In the house next door were women
who’d been evacuated from Munich. Suddenly, in the night, I heard
terrible screams and cries. I asked what had gone on
there because I couldn’t sleep. And they said: Yes, people
had come and raped the women. The screams were
so horrendous. To me it was a nationwide catastrophe, one that affected
an entire generation. Come Frau,
Raboti. How often did I hear that 70 years
ago, because I was a war trophy? That word conveyed
all the horror. We always said: I was
‘taken’ when we talked about it. You felt guilty. You felt dirty. In general, you can say that not
enough has been made of the fact that all troops committed
acts of sexual violence: the Soviet Army, the Americans,
the French and the British. I think that if we focusing
primarily on the violent acts committed by
the Red Army, we’ll remain stuck in a very
simplistic explanatory model. Rape is an old cultural
pattern in wartime. With it, the victor shows
the enemy soldiers: You can’t protect
your women. It’s a way of dishonoring
the men’s military honor. I was searching for
my identity for 40 years. The crazy thing is that this
rape is what led me to being alive. In Europe, the Second World
War had just come to an end. German cities
lay in ruins. In 1945, the months between the
end of fighting and a new beginning were full of chaos, despair,
euphoria, guilt, and hope. But this was also a time that proved
to be especially dangerous for women. My conservative estimate is that there were close to
900,000 rape victims. The number of rapes
themselves could be much higher because many victims
were raped multiple times. Women were raped by Allied
soldiers in the first weeks and months after the surrender
of Nazi Germany. Violated by those who
came to Europe as 'liberators': American, British and French troops,
and soldiers from the Soviet Red Army. This means there’s
likely no German family, or family that lived in
Germany at the time, that wasn’t affected
in some way: Either concretely
through their own assaults, or at least through the
fear that it could happen to their own
family members. Only when she was over 80 did
Maximiliane Heigl’s mother Margot speak of her childhood memories
of soldiers and awful screams. In the spring of
1945, after air raids, the US Army occupied the
Bavarian town of Landshut. Four-year-old
Margot, her mother and a female
cousin sought shelter in a cellar. The women lived together,
more or less without men. And then, in April 1945,
when the bombardments in Landshut became too severe,
they fled to a house in Pfarrgasse, right next to
the church. When the Americans arrived,
they forced their way into the house. There were several of them
and they were heavily armed. They searched the
house from top to bottom. And then, in a cupboard
in one of the bedrooms, they saw a Wehrmacht
uniform hanging on a hanger. And then they asked
‘where is this man? Where is this man? Where is
the soldier?’ And then they grew more and more
aggressive and drove the women into the bedroom. And then, in the bedroom, one of
the soldiers threw my grandmother onto the bed and tried
to take her clothes off. Margot stayed
silent for decades. In her family, no one ever
spoke about the events that occurred at the
end of April 1945. It was only her daughter
Maximiliane who, upon learning of her
grandmother’s rape, decided to find out more about
the time US troops entered Bavaria. She began looking for
witnesses to this history, especially in the villages and
was met with a wall of silence. So, the first ‘field’ that I
worked was in a small rural area on the border between Upper
Bavaria and Lower Bavaria, in the district
of Altötting. A very Catholic community
with a lot of social control. Back then I knew
incidents had occurred. Yet it took almost a year to
find women, and also men, who were willing to tell
me what happened there. Man, we were so
afraid of the soldiers. Are the
Russians coming? We’d heard terrible things about
them and hoped the Americans would arrive
before the Russians. It was May 1st and we
were at the May devotions. You could hear the sounds of the
tanks and vehicles in the church. Suddenly, the priest said: the enemy
has forced its way into our village. Go home. The women and girls
were to comport themselves with dignity
vis-à-vis the enemy. They came
upstairs to our place. Two young
Americans. And, of course, they saw
my mother and my sister and attacked
them right away. Rape is a
weapon of war. And as long as army commanders
don’t take strict actions against it, they’re tolerating it and perhaps even
exploiting it for their military aims. Because sexual violence
is, in a certain sense, so intimate that it can rupture
family structures, the connections, the social cohesion of a
society in the long term. Leonie Biallas has written
down the traumatic experiences she associates with
February of 1945. Back then she witnessed the Red
Army’s rapid advance into Breslau the historical capital of Silesia, now
known as the Polish city of Wrocław. Many of the big cities were
destroyed, but not Breslau. We rarely had
air-raid warnings. And we always said:
that’s why we’re in for it now. And it was
a disaster. The Russians formed a ring
around Breslau, encircling the city. Breslau was surrounded
and it was a fortress. The city was supposed
to serve as a bulwark and stop the Russians
from advancing. So the order to evacuate
came far too late. Leonie Biallas was just
14 years old at the time. We were in Uncle
Reinhold’s cellar. He was my father's
youngest brother. In my mind, I can still
see us sitting there. In a circle,
like this. I sat here and my
mother was next to me. On Mom's other side sat my
brother Winfried, my youngest brother. They stormed in. And we just
sat like this. I don't know if we
screamed or cried. We trembled
sitting there. One came in, looked around, saw
me and yanked me towards him. And Mother
cried out. I know exactly how he
threw me on the floor. And then, on the
doorstep, it happened. Only my mother
screamed. And then we lay in one
another’s arms and sobbed. Leonie and her mother were
among around 1.4 million women who were raped while
fleeing East Prussia or Silesia often more
than once. Nazi propaganda
about the 'Red Menace' meant fear of the Soviet
soldiers was especially great. Folks were more afraid
of the Slavic peoples, because in the racist
hierarchy of the time, they were portrayed
as monstrous, primitive, as beasts driven
by physical urges. So accordingly, they
triggered more fears. Adolf Hitler and his entourage
calculated their opponent’s eventual, awful revenge
into their plans. In his diary, Minister of Propaganda
Joseph Goebbels quoted Hitler as saying, not long after
Nazi Germany’s invasion of the
Soviet Union in 1941: We have so much to answer for
that we must win because otherwise our entire nation,
with us at its head, will be eradicated along
with all we hold dear. So let’s
get to work!’ The Nazi leadership, the
heads of the Wehrmacht and even individual soldiers
were certainly conscious of the German crimes committed
in the Eastern territories. They ordered them, knew about
them, saw them or even committed them. They knew all too well that if
the Red Army came to Germany, then God have
mercy on us. At the start of 1945, the Russian Army
stood 80 kilometers outside Berlin and was preparing its
attack on the German capital. Close to three million
people were still living there. Among the women,
panic was growing. Many saw killing themselves as
the only way to evade the enemy. In April, the number of suicides
in Berlin reached record levels, at close to 4000. On the 8th of May, 1945, Hitler’s
Nazi Germany surrendered. The last great battle of the Second
World War on European soil was now over. Berlin was one
huge war trophy. The soldiers were given
free rein to enjoy their victory. The victims of this flush
of victory were the women. It’s said that a few Red Army soldiers carried a leaflet
with them which said: Crush the Germanic
women’s racial pride! Take them as
your rightful spoils. Well, revenge was
certainly an important motive, perhaps the most
important one. But other factors
also came into play, especially the internal
military culture in the Red Army. A ban on vacations, high
casualties, poor cohesion, bad leadership by
officers and sergeants who kept passing the pressure
down from the upper ranks. And then, to relieve this pressure,
they’d let their own troops run wild. What was just as true for the Red Army
as for the US Army was that troops had certain images of the
moral depravity of German society and German women. And these seemed to justify
not applying any moral standards in their dealings
with them. The advances of the
US Army from the West seemed to worry the
German population less. In March of 1945 , the
Americans crossed the Rhine, and by April, they’d
already reached Thuringia. In Kleinbartloff, the
village priest wrote in relief: The Americans are coming!
There’s excitement, but no fright. An excitement between fright and
joy but leaning more towards joy. A quarter of a year later,
the troops would withdraw. Nine months later, Konrad Jahr
was born. Right after his birth, his mother put
him in foster care. When he was 8, his foster
sister told him the reason why. She told me: In 1945, the
Americans were in Altenburg and your mother got involved
with one of those Americans. And he’s
your father. That’s how
you came to be. For me, at first, that was actually
more of a relief than a shock. Now I knew
where I came from. I had red hair and
gaps between my teeth. From an early age, I had a
kind of inferiority complex. I didn’t belong. I didn’t know
where I was at. And I had no protection,
no one to protect me. No one
supported me. In my childhood, no one
ever took me under their wing. Konrad was a cheeky kid
who soon became a thorn in the side of the East
German school system. His third-grade report card states
that he constantly interrupted lessons and was proud
to be a “foreigner.” His family was implored to
take action before it’s too late. For me, my father
was my anchor. I had a secret that belonged only
to me, one that gave me strength. It was like I was on a kind of
mission: Screw you, I’m an American. One day I’ll leave here and
join my father in America. US soldiers weren’t as widely
feared, and they were expected to abide by their military
leadership’s strict code of conduct. Germany was
conquered enemy territory, and they were supposed to keep
their distance from the German people. Training films were shown
to prepare American soldiers: In general, armies forbid
fraternization out of concern that the informal
contacts their soldiers have with the domestic population will
lead to a weakening of the army. So, if they start to have personal
contacts and, for example, have a beer at a bar
together in the evenings, then they could lose sight of
the occupying power’s goals. But the US soldiers’ advance
didn’t always go smoothly. The liberation of Bavaria
took several weeks. While, in some places, Germans
surrendered without a fight, just a few kilometers away
Hitler’s ‘last contingents’ would continue to put up strong
resistance. And that had consequences. There were still young
people who would take up arms and try to fight
the US soldiers. It appears that the
places most resistant to being taken over were the ones most
affected by sexualized war violence. Take Moosburg
near Freising. There was a big prisoner
of war camp there, where the US troops moving
in could see how their comrades had been treated
in Germany. This, in particular, seems to
have triggered a lot of anger in the US soldiers. That led to an especially
large number of sexual assaults, which were carried
out systematically. Apparently, they made marks on
houses presumably inhabited by women essentially declaring
them to be prey. This report about
the troops’ arrival, written by the priest of the
town of Moosburg, states: At the time, rectories were
among the few German institutions still functioning. So the Bavarian priests’
reports on the Allies’ arrival remain an important
source for historians, and journalists like
Maximiliane Heigl. Here we have the report from the St.
Nicholas parish in Bad Reichenhall. On the one hand, it makes
the blanket statement that a large number of
women and girls were violated. In parentheses here it’s been
added that there’s talk of 200. Through his formulation,
the priest makes it clear that he has no personal knowledge
of the matter but is just relaying what the townsfolk
are saying. And then comes the frequently
confirmed information that, after the Americans marched
in, there was relative peace. But then the French
troops were advancing, and the word was they were
committing terrible crimes. Namely in moral terms, they committed terrible
crimes against women and girls. Here they wrote, ‘Colored’
Moroccans would use gun violence to force their
way in at night. It was fairly typical to mention
the skin color of the soldiers or fighters doing
the plundering. The French regiments which included
soldiers of North African descent made a particularly
strong impression. De Gaulle’s troops
were barbarous. They stole and robbed
and chased after the women. And the young girls locked
themselves in the attic, so the soldiers
couldn’t come in. At first, the French army also
kept acts of sexual violence secret. But when charges were
pressed, the military courts doled out particularly harsh
sentences to France’s colonial troops. The racism of societies
back then not just the German, but also the British,
French and American ones is reflected in the numbers of
convicted and sentenced perpetrators. It was clearly so that, for
instance in the US army, Black culprits were
charged more often and also received much harsher
sentences, including the death penalty. The French occupied the territory
near the French-German border. Here in southwestern Germany, it
was mainly the French occupiers’ merciless retaliation that’s burned
into people’s collective memory. After the Red Army, the French
had the second-worst reputation with the German people,
and that applied here, too. Folks also feared
there could be reprisals as revenge for the 4-year-long
German occupation of France. And, in fact, there were
many sexual assaults when the French marched
into southwestern Germany. In the French occupation zone,
children fathered by French soldiers had to be registered, by
orders of the military governor. So it’s on record that most
of the rapes were NOT, in fact, committed
by colonial troops. Anna-Rosa Adam, born in February 1946,
was one of these “Frenchmen’s kids”. She grew up with her grandmother,
in a village near Karlsruhe. She knows nothing about the
events surrounding her conception only that her father
was a French soldier. At the age of ten, Anna-Rosa
was suddenly sent to France, because she
was deemed to be a “child of the
French state.” From the moment I had
to leave, I was in shock. There was
this trauma. I was sent unprepared
to a foreign country, with a foreign language,
to live with nuns. That was a dramatic
change for me. I had to
learn French. I was there for three years
and became a Frenchwoman I was a forced
Francophile. I was never asked
what I wanted. Nothing was ever
explained to me. Up to the point in time when I learned
that there was an archive in Colmar, a French archive, I
knew nothing at all. And then I was outraged that I
wasn’t unfamiliar to the French, but that I most certainly
existed in the French archives. All of the children
fathered by French soldiers were archived “on the
orders of General Koenig.” From this document, Anna-Rosa also
learned her father’s name: Robert. Yet, she’s never
been able to find him. Many thousands of women
are thought to have been raped in the French
occupation zone. By the summer of 1945, the
consequences of that sexual violence had become
all too clear. Many women wanted
to have an abortion, but to be granted one they needed
to have previously reported the rape. But as this
gynecologist noted: Female sexuality was
basically viewed as unreliable. This meant that, when in doubt, the
ruling always went against the woman. It was always thought that
the woman seduced the man, that she didn’t have her own
sexual desires under control. Or that she was materialistic and
wanted something from these soldiers and that she then gave
herself or sold herself to get it. Anna-Rosa’s mother Monika also contravened the
moral codes of the time. In Spring 1945, near the
German city of Karlsruhe, she met the French soldier who
would become Anna-Rosa’s father. My mother was a
very reserved woman. She wasn’t someone who’d
have taken the initiative. So I think my mother
had the opportunity to earn money
from the French. After Monica unexpectedly became
pregnant by the French soldier, she was known in her home
village as “the Frenchman’s darling”. Eventually, she
was forced to leave. After the war, women normally weren’t
permitted to have a relationship with a Frenchman, nor an American,
nor an Englishman nor a Russian. In France, they shaved
the women’s heads and chased them
through the villages. And it was no
different in Germany. Women weren’t allowed to
have liaisons with the enemy, but that didn’t stop
relationships from happening. After the “zero hour” struck,
marking Germany’s surrender, people wanted to
forget about the past. German women raped by soldiers
were often held partly to blame, so most didn’t
press charges. Too great was the shame
and the feelings of guilt, towards their husbands
and families as well. Most of the women
likely never spoke about it, not even with their husbands
when they eventually returned. Plus, there was no
intact infrastructure that could have
dealt with this. There was no legal framework
whatsoever from the German police or the German courts
to take action against it. In this respect, there was
no systematic registration. It’s estimated that, between
the early summer and fall of 1945, at least 110,000 women
and girls were raped in Berlin alone. Many of them
multiple times. Though these figures
are only estimates. This is done using old patient
records and registration forms, like those found in the archives
of Berlin’s Humboldt University. Files from the Empress Auguste
Victoria House children’s hospital, for instance, show
that 5% of the children born between the end of 1945 and the
summer of 1946 had Russian fathers. In many of
these cases, the only entry on the line
for ‘Father’ is ‘Russian’ and, in parentheses, the
German word for ‘rape’. In the entire Soviet
occupation zone, historians estimate that more than
500,000 women were raped during the first
post-war years. American soldiers are thought to have committed
over 190,000 sexual assaults. The figures are still unknown
for the British Allied troops. The Allies divided Germany and
Berlin into four occupation zones. Over time, the “occupiers”
became the “liberators”. From then on, love affairs with
Allied soldiers were no longer rare. Soon, no one was talking
about the crimes committed in the weeks
after the war’s end. Sure, for a long
time, even to this day, people don’t like to talk about
crimes committed by the Allies. For two reasons: First,
they’re our present-day allies. And second, especially
on the German side, with all the crimes carried out in
Germany’s name during World War II, it’s hard to point a
finger at the Allies. Because very quickly you can risk
relativizing or offsetting German guilt. After years of
rationing and shortages, Germans longed for stability. 1948 proved to
be a decisive year. The Americans had been preparing the
currency reform in the Western zones. This effectively split Germany
into two economic divisions and kick-started the economic
miracle in the Western half. The political division
followed just a year later. The Republic of Germany held its
first parliamentary elections in 1949. On their election posters,
the Christian Democrats, or CDU, used stereotypical
images of the enemy to stir up fears of
the “Red Menace.” CDU candidate Konrad Adenauer
became the first Chancellor of the new
Republic. The occupation
status ended. And Adenauer tied his
country’s fate to the West. Now, at the latest, it was also in
West Germany’s political interest that the guilt for crimes
committed by the Allies was placed solely
upon the Soviets. Especially during the
Cold War in West Germany, Western Europe and
the US sexual violence committed by Red Army
soldiers was often scandalized, as allegedly being
especially uncivilized or brutal. The voices or memories
of those really impacted, as well as their
perpetrators, went unheard. Only in 1992 did a
documentary once again take up the controversial topic of
rapes committed by Allied troops in post-war
Germany. Konrad Jahr was one of
the contemporary witnesses, who recounted the story of his
desperate search for his father. In “BeFreier und Befreite”, also
known as “Liberators Take Liberties”, director Helke Sander talks to victims, perpetrators
and children born of rape. What the film makes
clear: For decades, German society largely blamed these
women and children for their fate. The film was viewed as a milestone when
it came to confronting this history. And, without a doubt,
that was also because, up to that
point in time, there’d hardly been any
kind of reflection about it. And in my mother’s case, my stepfather did everything
he could to suppress it. You found
shocking examples. Why was this such a
taboo topic for so long? Firstly, women weren’t accustomed
to talking about their own interests I think that’s the
decisive factor. And no one made it easy for them,
because if they tried to talk about it they’d wind up being
punished all over again. Many women said the conflict
with their own relatives afterwards was much tougher to
take than the rape itself. For his mother, Konrad
Jahr’s very existence was proof of her so-called
‘shame.’ The 22-year-old theology student
was made to carry the blame for something over
which he had no control. In 1968, the rebellious young
man once again drove to Cottbus, to see his mother and
finally learn his father’s name. I planned to bring
this American into play. She asked me to come
into the kitchen and sat down. I was just about to start
when the door was thrown open and her husband was
standing in the kitchen doorway. And he started yelling: Get
out of here! Get out! Skedaddle! You have no business
here, no reason to be here. And leave our
mother in peace. We have absolutely
nothing to do with you. Leave the
room, scram! Leave our home
and never come back. Four years later, Konrad Jahr received
a letter with a clear message. It was written not by his
mother, but by her husband. Look for the blame in
yourself, not in others. We bear no responsibility whatsoever
for you. That’s the letter. The lifelong search for an unknown
father, for one’s own identity, for love and acceptance these things have also left
Anna-Rosa Adam with deep, psychological
scars. You always have the sense
that half of you is missing. And you always have the feeling
that you don’t belong anywhere. That you don’t belong to France
and you don’t belong to Germany. In 1948, Anna-Rosa’s mother
got married to a Frenchman. He, too, only ever saw Anna-Rosa
as the “child born into shame”. He was strict,
always very strict. But we didn’t have any
real relationship with him. And shortly before he died, he
told me that he never could stand me. I said: Why? I was always
a good kid. It was like an electrical shock
went through me, from top to bottom. It was that simple 3,200 children
born of rape were officially registered in
West Germany and West Berlin. Still, the number of unreported
cases was certainly much higher. In West Germany, the politicians
and society denied responsibility for these women
and children. The women weren’t
recognized as victims of war and thus had no
right to compensation. That was off the table
right from the start, because the state couldn’t have
afforded it and didn’t want to either. It would have put women, who
were essentially civilian war victims, on an equal footing with
war-disabled soldiers. In East Germany, rapes
conducted by Red Army soldiers were also a taboo topic. Time and time again, Konrad Jahr
provoked the communist authorities. In 1986, East German officials
decided to deport him to the West. A day before the protestant minister
was forced to leave the country, he drove to Cottbus
one last time. I wanted to visit my
mother one last time for the sole purpose of having her
tell me the name of the American. And she started to sob
and cry something awful: I’ve no idea
what you want. Why are
telling me this? There is no
American. It was in
Elsterwerda. I was at the black market, trying
to trade a pair of shoes for food. Then a truck drove
in, filled with Russians. They jumped down and
conducted a raid on the market. Then they drove me out to a field
and threw me down on the ground. One of the men held a
machine gun to my temple while the other tore off
my clothes and raped me. And then it was
the other one’s turn. Yes. Within 20 minutes
I became Russian. And with that, my years-long
dream that I was American went bust. I described the course of events in
the months of February to June 1945 the way I experienced
them at the time from the perspective
of an almost 15-year-old. Leonie Biallas lived
to the age of 94. At the end of her life, she made
her peace with the sexual violence she’d
endured at 14. She says she became a happy person,
thanks to the love of her husband. Yes, he was
very loving. Very loving and knew I
was afraid of Mr. Right, too. Yes, I also was
afraid of the right guy. But he never pressured me
even when we were engaged. It took a really
long time, yes. I have my husband Martin
and my mother to thank for this. That I to my own surprise
can speak about it quite freely.
