Violence against women during the Second World War

Violence against women: the unspoken side of the Second World War

Society

Farouk Adel

Published Saturday, 10 December 2016

In a dark period of history, though one not very far removed from our own time, several countries tried to impose their control on the world during the Second World War. The world witnessed systematic persecution of many people, whether on religious grounds, such as the targeting of Jews, or on racial grounds, such as the targeting of Roma and Africans and attempts to exterminate them en masse. Yet one thing all sides had in common, and in which the Allied and Axis armies were alike, was violence against women.

Studies written about the war often overlook this aspect. Despite the passing of the years, there have not been sufficient investigations of violence against women, and this neglect is often due to embarrassment about mentioning such incidents.

Today, while the "16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence" campaign is under way, we write about three shameful stories of violence against women in the Second World War, because we cannot address present-day violence and prevent it from happening in the future without studying the horrific incidents of the past.

1. Women who collaborated with the Nazis (sleeping with the enemy)

We begin in France, where a practice dating back to medieval Europe returned: women's hair was completely shaved off, they were forced to walk naked through the streets and were pelted with bricks as punishment for collaborating with the German enemy.

During the Nazi German occupation of France between 1940 and 1944, many French women, and women in other European countries occupied at the time, collaborated with occupation soldiers by having sexual relations with them. This could be submission to their power and control and fear of abuse, or it could be in return for money at a time when women's sources of income had become scarce after their husbands died in the war. These relationships led to the birth of thousands of French-German children. More than 20,000 women were punished, although sources suggest that the number may have been higher given the number of births.

Belgian women being punished and forced to give the Nazi salute.

The women were punished in informal trials, without consideration of their defense, even though some women insisted that the sexual relations had been forced. In some areas prostitutes who agreed to deal with the Nazis were killed. Such punishment also spread to other countries occupied by the Germans, such as Belgium.

In addition to individual collaboration by some women with the German occupation, the German army officially relied on French brothels for the sexual gratification of soldiers. The German historian Fritz Zilder states that foreign women who worked in these houses, French or otherwise, came to work of their own free will. In another study, however, Ruth Seifert, professor of sociology at Regensburg University of Applied Sciences, confirmed that some of these girls were forced to work in the brothels, according to accusations made against Nazi officers at the postwar Nuremberg trials. It is worth noting that the German army high command issued soldiers with cards for visits to these houses and ordered that sexual relations with French women who did not work in them were forbidden.

As for the punishment of French women that followed the liberation of France, insufficient investigation of those incidents has been carried out even today, although they have become a stain on French history.

In 2008, the then French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said that the wounds between Germany and France had still not healed, and stressed that children born as a result of the war were still demanding that their identity be established. In 2009, the German Foreign Office allowed anyone who could provide documents proving that his or her father had been a German citizen during the war to obtain German citizenship. On that basis, the Frenchwoman Danielle Rouxel obtained German citizenship, becoming the first war child to receive it.

2. Women for the pleasure of the Japanese army

"They screamed at night, continually calling for their mothers." This is how the Korean woman "Kamiko Kaneda" concludes the story of her abduction by Japanese forces and her forced work in comfort stations. She faced many problems when she refused sexual acts and, as a result, was stabbed in the chest and suffered a broken hand. Later, Kamiko saw teenage girls also forced to work as comfort women; because their sexual organs were not sufficiently developed, they suffered wounds and various illnesses and spent the night screaming.

Kamiko Kaneda.

These details take us to the other side of the world. While the case of collaborating women took place in France, and just as Germany assigned brothels to its soldiers in France, Japan tried to solve the problem of sexual tension among its troops. This resulted in a large system in which many women, called "comfort women" or "ianfu," were recruited from countries occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army, which numbered more than a million men, including China, Korea, the Philippines, Burma and other countries and regions. Estimates of the number of women recruited into these camps range from 20,000 to 300,000; the wide discrepancy demonstrates the lack of sufficient investigation of the issue. Yoshiaki Yoshimi, professor of modern Japanese history at the University of Tokyo, drawing on wartime documents he found in the 1990s, confirmed that the Japanese army established a number of camps and comfort stations for soldiers out of fear of disease spreading among them, or of protests caused by their sexual needs and their long separation from their families.

Comfort women from South Korea.

Women from China and Malaya being taken by force to work in comfort camps.

The creation of "comfort camps" began in 1932 in Shanghai, China, where Japanese soldiers raped 233 women. General Okamura Yasuji tried to solve the problem and asked the army to send comfort women to his soldiers in China so that the rapes would stop. At first the women were Japanese prostitutes who volunteered to perform what was presented as national service for the soldiers. Later the army needed more women and advertised various fictitious jobs. For example, a Korean woman called "Pak" (a pseudonym) said that she was seventeen when Korean offices, acting on Japanese orders, recruited Korean women to work in a number of factories. Someone from Pak's family had to go, so she went with a number of other women. They were handed over to Japan, and the Japanese transported them to China to work in comfort camps.

Chinese women with Japanese guards.

On 4 August 1993, after a number of Korean women brought a lawsuit against the Japanese government, the then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued a statement that later became known as the "Kono Statement." In it Japan acknowledged for the first time since the Second World War the use of comfort women and the establishment of camps in which women were forced to have sex with soldiers, inflicting a grave wound on their honor and dignity.

The statement was considered an apology by Japan to the comfort women who had been forced into this system. In 2007, however, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe denied that the Japanese army had forced women to have sex and then said: "There was coercion in the broad sense of the term (coercion on the basis of contracts with prostitution institutions), but there was no coercion in the narrow sense (coercion by the army)."

Later, in 2014, Japan decided to form a team to review the steps that had led to the Kono Statement, after one of those who had drafted the statement said that the women's testimony had not been sufficiently reviewed.

The issue remains controversial to this day. Demonstrations are repeatedly held to demand an official apology from the Japanese government and the necessary financial compensation. Some of the women who were subjected to and forced into sexual relations during the Second World War within the framework of the comfort camps take part in these demonstrations in countries such as South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan.

Women in South Korea demonstrate to demand an apology for having been forced to work in comfort camps.

3. The Great Rape of Berlin

While the world breathed a sigh of relief in the middle of 1945 after the nightmare of the Second World War had ended, Hitler and his aides had committed suicide, and the power of the Axis states had effectively ended in most parts of the world, and while the world hoped for peace without the persecution of particular groups of people, the situation in Berlin was different. After the Allies destroyed the city, a horrific crime took place in the German capital. This time, however, the accused were not the Nazis but the Allied forces, which had finally entered Germany after a fierce war lasting five years. As usual, the victims were women. Soviet and American troops raped large numbers of German women; the number of victims reached two million women in what became known as the "rape of Berlin."

Corporal Kantaria raises the Soviet flag over the Reichstag after its capture.

German women stand beside buildings amid the ruins of Berlin.

As with most of the events mentioned in this report, there are major disagreements among historians over the number of victims. Soviet historians, representing the side most prominently accused, considered the figures exaggerated, as did others. These events were unlike other events documented in photographs, but there is a range of evidence pointing to details of the rapes.

The British military historian Antony Beevor, in his book The Fall of Berlin, and on the basis of testimony from a number of Soviet soldiers and from German women who were raped, confirms that rape incidents "occurred to women from the age of 8 to 80." He wrote that Soviet officers were convinced that the acts took place with the consent of German women because they were supposedly happy finally to have been liberated from the Nazis.

The Soviet soldier Vladimir Gelfand also recounts in his memoirs of entering Berlin the anger he felt toward his fellow soldiers, who sought to punish German women for what the German army had done before; their desires went so far as wanting to stab women in their genitals.

In a modest attempt to document these events, memoirs entitled A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City were published in 1959. The anonymous author recounts her memories of Berlin as the city fell to the Allies, her gang rape by a number of Soviet soldiers, and then her decision to obtain protection by entering into an intimate relationship with a Soviet officer, as many German women also did.

The book was regarded as "sullying the reputation of German women." As a result, the anonymous author decided that it should not be published again during her lifetime, according to the German writer Hans Enzensberger, who republished it in 2003 without naming the author. Later, however, the editor Jens Bisky revealed the author's identity as the German journalist Marta Hillers, who died in 2001.

Marta Hillers.

The book topped the bestseller list for 19 weeks in its second edition. It was also selected by The New York Times as an Editors' Choice, and a German film based on the book's story, entitled The Fall of Berlin: Anonymous, was made and earned 219 million dollars.

The Belarusian journalist and writer Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, also cited in her book The Unwomanly Face of War the testimony of a former Red Army officer, who said:

"We were young, strong, and had lived for four years without women, so we tried to hunt German women. Ten men raped one woman. There were not enough women; the entire population fled from the Soviet army, so we took a little girl, between twelve and thirteen years old, and if she cried we put something in her mouth. We thought it was funny. Now I do not understand how I did this. I grew up in a good family, but that is what I was like during the war."

In another testimony from the same book, a female telephone operator in the Soviet army recounts:

"When we occupied any city, there were three days for looting and rape. This was not official, of course, but after the three days anyone who did it could face a military trial... I remember a German woman who had been raped, sitting naked with her hands between her legs. Now I feel ashamed of it, but at the time I was not ashamed at all. Do you think it was easy for us to forgive the Germans? We hated seeing their houses white, decorated with flowers and undestroyed. I wanted to see them suffer; I wanted to see their tears. Ten years had to pass before I began to feel pity for them."

In another attempt to document the events, the German historians Rainer Gries and Silke Satjukow published their book Occupation Children: The Children of Occupied Germany after 1945, in which they tried to document the testimony of German children born after the fall of Germany. According to the authors' estimate, their number reached 300,000. Most of these children are now around 70 years old, but they are still searching for their parents and their lost identity.

Although the accusations are directed more heavily at the Soviet army, James Lilly, professor of psychology and criminology at Northern Kentucky University, states in his book Taken by Force that American troops also committed numerous rapes of women in France, Germany and Britain. According to the documents he cites, the number of female victims reached 14,000.

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