Page 457 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

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ActA
Remembering wartime rape – three sets of sources on the
red army 1944/45 in Central Europe and Germany 1

Kerstin BISCHl

alking about sexual violence is never easy. It stirs feelings of uneasiness, shame,
T guilt and helplessness. So, the topic oftentimes becomes complicated and hard to
address, especially when we focus on such a widely discussed and politicized incident
like the behavior of the Red Army in Central Europe and Germany in 1944/ 1945. At that
time, the advancing Red Army soldiers raped hundreds of thousands German women,
which is a widely known fact, but they also, and this is less known, abused Eastern Euro-
pean women, former forced workers or women which they had just freed from German
concentration camps.
When looking at the long list of monographs dealing with these acts of wartime
related sexual violence, one could assume that researching it once more is not neces-
sary. The question “Why did the Red Army soldiers rape in high quotas very different
women in very different ways” seems to be answered. But appearances are deceptive as
all analysis we have provide us with black-box-explanations, single causes, stereotypes
2
or commonplaces, sometimes being openly racist. The statements the authors make
about the perpetrators‘ motives are not connected to the perpetrators’ social world or
their everyday-life, thus lack a deeper insight into the Red Army as a social microcosms.
Therefore my Philosophical-Degree project tries to do exactly that: to write an every-
day-life-history of the Red Army and, thus, to trace how dynamics of violence and gen-
der-relationships intertwined during the “Great Patriotic War”. My thesis is that during
the “Great Patriotic War” - as the war of the Red Army against Germany was called in the
Soviet Union - the discourse of masculinity within the Red Army radicalized due to the
German total war, the violence and shaken social structures within the Red Army. As sug-
gested by the Soviet propaganda its male soldiers increasingly had to present themselves
as brave soldiers. This gendered identity included not only violence against the German
troops but also a focus on a man’s (hetero-) sexual potential and the soldier’s right to
3
(hetero-) sexual intercourse. Brutalized by the war and crossing the Soviet borders as
“victorious heroes” the soldiers demanded these “rights” in very different ways from the

1 The paper will be part of my is part of my dissertation project at Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany on
“Gender-relationships and dynamics of violence within the Red Army 1941-45” which is generously financed
by Hamburg Institute of Social Research.
2 So for example Alexander Werth, Russland im Krieg 1941-1945, [Russia at war], München 1965, 644; Norman
M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany. A history of the Soviet Zone of occupation, 1945 – 1949, Cambridge
1997, 107-14; Manfred Zeidler, Kriegsende im Osten. Die Rote Armee und die Besetzung Deutschlands
östlich von Oder und Neisse 1944/45 [End of war in the East. The Red Army and the occupation of Germany
east of Oder and Neisse 1945/45], München 1996, 105-9, 120-32, 147-51; Antony Beevor, Berlin. The
downfall, 1945, London 2002, 30-60, 326 -49.
3 There are no hints in sources or literature of homosexual encounters or desires among Red Army soldiers.