The May issue of GEO deals with the “Russenkinder”. Why does Germany only talk about the cases of sexualized wartime violence committed by the Red Army?
Monika Hauser: Because until now the investigation conducted on sexualized violence committed by Allied forces during the Second World War was very one-sided. In West Germany, the focus was restricted to rapes committed by Soviet soldiers, which served to perpetuate a particular prejudice. During the Cold War, the raped women were used politically and the racist image of the 'evil Russian' fitted well. In the GDR, of course, the situation was different.
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So was sexualized wartime violence talked about in the GDR with 'evil Americans' in the role of the 'bad guys'?
Monika Hauser: The issue of rapes committed by Allied forces was actually a non-issue in the whole of Germany until very recently. It was also taboo in the GDR because otherwise they would have had to address the crimes committed by the 'good comrades', too.
So after 1945, in the Soviet occupation zone and later in the GDR, women were not allowed to talk about it. There was no dialogue on this issue until the appearance of the film “BeFreier und Befreite (Liberators Take Liberties)” from Helke Sander at the beginning of the nineties – which was actually the first film on this issue.
In her book “When The Soldiers Came,” historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals the rapes committed by Western Allies on women. Does that surprise you?
Monika Hauser: Here I can answer quite generally and say: In the end, I am never surprised to hear about sexualized violence. But of course I am surprised at the magnitude which she describes as a result of her research. Once again this shows how hidden this topic has remained due to decades of deliberate silence and looking in the other direction. On the one hand this is due to the issue of sexualized violence itself and on the other there is a political dimension. The issue was simply undesirable and the women were left completely alone.
With UN Resolution 1820, rape has been recognized and condemned as a “tactic of war”. However, US soldiers at the time also raped women in Great Britain and France – their allied countries, so how can that be explained?
Monika Hauser: We cannot consider these rapes to be a tactic of war or act of revenge. They are sexualized violence and we have to take a look at the structures of power and violence in the countries where the soldiers came from. Everywhere, whether in France or the USA, we have patriarchal societies where rape is a tried and tested tool to preserve power during times of war.
And this is why I am not very surprised that the Allies also rapped. The key issue is always 'the patriarchal context'. Men use sexualized violence against women and girls – and against boys – to preserve their own power, to control and to humiliate. Nevertheless, specific war contexts give specific answers and we always have to take a precise look.
What reasoning can be found for the fact that after the liberation of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, Soviet soldiers raped Jewish women who had been starved so severely they were walking skeletons? That makes us speechless! We have to admit that war is not 'healthy' for men, either. They are traumatized by the violence they commit against others and also by the violence they have to see or suffer themselves. And what animalistic, abnormal things they then do! I do not intend to excuse them but I do want to show: War is not good for anyone.
The numbers vary enormously. Gebhardt comes to a figure of 860,000 raped women in Germany and other sources state 2 million. What do you think about these calculations?
Monika Hauser: It's simple: We can see that no one really knows the true figures! Nothing has been documented; authorities were either non-functional or not looking at this issue.
There is no war context in the world where we know the real figures. And I have been asking for 20 years: How do we count? If one woman was raped 30 times, do we enter this into the statistics as 30 raps or one? And none of the statistics can account for women who were murdered after suffering enormous violence. Do we include them or not?
Miriam Gebhardt conducts a new type of extrapolation which is indeed very relevant for West Germany. However, it is questionable whether it is permissible simply to take the numbers for the GDR and multiply them by two. This can neither be proven nor disproved. Nobody knows if she is right. But I think the fact she has discovered these sources in Bavaria is very interesting, as are the figures she comes to for western Germany.
If the affected women were still alive, we could ask them, couldn't we?
Monika Hauser: We still need to speak about the issue of silence. Even if they were still alive today, they would not talk. That is not an argument. But the most we can say is that the women were not asked because this issue was not present after the war. For the women in this patriarchal Germa