Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (15 page)

.
well, was conceptualized even, as a fascist act of domination. Yet it is in the nature of any institution in which men are set apart from women and given the extra power of the gun that the accruing power may be used against all women, for a female victim of rape in war is chosen
not
because she is a representative of the enemy, but precisely because she is a woman, and therefore an enemy. An all-male army cannot help but become imbued with a sense of its own male mastery, an4 in the last analysis, the Axis war machine

merely carried the male ideology to a further degree, to an unac ceptable exaggeration.

As it happened, the right side won in
1945,
and the evil that was brought forward for judgment was undeniably the ultimate evil; no one who has ever examined the holocaust literature of World War II can walk away from it without the knowledge that she or he has peered directly into the pit of hell. But those who judged at Nuremberg and Tokyo were those who had emerged from the war victorious.
It
was the other side that was held ac countable. No international tribunals were called to expose and condemn Allied atrocity, no war-crimes depositions were taken from "enemy" women, no incriminating top-secret documents from our side of the war were held up to merciless light. A theorist of rape must admit that the evidence has been unfairly weighted.

I am not suggesting that an equality of rape existed in World War II. I doubt that it did. But Allied soldiers did commit rape, with gusto. The sexual assault may not have been a logical weapon within a total concept of "destruction of inferior peoples," but it was just as real a humiliation for the female victims. Instead of a motive of out-and-out conquest we may substitute a motivation (or excuse) of retaliation and revenge. Logic of a sort pertains here as well. I rather suspect that Allied rape, for the rapists, was of ten joyous-a sporadic, hearty spilling over and acting out of anti female sentiment disguised within the glorious, vengeful struggle, an exuberant manifestation of the heroic fighting man who is fighting the good fight.

When llya Ehrenburg, the flinty Soviet novelist-turned-war correspondent, larded his front-line dispatches in
1942
with tales of German rape, the accounts he wrote set his ideological juices flowing.

These filthy lechers have now come to Russia. They are pol luting our houses. They are violating and infecting our women. Red Army men, in the name of our girls' honour, in the name of our women, in the name of human purity, smash these fornicating Fritzes I

Ehrenburg's job was to light a patriotic fire, and what better kindling was there than the tried-and-true "protection of our women"? These were the dark days for the Russians, before Stalin—

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AGAINST OUR WILL

grad, and Ehrenburg may be pardoned, I suppose, for creating the simplistic slogan, "To gain an hour is to save a Russian man from the rope and a Russian girl from dishonour." His call to arms and human purity became faintly ridiculous three years later when the glorious Red Army, risen at last like a great bear from slumber, turned around and raped German women on the road to Berlin with a ferociousness that matched those "fornicating Fritzes."

The German actress Hildegard Knef described the fall of Berlin from a woman's perspective in her fiercely written autobiog raphy,
The Gif t
Horse. As Knef stood in a doorway watching truckloads of women and children rattle past, refugees from Frank furt-on-Oder, Strausberg and Spindlersfeld, the women shouted, "Clear out, the Russians'll rape you." Knef dressed herself in a German Army uniform, she tells us, to
avoid assault.
Later, crouched in a makeshif t bunker with her male comrades she heard

screams, dreadful heartrending screams, high thin shrill. I call out softly to the next hole: Are you there?

Yes.

What's that screaming?

Russians are in that house over there started on the women shitshitohshitohshit.

When the actress was eventually captured, she had a remark able exchange with her Russian interrogator. "What you do in German army?" he asked repeatedly in halting German. She coolly answered, "I didn't want to be raped." Furious with her response, the Soviet officer could only bellow, "Russian soldiers not rape! German swine rape!"

But Russian soldiers did rape. Cornelius Ryan, author of The Last
Battle,
a well-researched narrative of the fall of Berlin, was one of the few historians to write of rape in war in its proper perspective. "The fear of sexual attack lay over the city like a pall," Ryan wrote at the start of his story, for six years into World War II Berlin was very nearly a city of women. Refugees who fled the advancing Soviet troops knowledgeably told Berliners what to ex pect: front-line Red Army men were disciplined and well behaved; they did not rape-but the second wave was close to a disorganized rabble, and it was they who committed the atrocities. (This makes supreme sense. The front-line troops, some of whom were veterans

i
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of Stalingrad, had an important, heroic job of retribution to do for their country. Those bringing up the rear had missed out on the most emotional and satisfying moment of the war-to be among he first Russians to march on German soil-and they would thus have been more inclined to take out their vengeance on persons and property. )

Rumor turned to reality when, in Ryan's words, "hordes of Russian troops coming up behind the disciplined front-line vet erans . . . demanded the rights due the conquerors: the women of the conquered." Ryan conducted his research in Berlin in the early sixties, aided by a team of interviewers. Although no function ing administration capable of documenting the extent of the ram page existed in Berlin in i945, the trail was not quite cold and the historian managed to obtain firsthand accounts.

Ursula Koster was sleeping in a basement shelter with her parents and her three children when four Russian soldiers beat in the door with their rifles. They searched the cellar, confiscated some canned goods and watches, and then held her parents and children at gunpoint while, one af ter another, all four assaulted her. At dawn two more soldiers found their way to the cellar; they, too, raped her.

Anneliese Antz was dragged screaming out of a bed she shared with her mother and was raped by a Soviet officer. When he was finished he stroked her hair, murmured, "Good German," and asked her not to tell anyone an officer had raped her. A food parcel for her was dropped off the following day. Anneliese's older sister, Ilse, was raped by a trooper who entered their cellar with a pistol in each hand. As he ripped off her sweaters and ski pants he stopped to· inquire, "Are you a German
soldier?"
Ilse told her interviewer, "I was not surprised. I was so thin from hunger I hardly looked like a woman." Af ter the act her attacker told Ilse, "That's what the Germans did in Russia." He lef t, but returned to spend the rest of the night with her-to guard her from other soldiers. Ilse Antz's protction lasted just so long; she was later raped by another soldier.