Throughout history, whenever there have been times of war (and such occasions have been present in any cultures, on all continents of the planet), there were also the consequences of them derivatives. THE loot, that is, the practice that the victorious soldiers had of plundering, appropriating material goods (whose usual name, in terms of war, is booty) of its enemies, was present in the most remote civilizations. Frequently, the “booty of war” included women, who became sex slaves. Over the centuries, the practice of looting, including rape of women, was being conceived (at least in the western world) as war crime. It turns out that, even with all the sophisticated legislation against war crimes that came to be gestated, the history of modern wars and, in particular, of the Second World War it shows that the horror of mass rapes continued even more terribly.
World War II was characterized by the large movement of troops on the European continent. These movements implied invasions and occupations of vast territories, but, above all, of highly populated towns and villages. We know that, unlike the aristocratic wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, the civilian population was harshly massacred and vilified during the two world wars by invading troops. Young women, of course, were targets of the soldiers' unbridled and cruel sexual appetite.
In the specific case of World War II, the most glaring cases of sexual abuse were committed in Europe by German and Soviet troops. Not that this type of crime was not committed by other armies, but in the case of these two nations at the time, gang rapes were tolerated and even encouraged in some cases. The Nazis, as is well known, turned Jewish, Polish and Dutch women into sex slaves before they were killed. The eugenic and racist conception of the Germans at that time supported the idea that these women were nothing more than subhuman entities, objects, roughly speaking.
The Soviet case was even more complex. It is known that Red Army troops have allied with Western forces against the Axis Powers. Soviet soldiers confronted the Nazis on the eastern front and even “liberated”, that is, occupy and establish defense positions in Berlin, Germany, in 1945. It was in this process of occupation by the Soviets that the mass rapes of German women took place. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped and many killed after the rape. Several contemporary historians and writers deal with this theme in their works. One author, in particular the novelist Hans Ulrich Treichel, addresses this issue in his book “The Lost”, which tells the story of a child who grows up during the Cold War in Germany Oriental and ends up discovering, little by little, that his mother, in 1945, was raped by Soviet soldiers - a fact that resulted in his birth.
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Historians, such as Antony Beevor and Norman Davies, have done the work of collecting data and analyzing the occurrences of rape of German women since the last year of the war. According to Davies (referring to the Soviets):
The culture of mass rape was encouraged both by the men's attitudes and the dispositions of the military authorities. ''Red Army soldiers do not believe in 'individual ties' with German women,'' wrote a Soviet playwright in his war diary. ''Nine, ten, twelve men at the same time collectively rape them.'' They could offend with impunity. 'The NKVD (…) did not punish its soldiers for rape, but only if they caught venereal diseases through contact with victims who, in most cases, had been contaminated by others violator''. This procedure recalls the practice instituted by the American Army, whose soldiers after having been prohibited from ''fraternizing'' paid a fine of 65 dollars when receiving treatment for illnesses venereal. [1]
In addition to this tolerance on the part of Soviet officers, there were also, among German women, the psychological side effects caused by rapes, such as suicide:
Rape is always a criminal offense. Group rape is an even more serious offense. And, carried out Soviet-style, it was often accompanied by murder, double murder (if the woman was pregnant), or suicide. Tens, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of German women killed themselves to escape the fate of their sisters, or out of a state of post-traumatic self-loathing. [2]
* Image credits: Shutterstock and Igor Golovniov
GRADES
[1] DAVIES, Norman. Europe at War. Editions 70: Lisbon, 2008. pp.376-77.
[2]Idem. P. 378.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes