Sex and the Citadel: Rape and War

Sex and the Citadel: Rape and War
Mary Chamberlain
Female 'collaborators' suffered more frequently then their male counterparts.
There are iconic images of the end of the Second World War:  the Soviet army reclaiming the Reichstag; jubilant sailors embracing their girls; women paraded semi-naked, heads shaved, a placard of shame around their necks. These were the ‘horizontal collaborators,’ the women who slept with the enemy. Such punishment was a near-universal form of rough justice – even the Channel Islands were not immune, though it was dismissed by Brigadier A. E. Snow, the head of the Southern Command, as ‘haircutting’ by a few ‘hotheads.’ Rape and war.

It is, ho inwever, a particularly gendered (and ancient) form of vigilante justice, with no account taken of the circumstances in which such ‘collaboration’ took place. Sexual violence against women as a weapon of war was not judged as a crime by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945. As a result, systematic evidence was not collected although it emerged incidentally in accounts of war atrocities.

And yet, as those images insist, women slept with the enemy – in the occupied countries of Europe, the Germans. In Germany, it was the Russians. One of the few accounts of this is Marta Hillers’ A Woman in Berlin. Published first anonymously, and in English, in 1954, the author’s identity was only revealed in 2003. It records the widespread rape of German women by the Soviet army, a circumstance more fully documented by Antony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall 1945, published in 2002.

Hillers’ account, however, tells it from the inside. It is a rare document. As a historian, I have been interested in the Second World War, not the triumphalist, white, male version, but those stories of war which reveal its darker underbelly, or challenge its heroics and the meanings of heroism, the stories of survival or subversion, women as military collateral, marginalised black soldiers revolutionising their homelands. It’s those subversions which make war so extraordinary, the hijacking of one circumstance in pursuit of another.

This is where fiction comes into play: imagining this past, these silences and dilemmas, particularly where the archival evidence, whether written or oral, is not there, or hard to excavate. My latest novel, The Forgotten, explores the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war, in this case, that of German women by the Soviet army in 1945. (An earlier novel, The Hidden, dealt with the trafficking of women into Wehrmacht brothels in the Channel Islands.) It is a shocking story; but it is not a simple story, either, and it asks broader questions about sexual exploitation in the context of war. Can coercive sex be turned on its head and used for survival by its victim? At what point does this become collaboration? And why is it that women’s sexual collaboration is judged more harshly than other forms of accommodation with the enemy?

I don’t offer any answers to the questions posed, but I try to explore the power and terror of rape and the ways in which women attempted to escape it – or subvert it. In Hillers’ account – and in my own novel which owes a considerable debt to her – I see the women taking control, searching for a kinder man, in authority, who is in a position to fend off competitors and has access to, in this case, scarce supplies of food. By implication, it raises broader questions about sleeping with the enemy. In the Channel Islands, for instance, an intelligence report dated the 24th July 1944, records how local women are ‘prostituting themselves in a most shameless manner.’ What it fails to record is that after the Normandy invasions, the Channel Islands were virtually cut off, and domestic food supplies dramatically reduced. The occupying forces had first dabs at whatever food was available. Perhaps this form of ‘collaboration’ was one way in which desperate women were able to secure food for their families. What it also fails to record is that many of the women employed in the German run brothels on the islands had been evacuated, and German soldiers and the rump of Organisation Todt employees had reduced access to ‘licensed’ women. It is entirely likely that their sexual attentions were diverted to local women, who were either coerced or who exchanged sex for food – or both. And who, in any case, were these ‘licensed women’? Had they, too, been coerced, or brought under false pretences?

Much more problematic is the vigilante justice meted out to these women, perpetrated mostly by men, and in marked contrast to male collaborators who for the most part benefited from the legal process. It was a vicious and cruel, and another violation of a woman’s body already violated by war. It turned women into scapegoats for a wider humiliation. For war is a male narrative and when it goes wrong, it is too easy to blame the women for the emasculation of their countries.