the war?”
Sometimes after initiating the interviews with me, my interpreter left to do his own business. We planned this on a few occasions because we thought the women might open up more if there weren’t a man present. I would continue, hoping for the best and communicating with Russian, broken Ukrainian, and body language. Sometimes this was a little frustrating, but the women were grateful to share, and we did our best. They also knew that if I didn’t understand all the details in that moment I would eventually.
Additionally, with just a few exceptions, the people I interviewed spoke as if they hadn’t ever told these stories before. The words poured out like water from a dam. Their memories came out in a jumble and a rush. The interviews are verbatim, exactly how how the conversations went, how people remember stories. They had not prepared their stories.
Timing of the Interviews
In 1998 the former Soviet Union was experiencing a tremendous recession. People across the country were having a hard time finding work, enough food, and basic living supplies, such as soap. Several Babas complained to me, a few crying about the hardships they faced. They pined for their lives under Brezhnev, when things were more stable and they had enough food on the table.
Some of the people had been teenagers during the war and others small children. A few were young adults. I interviewed three men. One was an army officer in charge of a regiment of soldiers moving west. Another was a child who witnessed the Germans raping his mother until she died. Unofficially, my interpreter’s father also told me of heading toward Berlin and seeing the soldiers lined up to rape. At the time, sexual violence and the war was not a topic that many people had researched, let alone talked about.
I think it was painful for the people to talk about these memories, but it was also cathartic in a way. Only a few were distrustful of a westerner coming to “make money” off of their stories. (I actually only had more debt, LOL). Most of the interviewees lived in poverty
Difficulty of the Topic
Sexual violence and World War II is an extremely sad topic to research. Sometimes my interpreter did not fill me in as the interviews progressed. A few times he decided to let me find out on my own once I had the translations. The most graphic scene was a horrific surprise for me and my local Ukrainian friend. I will never forget us sitting at her table working together, and she suddenly coughed and sputtered. She had to leave the room for a cigarette. When she came back, it was hard for her to get the words out between her sobs.
Svitlana cried during many of the interviews. I would also get emotional, feeling the interviews again, as well as her personal pain. Anyone would have a hard time working so closely with these stories of such sad experiences. But she had experienced great losses during the war as well. Her baby sister had perished because her starving mom had run out of milk while they were on the run. After that, they still had a long journey before reaching safety.
Somehow the process of her reading, speaking, and I typing and asking questions, was incredibly painful. I will never forget sitting there with Svitlana, her wrinkled face, longer hair, and smoker’s voice and cough. The sound of her English, with the Ukrainianisms and accent, along with knowing the tragedies she had endured in Ukraine as a child during the war and in the United States as a woman is seared into my memory. She was a survivor in every sense of the word.
Living the Topic of Sexual Violence and War
Translating approximately fifty hours of interviews was a monumental project that took us more than a full year. I relived the interviews with the Ukrainians and again intimately felt the sadness of what they had told me. The experience of working with someone who intimately understood the tragedy of what she was translating made the process even more emotional and poignant. I am truly and forever grateful for Svitlana’s contribution to this work. I saw the pain it caused her, but I know she also understood how important it is to get these stories out.
The Silence of Sexual Violence and War
It was extremely rare for someone to ask openly about sexual violence during the war. Similar to other Slavic cultures, Ukrainians did not speak about sex or sexual violence. The silence was deafening, but without my interpreter to approach the villagers with this topic, I don’t think I would have gotten very far. Often, during the interviews, the women or men would whisper amongst each other.
One woman told me her whole sad story in the third person, as if it had happened to someone else. Several other people had told her story and led us to her, but even as an elderly person, she could or would not talk about it openly as her experience. As a survivor myself, I know this silence and shame. I think the Slavic and Christian Orthodox culture also throws even more conservative, often misogynist ideas into the mix of feelings one has about sexual violence.
The idea that women were to blame for their rapes was deeply ingrained. Even my educated interpreter, who lived in a town in a nice house with an educated wife and daughters, had to rethink a few things. After one interview about a Polish man who drugged a Ukrainian woman and had sex with her while she was passed out, he said that he didn’t think that was rape. We had several conversations about this, and when I left he said that he saw some things differently now. Society blamed that poor woman and harassed and bullied her daughter born from the rape.
Finally
Please read these interviews with a forgiving attitude toward the language and with respect. Imagine that you are listening to this older person speak of starvation, deprivation, cunning and deceit, as well as violence many of us cannot even fathom.
I remember how welcoming so many of the women were, how sad the one man was, and in general all the emotion that we all felt while speaking with one another. People often teared up talking about the war. They also could not believe they were speaking with an American since it was not a common occurrence to have an Americans visit these villages.
Another memorable interview was of one woman who basically yelled for two hours. She was so excited to talk, to have visitors, and to meet an American. I thoroughly enjoyed this interview, but had a terrible headache afterward, and my interpreter was in some trouble at home because we arrived there so late. She kept calling me her little bird, and in between talking to us, she would screech at her chickens to be quiet. She was so sweet and had lived through so much: the Civil War, collectivization and starvation, and then the war.
Most of the people were extremely poor and had either nothing to offer me or something very small. They would pull out an old fold-out chair for me to sit on or they would have me sit on a bench or elsewhere. Before I could sit though, they would put a piece of newspaper on the chair so that I wouldn’t get my clothes dirty. They treated me with the utmost respect and generosity. I had little gifts to give to them, but it felt so small considering the conditions they were enduring.
Also
Because of the colloquialisms and grammatical errors in the translations from my Ukrainian friend, I have been torn as to “clean” up the English to a more standard form or leave them as is. I have a feeling that she would be fine with whatever I decide. What she did for me for very little pay was enormous. It was difficult mentally and emotionally. I never changed the interviews to more standard English, because I wasn’t sharing them. I wrote about them and only quoted small portions in my published work.
For now, I will post them basically as they are. Later, if time permits, I can perhaps annotate or provide cleaner versions with links to the originals. I think to be more expedient, since I have waited so long to get this done (life basically got in the way), this is a good plan.
* * *
* In addition to the over thirty interviews, I consulted archival documents in Germany, Latvia, Estonia, and the United States. Because of the nature of the topic, the full text is available free of charge online.
The abstract to Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front During World War II.
Major Kopelev, an officer in the Soviet Red Army during World War II wrote about an incident when a screaming Polish woman came running toward him and other officers. Drunken soldiers interested in sex followed her. According to Kopelev, the lieutenant in charge waved his pistol and told the men to go away or he would execute them because of the Rokossovsky Order #006*: “For rape – execution on the spot.” Kopelev drew his pistol, but did not want to shoot one of his own men, this “brave soldier blind- drunk on vodka.” The intoxicated man came at [Kopelev], “hoarse with anger, spraying saliva. ‘You fucking officers, fuck your mothers! You! Fighting the war on our backs! Where were you when my tank was on fire? Where were you, fuck your mother, when I set fire to that Tiger?’”**
Kopelev wrote that he tried to convince the man not to rape by shouting, “Don’t disgrace yourself! Leave the girl alone! She’s Polish. Don’t you have a mother, a sister? Have you thought of them?” but the man yelled back, “and what did the Germans think of? Get out of my way, fuck your mother! I need a woman! I spilled my blood for this!” And other tank men, disgusted with the officers, mumbled comments such as, “some commanders…They’ll shoot their own men over a German bitch.”**
My self analysis and self empathy led me to feel empathy for the rapists
About twenty years ago, when I read this passage from Kopelev’s memoir I was researching sexual violence only because I was angry about my own experiences. Yet through my horror, I felt empathy for the soldiers. I didn’t condone their actions. But I somehow understood why they thought they had a right to take sex from others during the war. I was surprised at my spontaneous reaction, but the moment stuck with me: I knew there was a connection between my pain and the desperation and anger the men expressed, or I wouldn’t have felt the empathy.
* * *
Today there are too many attempts to control other people’s destinies. But if more of us had a greater ability to sympathize with others, policies that ensure people autonomy and self-respect would be more commonplace. Even though we do not all have great trauma and our emotional wounds vary, we can nevertheless build a more empathetic world by taking our own inner growth seriously. Intellectually and emotionally, such examination opens our hearts and minds to sympathy and even empathy. It is as though we were standing in other people’s shoes and seeing the world from their perspective. My experience might seem extreme, but everyone can look inside for insight. Everyone can become more open to others’ experiences, regardless of the level of their trauma.
* * *
For thirty years, I’ve lived with post-traumatic stress disorder while actively trying to grow beyond it. I now understand that it was my determination to face, fight, and heal my emotional wounds that allowed me to understand these soldiers and feel this empathy. In my family of origin, I am the first to break the generations-long cycle of trauma. Instead of passing trauma and subsequent behaviors to my children, I nurtured their self-esteem. I taught them self-care and how to express their emotions.
I believe if we honestly face our demons without numbing the pain, we become stronger and happier. Additionally, we are better able to teach our students to be empathetic. Simply put, self analysis leads to empathy. This emotional work is how we will change our divided world. The current rise of fascism and other forms of hateful politics are possible because individuals fear and see those as “others” despite the many similarities we have. The more we looks inside ourselves, the more we can teach compassion, insight, and empathy to those around us, especially our students and children. Self analysis leads to empathy. This helps stem the tide of hate and fear.
Self analysis and empathy: not condonation
Before seeking help, my despair let me to drink large amounts of alcohol to numb my feelings. I did not rape anyone, but instead turned my anger inward. Still, I too had strong feelings of being out of control and beyond help with anger. I had a scream so loud in my head that I sometimes thought I would have to die. It felt as though I would never be able to live with this much pain inside me. In my anguish, I sought connections with others in ways that were dangerous because of the alcohol and people involved. The wartime rapists also sought connections: sexual connection and release from their desperation. And the motivation for sexual activity fueled the abuse of their physical power, regardless of the female’s desires.
My analysis of why some soldiers rape is not equivalent to condonation. Rape does not have to be a natural part of civilian life or armed conflicts. Individual perpetrators and countries should be prosecuted for all wartime sexual crimes. This attempt to understand wartime trauma, however, helps us understand civilian peacetime struggles.
War time context
How could anyone, let alone a survivor of multiple rapes, feel empathy with these rapists? We must understand both the wartime context for these men and my civilian peacetime context. The eastern front was one of the most brutal areas of warfare during WWII. Soviet soldiers were the most desperate of all soldiers. Often, they did not have adequate training or supplies, including food, water, weapons, and even sufficient clothing and boots. However, the state usually provided plenty of liquor.*** Alcohol helped deaden soldiers’ senses and emotions to the horrors they experienced and perpetrated. This kept them moving, but loosened their inhibitions. Similar to peacetime, alcohol and sexual violence went hand in hand, rendering the nightmare even worse.
Additionally, the Soviet Union lost more of their population during WWII than any other country in the world.**** The desperation men and women felt is something that we can barely begin to understand. Imagine the trauma of seeing Germans carting off women and girls to serve in German military brothels. Or the experience of seeing entire towns disappear to mass graves. Imagine knowing the Germans were attempting to exterminate Slavs through starvation. And you thought about your own malnourished family dying at home because of their policy. As the Soviet soldiers moved west they saw bodies of men, women, and children, murdered, raped, or otherwise violated and mutilated. They also saw carcasses of livestock, cats, and other animals. There were destroyed trees, houses, farmyards, outbuildings, etc.: these soldiers were living a surreal and horrifying existence.
AP/Ryan Stennes. A horse in the ruins of Stalingrad, 1942.
Exaggerated horror
Everything during war was exaggerated, including the drunkenness, filth, and anguish of the rapists, and the size of the rape groups. Even the condition of the girls, women, and men who were raped. In civilian life, historically and currently, much emphasis is put on the rape victim’s appearance and clothing. Similar to countless other examples, the current US president insinuated that one of his accusers wasn’t attractive enough for him to rape. Plus, in the popular press are countless articles about cleanliness and sex.
Yet during wartime, and specifically during WWII, the people were starving, dirty, and often diseased. But in their intoxicated and exhausted states, rapists would attack people they may not have otherwise. The pretense of disease sometimes helped victims deflect unwanted attention from soldiers. Nevertheless, German and Soviet soldiers raped civilians and concentration or POW camp prisoners, regardless of how old or clean their victims were. It was as if many, not all, men turned into frenzied, demonic toddlers who took any toy they saw. They moved in an inebriated, foggy nightmare, their bodies responding to their base instincts of eating, drinking, and fulfilling sexual urges.
Patriarchy
Acknowledging the horror of the Soviet WWII experience is only part of the context necessary to explain my reaction to Kopelev’s passage: patriarchal culture was inveterate throughout Russia and Eastern Europe. Centuries of oppression of Slavic women fueled men’s beliefs in their right to sex, whether with their spouse, girlfriend, or stranger. Stalin wasn’t concerned about the mass raping. He is quoted as saying that the men had “earned” the right to sexual release, having fought so hard. These patriarchal beliefs were what some men fell back on in their few moments of respite from seeing blood, entrails, destroyed tanks, corpses, and severed body parts. Having witnessed such monstrosities and many not expecting to survive themselves, in their few hours of reprieve, almost like automatons, some turned to the physical comfort and orgasmic release of sexual activity.
Kopelev’s soldiers dismissed this woman as though she weren’t a sentient being. Despite being a survivor of my own kind of peacetime terror, I understand that because patriarchy told them sex was their right in these extreme circumstances they felt it was somehow a small price for the woman to pay for them to have sexual intercourse with her.
There are obvious problems with thinking that having sex with a soldier was a small price for a person to pay. Often females died from rapes or suffered such physical trauma. Rapists would have to have realized the rapes weren’t a small price to pay. A man at the end of a line of twenty or thirty would have raped someone who was more like a corpse. Her body would have been battered and smeared with blood and sperm. Eventually, she would have stopped screaming and would have passed out from pain and loss of blood. This was a huge price to pay.
Germans raped en masse during the war. They established a system of sexual slavery throughout the entire Reich and occupational territories. They forced thousands of woman of all nationalities, religions, and races to have sex with concentration camp prisoners and their soldiers.
Despite my focus on Red Army rapists, I do not present Kopelev’s testimony to support the long-held view that an eastern horde of rapists exceeded the beastliness of German sexual crimes. Western historians, politicians, and the media have pushed a racist agenda. They have highlighted the image of the lustful, maniacal, and drunken Slav from the east. Yet they have almost never acknowledged the sex crimes of the German Wehrmacht.
But the Germans indeed raped en masse, including females who were racially forbidden. They raped in towns, cities, in workplaces, and after battles. They also established a far-reaching, systematic system of sexual slavery. This consisted of hundreds of brothels all across Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa. The Germans set up brothels in camps, near battlefields, and in cities and towns. They seized females at gunpoint. They were subjected to up to dozens of rapes a day. Members of the Wehrmacht, SS, mercenary forces, and even concentration camp inmates who had “earned” a brothel visit took part in these rapes. It is paramount that historians and the general public acknowledge these crimes against humanity. It is a kind of racism to only embrace and write about the sexual crimes of the Red Army.
Łapanka, 1941 kidnapping raid in Warsaw‘s Żoliborz district. Selected young women were later forced into military brothels.
* * *
However, my surprising feeling of empathy, an understanding that went beyond sympathy, was for the Russian rapists in Kopelev’s passage. It wasn’t for the German rapists or for all rapists in general. I am not a saint. Still, I believe I now can better explain how my civilian experience ties to these Soviet soldiers on the eastern front.
I’m a survivor of too many statutory rapes, date rapes, and other assaults, ranging from pinches to rough grabs to tackles, and a couple of narrow escapes from some unknown fate, all before my twenties. The neglect and lack of emotional support in my childhood home, the constant sexual harassment and bullying from grade school through early college years, as well as at one place of employment, added to my PTSD that I still suffer from in various ways today. But my healing began with sharing and self analysis, which led to self empathy and finally to my feeling of empathy for men who committed acts of violence that terrified me to the core.
In 1990 the self analysis that led to greater empathy began
In 1990 my journey to heal began. This meant through the decades having various memories surface and feeling the deep pit of horror in my body. I would often scream out and suddenly jerk to attention if my husband tapped me gently to wake me. It meant hiding myself from all local news, many television shows, and researching before seeing movies because I could not bear to watch or hear about any sexual violence, especially against women. Part of my healing occurred in my forties, when my daughter was a teenager. I finally understood that three of my experiences were in fact statutory rapes, the enormity of which I hadn’t fully grasped before. Somehow I had dismissed my experiences until I saw her and imagined how I would feel if a, for example, thirty-two-year-old man had sex with her.
Even though I have survived such a large number of violations of my body, I cannot imagine the trauma of violent, savage rape by one or many soldiers in wartime. I also cannot imagine having one’s trauma compacted into a few months or years instead of spread over a decade or two. Finally, although I remain silent in many ways, I am eternally grateful that I had the ability to share in so many groups, workshops, and counseling sessions. Without being able to reach out and speak in safe places, I may not have survived. Instead, I sought out and was provided support from countless, loving women and men, who touched me both physically and emotionally, and who helped teach me once again that I was worthy of the space I occupied in this world and that I was more than a sexual entity.
How I can relate to the soldiers’ desperation
As a survivor of patriarchy, male sexual abuse, and childhood neglect, I can relate to the desperation experienced by these soldiers. I can say that growing up and in my early twenties before I sought out professional help and realized what I had survived, I lived in my own kind of desperation despite having been a fairly high achiever. There is a scream in my head that I still hear today, even though it isn’t nearly as loud as it used to be. As a teenager, I used alcohol to quiet the scream and to quash my loneliness and anguish.
Recently someone asked me what the scream said, and the first thing that came to mind was, “get the fuck off me!” Once at a healing workshop, in my mind I went back to feelings of being violated. Nine adults were on top of me trying to hold me down. I pushed them so hard that I they had difficulty holding their positions. I almost succeeded in getting them “the fuck off of me.” I wasn’t overly strong. But somehow the anger I felt gave me superhuman powers to push the men I envisioned in my mind off of me through the act of pushing these nine people holding me down.
* * *
Thirty-five years ago, the scream was mostly an angry roar at the universe, an expression of my cynicism and profound sadness and betrayal. It was a scream that demanded the world or someone pay attention to me. But it also felt sardonic, acerbic, and out-of-control. Sometimes when I was intoxicated, the bitterness felt unmanageable. I was incognizant to any damage I inflicted onto myself as I drank more and more and moved closer and closer to oblivion. I had not been taught self-care and did not understand, in those intoxicated times, how I was dismissing myself as someone who did not matter. It wasn’t at all clear to me how sad it was to think I really did not care what happened to me.
* * *
When I quit drinking as an undergraduate, I fought for my life and sanity as repressed memories began to surface. This was when the pain and depth of my despair felt so crisp and sharp and deep. I often felt such rage, shame, loneliness, and sadness in my stomach, it would force my body to fold in half. Because I was already having black outs from drinking at age thirteen, much of the horror I felt in my sober twenties was from my childhood years. These were feelings I had never processed but had instead drowned in alcohol.
The depth of despair I felt and even once in a great while still feel at age fifty-two, is how I can relate to these soldiers’ despair at the horrors they witnessed, even though their traumatic experiences were different. I cannot begin to compare my peacetime agony with the trauma that tank warfare, genocide, mass starvation, gang rape, and other wartime tragedies caused soldiers and civilians alike during WWII.
But historically I dismissed myself as though I were unworthy to such a degree that I didn’t even recognize some of my assaults as rapes. Nor did I think I had any legitimate reason to be angry. I felt it didn’t matter to me or anyone else that I was raped. So I could understand that these men did not care about someone they intended to rape for their own sexual release. Because I had dismissed myself, I could feel how these soldiers could dismiss women and women’s rights to their bodies after what they had been through.
Trauma is hard to completely beat
Trauma stays with a victim for life. With help and work, though, one can break the cycle so the next generation is healthier. Today it usually feels I was never traumatized. Yet there are still times when it seems the sources of my agony happened yesterday. Even with modern EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) treatments, body work, and group and individual therapies, my trauma will always be a part of me, regardless of my continued self analysis any growing empathy. I will continue to heal to the day I die.
But I can have a positive effect on the world. At twenty-three, when I realized I had been raped as a teenager, I couldn’t say the word. I tried to explain to a friend, but could only mutter, “the R word.” She had to guess what I meant.
Yet I progressed from one extreme to another great limit. At first I couldn’t even say “rape” about one incident and I felt shame about my heavy drinking. Then I learned to sympathize with myself as a young girl who had no reason to be raped by men whether or not I was intoxicated. Finally, I ended up researching and writing about sexual violence and armed conflict. This kind of inner analysis can help us become more tolerant and empathetic toward others. Self analysis leads to empathy. In turn, this will help spread progressive political ideas that stem from an inherent understanding of all kinds of beings.
There is hope…
We can change the next generations and slow the spread of fearful politics. But we need to face our own emotional wounds, no matter how small. My politics as a young person were insensitive, because I was oblivious to my pain. This is partly why many otherwise kind, intelligent people support politicians who spew hatred and dismiss other people’s experiences as trivial. As I faced my anguish, my stance on issues shifted dramatically because I felt the trauma of others, including animals. This self analysis is how I experienced empathy for the rapists, despite my deep fear of angry men. I broke the generational cycle of trauma. I raised my children and encouraged others to not be victims and instead be strong individuals with a strong sense of self-worth and self-awareness.
The more people understand their own issues, the more deeply they can understand the experiences of others. This includes understanding the trauma rapists or mass shooters endure. Facing one’s own pain creates a less divided world. People will embrace candidates who bring us together, not tear us apart. Women will be less likely to dismiss #metoo stories as “this is just how it was back then! Men grabbed us! Big deal!” People will see that we cannot discriminate against Hispanics, Muslims, transgender people, etc.. They will learn to condemn hateful rhetoric mocking equality, women’s reproductive or prisoner rights, environmentalism, or whatever the issue.
In summary, we need to support and teach self-analysis because self analysis leads to empathy. I hope that explaining my empathy with these rapists will help even one person gain the courage to look inside and subsequently gain a greater sense of enlightenment. If that is the case, then I feel that bearing my soul will have been worth the effort.
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* During WWII, Marshal Rokossovsky, Commander of the Stalingrad Front, issued Order #006, which became known as the Rokossovsky order. It was an instruction to officers to execute without trial soldiers who raped. It was more of a public relations stunt because in reality, Stalin had given his tacit consent to the soldiers to do what they wanted with civilians (see Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B. Petrovich (New York and Lon- don: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962), 110-111).
** A tiger was a German tank, and it isn’t clear why Kopelev writes that the soldier called the Polish woman a German. Still, I have maintained the nationality didn’t matter because the soldiers just wanted sex with a female. This was also true for the Germans who raped and sexually enslaved Slavs, Jews, and others who were supposed to be off-limits to their race because of their alleged racial inferiority.
*** Soldiers received a daily ration of vodka, and before attacks this apparently was doubled. For one source on this, see Djilas, Conversations, 52-53.
**** According to nationalww2museum.org, “[t]he Soviet Union suffered 21% more casualties than Americans in World War II. Most estimates agree the Soviet Union suffered the highest number of total deaths in World War II, between 22 and 28 million. The population of the Soviet Union was 194,100,000. This represents a total loss of 14.0% of its population.” China lost an approximate twenty million. In my dissertation, I used the estimate “approximately thirty million,” but the figure is inexact and depends on what and who you count. Do we include only deaths caused by the Germans or also deaths caused by the various armed forces fighting on the eastern front? For further discussion see, https://www.rbth.com/history/330625-soviet-citizens-died-world-war-statistics.
Afterword
This essay about self analysis and empathy came bubbling up one morning in late spring, early summer of 2019. I woke up and suddenly understood and saw the larger picture and explanation of how I felt the empathy with the soldier rapists. I had help from many people who gave me various kinds of feedback. In the fall, I tried to get this essay published in more visible and well-known journals without success. With the pandemic and my subsequent struggles, it wasn’t relevant to what the world was reading at the time. In the later spring, I tried a few other places, but again, without success.
I feel it is an important contribution to the world, because of all the hateful politics now. People on both sides of the political divide can use self analysis and self empathy to become greater stewards of the earth and its inhabitants. I have so many people to thank and especially taiko. In the years since I started playing, I had more memories and realizations surface than I had maybe the decade prior. It has been an incredible journey so far, and I look forward to the next years of healing, joy, compassion, and sharing.
My explanations on self analysis and empathy were inspired because of this memoir: Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought, trans. Anthony Austin (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 50-51. Lev was a Stalin enthusiast who became an officer in the Red Army. Later he was a victim of Stalin and spent time in the Gulag, and even later a dissident.
The purple ribbon and candle signify violence and our desire to stop violence of all kinds. This essay helps to illuminate the idea that self analysis leads to empathy. Self analysis helps us become better teachers, parents, spouses, friends. No matter the size of your trauma or problems, it is worth taking all your uncomfortable feelings seriously.
Interview by Luka Pejić about sexual crimes in WWII, civilian’s coping methods, and the social consequences after the war.
Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen is an American historian from Minnesota who received her PhD in 2004 with the dissertation “Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War II.” In doing this research, she worked with material available in archives in the US, Germany, Latvia, and Estonia. In addition, for the purposes of her dissertation, she spoke with more than thirty women and men from the territory of Ukraine whose life experiences were an important source for a fuller understanding of the problems of sex crimes during the war events in the east of the European continent in the 1940s. Although, after completing the nearly 400-page text, she temporarily gave up historiography, because of the trauma she had experienced from going deeper into the topic of her own research. In the last few years she has returned to academic work, the focus of which is gender and social history.
You wrote that the Germans developed an “extensive system of sexual slavery” during World War II. What exactly do you mean by that?
Author of “Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front During World War II,” 2004.
The German leadership recognized the dangers of venereal diseases to their armed forces and the reality that men, married or single, were having sexual intercourse with local women they met on the street, in local brothels, or elsewhere. Without antibiotics to fight syphilis and gonorrhea, soldiers became ill and eventually were unable to serve because of their unsafe sexual practices. To save the health of their soldiers, the Germans established brothels in concentration camps and across the areas they fought and occupied. Sanitation officers required a strict cleansing routine before sexual intercourse for the soldiers. The workers also were required to be clean, and doctors routinely checked them for disease. Females who engaged in prostitution during the war were starving or had limited options/chances for survival. Germans also forced girls and women at gunpoint to work in brothels where they could serve more than thirty men a day. This is sexual slavery.
Could you elaborate how the spread of prostitution in Eastern Europe during the war was economically conditioned? What were the consequences of this phenomenon?
During the war people had a hard time finding food, medical services, and other necessities. The Germans viewed Slavic people as Untermenschen and planned to starve them and eventually inhabit their territories in the east. Not only were people starving because of typical war conditions, the Germans purposely confiscated any food they could find. With the arrival of sex-craved soldiers who had essential food items, as well as chocolate and liquor, prostitution spread.
The consequences were many. The German army began arresting women and forcing them to undergo medical examinations to see if they were infected with venereal diseases. Venereal diseases spread through both the local populations and the German forces. This in turn led to Himmler insisting on establishing brothels, even if the females were Untermenschen. The spread of prostitution of course probably enabled some to bring food to their starving families, and maybe in some cases there were happy endings with love and romance. I’m sure that women forced into prostitution also were injured by sadists, which was traumatic beyond the pain of having to sexually service strangers.
Brothels existed even in the concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. How do you explain establishment of places like these in those locations? What were the living conditions there?
There were two different kinds of brothels, one for the prisoners and one for soldiers and officers. The prisoners had an incentive program so that they would work hard and behave themselves. One of their rewards was a visit to the camp brothel. This is something that is rarely talked about in Holocaust discussions. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., the outdoor Berlin museum, Topography of Terror, as well as the museum underneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, all do not mention that camp prisoners visited camp brothels where women and girls worked. Even if a female prisoner volunteered to work in the brothel despite the fatal risk of pregnancy or of injury and death by multiple rapes, this likely was NOT because she wanted to have sex with multiple men a day, but because she thought perhaps she would have a place to sleep and possibly more food. This is another layer of victimhood, where a victim victimizes another in the camps. While the topic of layered victimhood has been widely discussed in regards to arranging food, jobs, and services in the camps, museums and textbooks need to include in their discussions how sex, prostitution, and rape were bartered just as bread or indoor jobs were. Sometimes the SS would visit the camp brothels, and there is also testimony attesting to SS brothels just outside of camps.
Sexual Crimes in WWII includes the expansive German system of forced prostitution
In one chapter, you mentioned the various forms of “camouflage” undertaken by the female civilian population under German occupation for the purpose of avoiding rape. Could you tell us more about that?
Camouflage seems to have been a common phenomena. Several people told me about this, and you can read about it in various memoirs or testimonies. In one memoir, a family goes to extraordinary efforts to camouflage the teenage girl as being ill when the Soviet soldiers reentered the Crimean town of Feodosia in December 1941. Ukrainian women I spoke with also told about trying to make themselves look old or contagious. They would limp, cough, and cover or smear dirt or coal on their faces to make them look dirty.
Did you come across any specific information regarding sex crimes and prostitution during the 1940s in the area of former Yugoslavia?
Yes, the Chief Sanitation Officer in Poland argued that a brothel visit was not a social relationship, but a “material and economic kind,” and therefore such sex with Poles, Greeks, Yugoslavians, and others, was allowed. This infers, as another scholar pointed out, that there is evidence of Yugoslavians in brothels. Additionally, historian Danijel Jelaš found a document for me from 1941 in the Osijek archives that discusses the plans for multiple brothels in Osijek and the sanitation procedures required. I suspect there were others in additional cities in the former Yugoslavia. We need further research to ascertain how many brothels there actually were and what kinds of sexual violence people endured.
In the thesis, you also analyzed crimes of the Red Army. Moreover, you point out that in Berlin alone, more than 90,000 women visited doctors’ offices because of sexual abuse perpetrated by the Soviet soldiers. What were the causes of these mass rapes committed by Stalin’s troops? How did the dictator perceive reports on this type of crime when they had reached him?
There are several points: The first concerns motivation. The Soviet soldiers did not rape en mass as a political act to degrade the German enemy. They raped females of all nationalities and cultures. The Red Army consisted of soldiers from across Europe who raped Ukrainians, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Yugoslavians, Jews, Christians, etc. The primary motivating factor in rape is sexual desire (not power or politics), and rapists use their power to obtain what they want, which is sexual satisfaction. Similarly, sexual desire motivated men to visit German brothels and have sexual intercourse with females who were not there to enjoy their afternoons.
Secondly, the desperation men and women felt as they went into battle or continued to fight is something we can barely begin to understand. Imagine the trauma of seeing Germans carting off women and girls to serve in Wehrmacht or SS brothels, of seeing entire Slavic towns disappear to mass graves, and knowing their own families were malnourished and dying at home. The soldiers were living in a surreal and horrifying alcohol-infused nightmare. They had seen corpses of men, women, and children, murdered, raped, or otherwise violated and mutilated, not to mention the carcasses of cows, horses, cats, and other animals, and all the destroyed (bombed or burned) trees, houses, farmyards, outbuildings, etc. Their desperation does not excuse their actions, but it does put the rapes into their horrific context.
Thirdly, historians and the media have long ignored the sexual crimes of the Germans and other western forces and instead have highlighted the rapes and other crimes against humanity by the Red Army. They have depicted the Slavic men as an Asian horde of rapists. While the mass rapes are inexcusable and horrifying, even unimaginable to most, so are the extensive sexual crimes of the German forces.
The Germans spent an enormous amount of resources in the establishment of their extensive system of brothels that enslaved thousands of females, and likewise, Stalin was unconcerned about the welfare of civilian females. There are mixed reports, however, about the issue, because as more diplomats became aware of the raping, there was a Soviet attempt to show that an effort was being made to control the soldiers’ behavior. One of these attempts was the Marshal Rokossovsky Order #006 by which a soldier would be executed for raping. However, various diplomats report meetings with Stalin who dismissed the sexual crimes. Even Yugoslavia’s Milovan Djilas wrote about how Stalin completely ignored the issue and acted angrily when Djilas asked about the conduct of the Soviet soldiers, who were not only raping Germans, but also Yugoslavians. I too acknowledge the horrors the Red Army experienced and the soldiers’ heroism pushing back the Germans, but unlike Stalin, I don’t believe that a soldier was entitled to “have fun with a woman or take some trifle” (Djilas).
German military brothel during WWII
What social consequences did victims of sexual abuse have to deal with when the war ended? You mentioned that some abused women were referred to as “German whores” upon return to their hometowns and that their children, who were born after rape, were also victims of discrimination.
Because of patriarchy and cultural norms, local people abused those who had been raped or had suffered prostitution. People condemned and shamed females as whores for consorting with the enemy, regardless of the circumstances, and society did not condemn those who had abused their power to obtain sex. Even in Germany, but more so in the more conservative Slavic countries, there was silence surrounding the rapes, and victims were unable to obtain counseling. One Ukrainian family I interviewed suffered for generations because a Polish man drugged the mother and raped her. When she came home her townspeople called her a German whore. She bore her rapist’s child, who in turn was bullied and called a German bitch (even though the rapist was Polish). Furthermore, many people in conservative societies did not view exchanging food for sex as rape, even though probably in most cases, the female normally wouldn’t have sex with the person who had the food. Instead of blaming the person with the food who used their power to obtain sex, both men and women blame the victim. Even my Ukrainian translator thought this particular woman wasn’t raped, since she was sleeping, but the man drugged her, and of course, a sleeping person cannot consent to sex.
How is it that, despite the abundance of available materials (official documents, testimonies, memoirs, etc.), such topics remain historiographically neglected? Have you noticed any progress on this issue in the last ten years?
Simply answered – shame, silence, and patriarchy. If someone is attacked, people ask what the victims were wearing or if they were intoxicated, none of which is relevant because the perpetrator is to blame. Women and men hold these institutionalized patriarchal views, and thus victims feel shame and do not speak out. Male and female victims need to talk, analyze themselves and heal, so they can heal their children and students. Historians need to tackle these topics so we can better understand why people rape, whether during peacetime or war. Because of these persistent views, professors may discourage graduate students from tackling sexual violence. One educated Croatian woman asked me why I had chosen my topic because it was a “man’s topic.” This kind of archaic view hampers progress toward raising awareness of sexual violence, which is a gender-neutral human rights topic that affects males, females, and transgender people.
When I presented my research in Cherkasy, Ukraine, it was momentous occasion because many people in Cherkasy had not yet spoken publicly about their trauma. It was as if my talk about sexual violence gave them permission to also start discussing and sharing. When we break the silence and fight the shame to honestly face our own trauma, we can better understand the trauma of others, the complexities of victimhood, war, and violent sexual and other crimes. It is extremely difficult to openly admit and discuss one’s own rape or the rape of a family member. Despite the difficulties of recovery and healing, war- and peacetime survivors of sexual violence can help us understand other trauma if they face their own pain. I was only able to do the research I did and to continue to write because for the last twenty-nine years I have faced my own complex trauma of sexual abuse and other childhood familial issues. It has been extremely challenging at times, but well worth the effort because I have changed the world for the better in small, but meaningful ways—by writing, talking, and raising children who will be less likely to be victimized as I was. Understanding our complicity in crimes around the world or the motives behind mass shooters or rapists in the US can help us better teach our children and students to not engage in such violence. Similarly, the more Croatians better understand their personal and societal traumas by breaking the silence and shame, they too can help Europe and the world grow toward a more peaceful and healthy society.
And yes, now there is much more written on the topic of WWII sexual violence than when I first tackled it. However, the general public still is not aware of the widespread system of brothels the Germans established nor how much the drunken Axis soldiers raped, yet a larger portion are acquainted with the extent of the rapes by the animalistic Red Army. This needs to change.
It is 2017 and Germany still has not owned up to its widespread sexual violence during World War II, committed by German soldiers, members of both the Wehrmacht and the SS. The myth that only the Soviet soldiers in Berlin who committed mass rape continues to be in so many people’s thinking.
I was apprehensive after I read the sentence about how Red Army soldiers harrassed German women in Berlin as they entered Berlin. We entered the open air museum at the end of the exhibition and read chronologically backward. I could only suspect that they wouldn’t mention that German soldiers had also committed massive sexual crimes during the war.
Because we began reading at the end of the exhibition, it made sense the Red Army rapes would be mentioned first. But I had little hope the exhibition would mention the vast German system of sexual slavery. I had even less hope that the many German rapes of Jews, Slavs, and others during the war would be mentioned.
The Germans were as sexually bestial as were the Soviets
And sure enough, unless I missed it, I did not see any mention of German sexual crimes during the war. As usual, those behind the making of this museum only thought to include the crimes of the Slavs. They helped to further the stereotype that for some reason the Slavic men are more beastly than the Germans.
Of course, it mentioned other crimes the Germans committed, but not sexual crimes. If the authors thought to mention sexual crimes of one army, then they should also mention the sexual crimes of the other. The SS, Wehrmacht, and other Germans in the east were not innocent of sexual criminality.
The evidence is out there even from before my dissertation in 2004! And I clearly documented widespread rape and system sexual slavery committed and established by the Germans. In the years since my published research, other scholars have documented additional German sexual violence during the war.
Topographie des Terrors, Shame on You!
Come on, Germany! Own up to your sexual crimes as well! Stop pretending only the Soviet Army committed these on the eastern front.
If I am wrong and missed something and the historians and those responsible for the text of this exhibition did include something of the sexual crimes the Germans committed, let me know. We were unable to spend as much time as I would have liked at this outdoor museum, so it is possible I missed something. I actually hope that I have.
I do commend Berlin for having the open air museums it does have. Many of the stories and photographs are available to the general public. This is especially important to students and young persons who do not always have the financial means to enter the more expensive museums housed inside buildings.
Still, the general public deserves to know that the Germans forced thousands and thousands of women of all races to work in brothels. The SS, Wehrmacht, other soldiers, and concentration camp inmates visited the brothels to engage in sexual intercourse, in effect raping a woman each time. No woman chose to work in one of these brothels. If the choice is between starvation and the slight chance of living, that is not a choice. Each man who visited the brothel is in effect a rapist.
German soldiers also raped before they murdered, outside of brothels. Scholars have documented this time and again. So why not, in Berlin, do the scholars in charge of this open air museum mention this and pretend the Germans committed no such crimes? The Germans even raped Jews, which was categorically and falsely denied for decades.
