Rape during the occupation of Germany

Territorial changes and occupational zones of Nazi Germany after its defeat. Includes the front-line along the Elbe from which U.S. troops withdrew in July 1945

As Allied troops entered and occupied German territory during the later stages of World War II mass rapes took place both in connection with combat operations and during the subsequent occupation. Most Western scholars agree that the majority of the rapes were committed by Soviet servicemen, but estimates vary widely. Russian historians have criticized the estimates and argue that these crimes were not widespread. The war time rapes had been surrounded by decades of silence.[1][2][3][4] According to Antony Beevor, NKVD files have revealed that the Soviet leadership knew what was happening, including about the rape of Russian women liberated from labour camps, but did nothing to stop it,[5] while other sources say that the Soviet leadership took swift action.[6]

Soviet Military

Historians have written about sexual violence committed by the armies of the Western Allies and the Red Army as these forces fought their way into the Third Reich and during the period of occupation.[7] On the territory of Nazi Germany, it began on 21 October 1944 when troops of the Red Army crossed the bridge over the Angerapp creek (marking the border) and committed the Nemmersdorf massacre before they were beaten back a few hours later.

The majority of the assaults were committed in the Soviet occupation zone; estimates of the numbers of German women raped by Soviet soldiers have ranged up to 2 million.[8][9][10][11][12] According to historian William Hitchcock, in many cases women were the victims of repeated rapes, some as many as 60 to 70 times.[13] At least 100,000 women are believed to have been raped in Berlin, based on surging abortion rates in the following months and contemporary hospital reports,[10] with an estimated 10,000 women dying in the aftermath.[14] Female deaths in connection with the rapes in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000.[1][15] Antony Beevor describes it as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history", and has concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.[16] According to Natalya Gesse, Russian soldiers raped German females from eight to eighty years old. Russian women were not spared either.[17][18][19]

When Yugoslav politician Milovan Djilas complained about rapes in Yugoslavia, Stalin reportedly stated that he should "understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle."[20] On another occasion, when told that Red Army soldiers sexually maltreated German refugees, he reportedly said: "We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have their initiative."[21]

Historian Norman Naimark writes that after the summer of 1945, Soviet soldiers caught raping civilians were usually punished to some degree, ranging from arrest to execution.[22] However, the rapes continued until the winter of 1947–48, when Soviet occupation authorities finally confined Soviet troops to strictly guarded posts and camps,[23] separating them from the residential population in the Soviet zone of Germany.

Picture taken by the Sicherheitspolizei, the original caption states that the two women show signs of rape

Analysis

In his analysis of the motives behind the extensive Soviet rapes, Norman Naimark singles out "hate propaganda, personal experiences of suffering at home, and a fully demeaning picture of German women in the press, not to mention among the soldiers themselves" as a part reason for the widespread rapes.[24] Naimark also noted the effect that the Russian tendency to binge-drink alcohol (of which much was available in Germany) had on the propensity of Russian soldiers to commit rape, especially rape-murder.[25] Naimark also notes the patriarchal nature of Russian culture, and of the Asian societies comprising the Soviet Union, where dishonor was in the past repaid by raping the women of the enemy.[26] The fact that the Germans had a much higher standard of living (with things such as indoor toilets), visible even when in ruins "may well have contributed to a national inferiority complex among Russians". Combining Russian feelings of inferiority and the resulting need to restore his honor and their desire for revenge may be the reason many women were raped in public as well as in front of husbands before both were killed.[26]

According to Antony Beevor revenge played very little role in the frequent rapes; according to him the main reason for the rapes was the Soviet troops' feeling of entitlement to all types of spoils, including women. Beevor exemplifies this with his discovery that Soviet troops also raped Russian and Polish girls and women that were liberated from Nazi concentration camps.[27]

According to Alexander Statiev, while Soviet soldiers respected their own citizens and those of friendly countries, they perceived themselves to be conquerors rather than liberators in hostile regions. They viewed violence against civilians as a privilege of victors. Statiev cites the attitude of a Soviet soldier as exemplifying this phenomenon: "Avenge! You are a soldier-avenger! ... Kill the German, and then jump the German woman! This is how a soldier celebrates victory!"[28]

With respect to the number of abortions reported in Berlin and the estimates of the number of rapes based on the abortions statistics, there are some alternative contentions which don't necessarily involve rapes by Soviet soldiers. Atina Grossmann explains that until early 1945 abortions in Germany were illegal (except for medical and eugenic reasons), and so when doctors opened up and started performing abortions to rape victims (for which only an affidavit was requested from a woman), many women would claim that they were raped, but their accounts were surprisingly uniform (describing rapists as having "mongoloid or Asiatic" features). It was also typical that women specified their reasons for abortions as being mostly socio-economic (inability to raise another child) rather than moral or ethical.[29]

Richard Overy, a historian from King's College London, has criticized the viewpoint held by the Russians, asserting that they refuse to acknowledge Soviet war crimes committed during the war, "Partly this is because they felt that much of it was justified vengeance against an enemy who committed much worse, and partly it was because they were writing the victors' history."[30]

Historian Geoffrey Roberts writes that the Red Army raped women in every country they passed through, but mostly in Austria and Germany: 70,000–100,000 rapes in Vienna, and "hundreds of thousands" of rapes in Germany. He notes that the German Army probably committed tens of thousands of rapes on the Eastern Front, but that murder was the more typical crime for them.[31]

Criticism from Russian historians

Several Russian historians argue that although there were cases of excesses and heavy-handed command, the Red Army as a whole treated the population of the former Reich with respect.[30]

According to Oleg Rzheshevsky, a President of the Russian Association of World War II Historians, only 4,148 Red Army officers and many soldiers were convicted of atrocities. He explains crimes such as acts of sexual assault as inevitable parts of war, and men of Soviet and other Allied armies committed them. However, in general, he says Soviet servicemen treated peaceful Germans with humanity.[6]

Makhmut Gareev states that he had not even heard about sexual violence. He says that "instances of cruelty, including sexual, occurred", and that they "simply could not be absent after what the Nazis did" in the USSR, but also states that "such cases were strongly suppressed and punished," and that "they did not become widespread." He notes that the Soviet military leadership signed an executive order on 19 January 1945 that demanded the prevention of cruel treatment of the local population.[6]

Social effects

A number of "Russian babies" were born during the occupation, many of them as the result of rape.[32]

According to Norman Naimark we may never know how many German women and girls were raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation, their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as 2 million.[33] As to the social effects of this sexual violence Naimark notes:

In any case, just as each rape survivor carried the effects of the crime with her till the end of her life, so was the collective anguish nearly unbearable. The social psychology of women and men in the soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of occupation, through the founding of the GDR in the fall of 1949, until—one could argue—the present.[33]

West Berliners and women of the wartime generation refer to the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, Berlin, as the "tomb of the unknown rapist" in response to the mass rapes by Red Army soldiers in the years following 1945.[34] [35][36][37][38][39]

The wife of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Hannelore Kohl, had been gang raped at age 12 by Russian soldiers in May 1945, according to her biographer. As a consequence, she sustained a serious life long back injury after being thrown out of a first floor window. She had been suffering long and serious illnesses that experts thought of as the consequence of childhood trauma. Hannelore Kohl committed suicide in 2001.[40][41]

Soviet literature

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn took part in the invasion of Germany, and wrote a poem about it: Prussian Nights;

“ Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse. It's not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning by the walls, half muffled: the mother's wounded, half alive. The little daughter's on the mattress, dead. How many have been on it? A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl's been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse. . . . The mother begs, "Soldier, kill me!"[42] ”

Svetlana Alexievich published a book, War's Unwomanly Face that includes memories by Soviet veterans about their experience in Germany. According to a former army officer,

“ We were young, strong, and four years without women. So we tried to catch German women and ... Ten men raped one girl. There were not enough women; the entire population run from the Soviet Army. So we had to take young, twelve or thirteen year-old. If she cried, we put something into her mouth. We thought it was fun. Now I can not understand how I did it. A boy from a good family... But that was me.[43] ”

A woman telephone operator from the Soviet Army recalled that

“ When we occupied every town, we had first three days for looting and ... [rapes]. That was unofficial of course. But after three days one could be court-martialed for doing this. ... I remember one raped German woman laying naked, with hand grenade between her legs. Now I feel shame, but I did not feel shame back then... Do you think it was easy to forgive [the Germans]? We hated to see their clean undamaged white houses. With roses. I wanted them to suffer. I wanted to see their tears. ... Decades had to pass until I started feeling pity for them.[44] ”

In popular culture

As most women recoiled from their experiences and had no desire to recount them, most biographies and depictions of the period, like the German film Downfall, alluded to mass rape by the Red Army but stopped shy of mentioning it explicitly. As time has progressed more works have been produced that have directly addressed the issue, such as the books The 158-Pound Marriage and My Story (1961) by Gemma LaGuardia Gluck [reissued as Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck's Story (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust) (2007, Expanded Edition)],[45][46] or the 2006 films Joy Division and The Good German.

The topic is the subject of much feminist discourse.[47] The first autobiographical work depicting the events was the groundbreaking 1954 book A Woman in Berlin, which was made into a 2008 feature film. It was widely rejected in Germany after its initial publication but has seen a new acceptance and many women have found inspiration to come forward with their own stories.[48][49][50]

US Military

In Taken by Force, J. Robert Lilly estimates the number of rapes committed by U.S. servicemen in Germany to be 11,040.[51] As in the case of the American occupation of France after the D-Day invasion, many of the American rapes in Germany in 1945 were gang rapes committed by armed soldiers at gunpoint.[52]

Although non-fraternization policies were instituted for the Americans in Germany, the phrase "copulation without conversation is not fraternization" was used as a motto by United States Army troops.[53] The journalist Osmar White, a war correspondent from Australia who served with the American troops during the war, wrote that:

After the fighting moved on to German soil, there was a good deal of rape by combat troops and those immediately following them. The incidence varied between unit and unit according to the attitude of the commanding officer. In some cases offenders were identified, tried by court martial, and punished. The army legal branch was reticent, but admitted that for brutal or perverted sexual offences against German women, some soldiers had been shot – particularly if they happened to be Negroes. Yet I know for a fact that many women were raped by white Americans. No action was taken against the culprits. In one sector a report went round that a certain very distinguished army commander made the wisecrack, 'Copulation without conversation does not constitute fraternisation.'[54]

A typical victimization with sexual assault by drunken American personnel marching through occupied territory involved threatening a German family with weapons, forcing one or more women to engage in sex, and putting the entire family out on the street afterward.[53]

As in the eastern sector of the occupation, the number of rapes peaked in 1945, but a high rate of violence against the German and Austrian populations by the Americans lasted at least into the first half of 1946, with five cases of dead German women found in American barracks in May and June 1946 alone.[52]

Carol Huntington writes that the American soldiers who raped German women and then left gifts of food for them may have permitted themselves to view the act as a prostitution rather than rape. Citing the work of a Japanese historian alongside this suggestion, Huntington writes that Japanese women who begged for food "were raped and soldiers sometimes left food for those they raped."[52]

British troops

Many rapes were committed under the effects of alcohol or post-traumatic stress, but some cases of premeditated attacks, like the attempted rape of two local girls at gunpoint by two soldiers in the village of Oyle, near Nienburg, which ended in the death of one of the women when, whether intentionally or not, one of the soldiers discharged his gun, hitting her in the neck, as well as the reported assault on three German women in the town of Neustadt am Rübenberge.[55] On a single day in mid-April 1945, three women in Neustadt were raped by British soldiers. A senior British Army chaplain following the troops reported that there was a 'good deal of rape going on'. He then added that "those who suffer [rape] have probably deserved it.'[56]

French Military

French troops took part in the invasion of Germany, and France was assigned an occupation zone in Germany. According to Perry Biddiscombe the French for instance committed "385 rapes in the Constance area; 600 in Bruchsal; and 500 in Freudenstadt."[57] The soldiers of France indulged in an orgy of rape in the Höfingen District near Leonberg.[58]

According to Norman Naimark, French Moroccan troops matched the behavior of Soviet troops when it came to rape, in particular in the early occupation of Baden and Württemberg.[59]

Discourse

The study of violence committed against German civilians at the end of the Second World War had, until relatively recently, been largely ignored by historians. Soviet archives were closed. An attitude prevailed that the Germans were the perpetrators of war crimes, Soviet writings spoke only of Russian liberation and German guilt and Western historians concentrated on the details of the Holocaust.[60]

Elizabeth Heineman, University of Iowa, has argued however that in postwar Germany, especially in West Germany, the war time rape stories became an essential part of political discourse[8] and that the rape of German women (along with the expulsion of Germans from the East and Allied occupation) had been universalized in an attempt to situate the German population on the whole as victims.[8] This discourse became wholly discredited by the late 1960s; since the 1970s on German leftists conducted politics focused on critical investigation of the Nazi past, the older generations' unwillingness to face that past, and their tendency to portray themselves as victims rather than as perpetrators, particularly of the Holocaust.[61] Therefore, it is argued, the frequently iterated claim that the war time rapes had been surrounded by decades of silence[1] [62][63] is perhaps not correct.[61]

The way the rapes have been discussed by Sander and Johr in their "BeFreier und Befreite"[1] has been criticized by several scholars. According to Grossmann, the problem is that this is not a "universal" story of women being raped by men, but of German women being abused and violated by an army that fought Nazi Germany and liberated death camps.[14] Such attempts to de-emphasize the historical context of the rape of German women is a serious omission, according to Stuart Liebman and Annette Michelson,[64] and, according to Pascale Bos, is an example of ahistorical, feminist and sexist approach to the wartime rape issue.[61]

According to Pascale Bos, the feminist attempt to universalize the story of the rapes of German women came into a contradiction with Sander's and Johr's own description of the rapes as a form of genocidal rape: the rape of "racially superior" German women by "racially inferior" Soviet soldiers, implying that such a rape was especially harmful for the victims.[61] In contrast, the issue of the rapes of Soviet women by Wehrmacht soldiers, that, according to some estimation amounted hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions[65][66] is not treated by the authors as something deserving serious mention.[61]

See also

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Helke Sander/Barbara Johr: BeFreier und Befreite, Fischer, Frankfurt 2005
  2. ↑ Allan Hall in Berlin (24 October 2008). "German women break their silence on horrors of Red Army rapes". Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  3. ↑ "Raped by the Red Army: Two million German women speak out". The Independent. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  4. ↑ Susanne Beyer. "Harrowing Memoir: German Woman Writes Ground-Breaking Account of WW2 Rape". Spiegel.de. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  5. ↑ Bird, Nicky (October 2002). "Berlin: The Downfall 1945 by Antony Beevor". International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs) 78 (4): 914–916.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Gareev, Makhmut; Tretiak, Ivan; Rzheshevsky, Oleg (21 July 2005). Насилие над фактами [Abuse of Facts]. Trud (in Russian). Interview with Sergey Turchenko.
  7. ↑ Biddiscombe, Perry (2001). "Dangerous Liaisons: The Anti-Fraternization Movement in the U.S. Occupation Zones of Germany and Austria, 1945–1948". Journal of Social History 34 (3): 611–647. doi:10.1353/jsh.2001.0002. JSTOR 3789820.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Heineman, Elizabeth (1996). "The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany's "Crisis Years" and West German National Identity". American Historical Review 101 (2): 354–395. JSTOR 2170395.
  9. ↑ Kuwert, P.; Freyberger, H. (2007). "The unspoken secret: Sexual violence in World War II". International Psychogeriatrics 19 (4): 782–784. doi:10.1017/S1041610207005376.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "BBC - History - World Wars: The Battle for Berlin in World War Two". Bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  11. ↑ Hanna Schissler The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968
  12. ↑ "Silence Broken On Red Army Rapes In Germany". NPR.org. 17 July 2009. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  13. ↑ Hitchcock, William I. (2004). The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945 to the Present. Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0-385-49799-2.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Atina Grossmann. A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers October, Vol. 72, Berlin 1945: War and Rape "Liberators Take Liberties" (Spring, 1995), pp. 42–63 MIT Press
  15. ↑ Seidler/Zayas: Kriegsverbrechen in Europa und im Nahen Osten im 20. Jahrhundert, Mittler, Hamburg Berlin Bonn 2002
  16. ↑ Sheehan, Paul (17 May 2003). "An orgy of denial in Hitler's bunker". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 7 December 2010.
  17. ↑ Beevor, Antony (1 May 2002). "They raped every German female from eight to 80". The Guardian (London).
  18. ↑ Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945.
  19. ↑ Richard Bessel, Germany 1945.
  20. ↑ Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain, The Crushing of Eastern Europe, p.32
  21. ↑ Roberts, Andrew (24 October 2008). "Stalin's army of rapists: The brutal war crime that Russia and Germany tried to ignore". Daily Mail (London).
  22. ↑ Naimark, p. 92.
  23. ↑ Naimark, p. 79.
  24. ↑ Naimark, pp. 108–109
  25. ↑ Naimark, p. 112
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Naimark, pp. 114–115
  27. ↑ Daniel Johnson (24 January 2002). "Red Army troops raped even Russian women as they freed them from camps". Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  28. ↑ Statiev, Alexander (2010). The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands. Cambridge University Press. p. 277.
  29. ↑ Grossmann, Atina (Spring 1995). "A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers". October (The MIT Press) 72: 42–63. doi:10.2307/778926.
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 Summers, Chris (29 April 2002). "Red Army rapists exposed". BBC News Online. Retrieved 27 May 2010.
  31. ↑ Roberts, Geoffrey (2013). Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle That Changed History. Routledge. pp. 152–153. ISBN 978-0-582-77185-7.
  32. ↑ SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg, Germany (16 August 2007). "The Occupation and its Offspring: Lost Red Army Children Search for Fathers". SPIEGEL ONLINE. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  33. ↑ 33.0 33.1 Naimark, pp. 132–133
  34. ↑ Johnson, Daniel (25 January 2002). "Red Army troops raped even Russian women as they freed them from camps". London: The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2009-03-30.
  35. ↑ Polish town tears down statue marking the rape of millions of German women by Russian soldiers
  36. ↑ Ksenija Bilbija, Jo Ellen Fair, Cynthia E., The art of truth-telling about authoritarian rule, Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2005, p70
  37. ↑ Allan Cochrane, Making Up Meanings in a Capital City: Power, Memory and Monuments in Berlin, European Urban and Regional Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, 5–24 (2006)
  38. ↑ J.M. Dennis, Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic 1945–1990, p.9, Longman, ISBN 0-582-24562-1
  39. ↑ Jerry Kelly (2006). In the Grip of the Iron Curtain. p. 118. Retrieved 16 January 2014.
  40. ↑ "Wife of ex-German chancellor Helmut Kohl 'raped at the age of 12 by Russian soldiers'". The Daily Mail. 19 June 2011. Retrieved 26 December 2014.
  41. ↑ Schwan, Heribert (2011). The Woman at his Side: Life and Suffering of Hannelore Kohl. Heyne Verlag.
  42. ↑ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights: A Poem [Prusskie nochi], Robert Conquest, trans. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).
  43. ↑ Alexievich, p. 33
  44. ↑ Alexievich, p. 386
  45. ↑ "Remember the Women Institute: Library - Book Reviews". Rememberwomen.org. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  46. ↑ Gemma La Guardia Gluck (Author), Rochelle G. Saidel (Editor) (2007). Fiorello's Sister: Gemma LaGuardia Gluck's Story (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust). Syracuse University Press.
  47. ↑ "The rape of Berlin". Dir.salon.com. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  48. ↑ 'In Berlin,' The Diary Of One Who Stayed
  49. ↑ "German women break their silence on the rape of Berlin". The Age (Melbourne). 25 October 2008.
  50. ↑ Hegi, Ursula (4 September 2005). "After the Fall". The Washington Post.
  51. ↑ Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II. J Robert Lilly. ISBN 978-0-230-50647-3 p.12
  52. ↑ 52.0 52.1 52.2 Harrington, Carol (2010). Politicization of Sexual Violence: From Abolitionism to Peacekeeping. London: Ashgate. pp. 80–81. ISBN 0-7546-7458-4.
  53. ↑ 53.0 53.1 Schrijvers, Peter (1998). The Crash of Ruin: American Combat Soldiers in Europe During World War II. New York: New York University Press. p. 183. ISBN 0-8147-8089-X.
  54. ↑ White, Osmar (1996). Conquerors' Road: An Eyewitness Report of Germany 1945. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 97–98. ISBN 0-521-83051-6.
  55. ↑ Longden, Sean. To the victor the spoils: D-Day to VE Day, the reality behind the heroism. Arris Books. p. 276. ISBN 9781844370382.
  56. ↑ Emsley, Clive (2013) Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since 1914. Oxford University Press, USA, p. 128-129; ISBN 0199653712
  57. ↑ Biddiscombe, Perry (2001). "Dangerous Liaisons: The Anti-Fraternization Movement in the U.S. Occupation Zones of Germany and Austria, 1945–1948". Journal of Social History 34 (3): 635. doi:10.1353/jsh.2001.0002. JSTOR 3789820.
  58. ↑ Stephenson, Jill (2006). Hitler's Home Front: Württemberg under the Nazis London: Continuum. p. 289. ISBN 1-85285-442-1.
  59. ↑ Naimark, pp. 106–107
  60. ↑ Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, June 2008 a historiographical analysis
  61. ↑ 61.0 61.1 61.2 61.3 61.4 Pascale R . Bos, Feminists Interpreting the Politics of Wartime Rape: Berlin, 1945; Yugoslavia, 1992–1993 Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006, vol. 31, no. 4, p.996-1025
  62. ↑ "Raped by the Red Army: Two million German women speak out". The Independent. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  63. ↑ Susanne Beyer. "Harrowing Memoir: German Woman Writes Ground-Breaking Account of WW2 Rape". Spiegel.de. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  64. ↑ Stuart Liebman and Annette Michelson. After the Fall: Women in the House of the Hangmen, October, Vol. 72, (Spring, 1995) pp. 4–14
  65. ↑ Gertjejanssen, Wendy Jo. 2004. "Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War II." PhD diss., University of Minnesota.
  66. ↑ A 1942 Wehrmacht document suggested that the Nazi leadership considered implementing a special policy for the eastern front through which the estimated 750,000 babies born through sexual contact between the German soldiers and Russian women (an estimate deemed very conservative) could be identified and reclaimed as racially German. (The suggestion was made to add the middle names Friedrich and Luise to the birth certificates for boy and girl babies, respectively.) Although the plan was not implemented, such documents suggest that the births that resulted from rapes and other forms of sexual contact were deemed as beneficial, as increasing the "Aryan" race rather than as adding to the inferior Slavic race. The underlying ideology suggests that German rape and other forms of sexual contact may need to be seen as conforming to a larger military strategy of racial and territorial dominance. (Pascale R. Bos, Feminists Interpreting the Politics of Wartime Rape: Berlin, 1945; Yugoslavia, 1992–1993 Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 996–1025)