Berlin was far from the only place where soviet soldiers raped large numbers of women. Their conduct during their first incursions into East Prussia and their advance across eastern Germany earlier in 1945 had been similar.
Furthermore, this behaviour was not confined to Soviet troops. The behaviour of some of the soldiers in French uniform who marched into Baden and Württemberg in south-western Germany behind the Americans in April 1945 was not much better. The French arrival in the Reutlingen district, for example, was accompanied by large numbers of rapes: in Gönningnen, 24 April was a day of plunder and rape during which ‘the Moroccans attacked many women and in addition demonstrated their great liking for jewellery and watches’; in Gomaringen, after three days of sexual violence by French soldiers 75 women aged between 14 and 60 were treated medically after being raped; in Bronnen, while the first French soldiers had left a good impression, later a ‘black unit’ arrived in the village, searched ‘every house from cellar to attic’, stole money, watches, cutlery and food, discovered stores of alcohol at a local inn, and beat the men and raped the women ‘in the presence of their husbands or children’; and in Reutlingen itself the arrival of the ‘second wave’ of soldiers ushered in a ‘reign of terror with looting and rape’.
In Freudenstadt in the Black Forest, hundreds of women reported being raped after the French arrived in mid-April and proceeded to destroy much of the town; in the university town of Tübingen, which French forces had occupied without a fight on 19 April, the Women’s Clinic treated hundreds of patients who had been sexually assaulted, ‘including children of 12 years of age up to old women of over 70 years’; and in Konstanz, on the Bodensee at the Swiss border, which had also been occupied by French forces, large numbers of women – 115 in August 1945 alone – approached the city’s Women’s Clinic to seek abortions, claiming that their pregnancies had been the product of rape.
Author’s Note:
Werner’s manuscript remained unpublished for 35 years. At the time it was completed, in 1951, the author was told that for it to be published ‘in the foreseeable future’ the sections that deal with the conduct of the French during the early weeks must be gone over again and shortened’; what he had written about the ‘looting, assaults and violence against women cannot yet be said so openly today’. See the introduction by Manfred Schmidt, p. 11.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “The Last Days of the Reich.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 116-17. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Gerhard Junger, Schicksale 1945 (Reutlingen, 1991), pp. 101-102, 139, 148-19, 234. See also Edward N. Peterson, The Many Faces of Defeat. The German People’s Experience in 1945 (New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main and Paris, 1990), pp. 131-132.
Hansmartin Schwarzmaier, Der deutsche Südwesten zur Stunde Null. Zusammenbruch und Neuanfang im Jahr 1945 in Dokumenten und Bildern (Karlsruhe, 1975), pp. 99-101.
Jochen Theis, Südwestdeutschland Stunde Null (Düsseldorf, 1979), p. 26.
Peterson, The Many Faces of Defeat, p. 130.
Manfred Schmidt (ed.), Tübingen 1945. Eine Chronik von Hermann Werner (Tübingen, 1986), p. 86.
Lothar Burchardt, Konstanz sqischen Kriegsende und Universitätsgründung. Hungerjahre, ‘Wirtschaftswunder’, Struktunwandel (Konstanz, 1996), p. 48.
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