Rape in World War II

Rape, looting and other abuses by military forces have existed since the conception of armies and war, and continue even today. What made World War II different to other recent wars was the sheer scale of these behaviors and the ideological justifications. Moreover, postwar historiography quickly muddied the water leading to myths like "Soviet Rape of Berlin" and "clean Wehrmacht".

Prewar incidents

The war truly began in the 1930s as the future Axis members began their expansionist pushes in the attempt to prepare for the conflict that was looming ahead. This also involved ideological acts and military action.

Wartime actions of the Axis

Despite what defenders of Nazism may attempt to claim, the German military was complicit to countless atrocities.

Nazi birthing centres for foreign workers

During World War II, Nazi birthing centres for foreign workers, known in German as Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte ("foreign children nurseries"), Ostarbeiterkinderpflegestätten ("eastern worker children nurseries"), or Säuglingsheim ("baby home") were German institutions used as stations for abandoned infants, Nazi Party facilities established in the heartland of Nazi Germany for the so-called 'troublesome' babies according to Himmler's decree, the offspring born to foreign women and girls servicing the German war economy, including Polish and Eastern European female forced labour. The babies and children, most of them resulting from rape at the place of enslavement, were abducted en masse between 1943 and 1945. At some locations, up to 90 percent of infants died a torturous death due to calculated neglect.

Among the Polish and Soviet female forced labour (Zivil- und Ostarbeiter) unintended pregnancies were common due to rampant sexual abuse by their overseers. A staggering 80 percent of rapes resulting in unwanted births occurred on the farms where the Polish girls worked. The SS suspected the victims of "cheating their way out of work" by conceiving. Notably, the babies born inside concentration camps were not released into the communities. For example, of the 3,000 babies born at Auschwitz, some 2,500 newborns were drowned in a barrel at the maternity ward by the German female overseers. Meanwhile, by the spring of 1942 the arrival of trains with the girls from Poland turned into medieval slave markets in German towns and villages, as in Braunschweig among other locations, where the young women were beaten, starved, and prohibited from speaking to each other.

Abortion in Germany was illegal as far as German women were concerned, and thus the law had to be altered. On 11 March 1943, the Reichsführer-SS signed a decree allowing for abortions "requested" by the young Zivil- und Ostarbeiter. Pregnant slave workers, who were forced to abort by the Germans, had to sign printed requests before surgery and were threatened with prison time and death by starvation. Abortions were enforced after determining whether the probable father was a German or otherwise Germanic in origin. Children were either born in, or brought into any one of the estimated 400 Ausländerkind-Pflegestätte homes as "parentless". When racially valuable, they were removed for Germanisation. In the event a foreign female worker was considered to be of Germanic blood, such as Norwegian, her child was kept alive, but this was rare.

The mortality of the Zivil- und Ostarbeiter babies was very high on average, exceeding 50 percent regardless of circumstances. It is estimated that between 1943 and 1945 some 100,000 infants of slave labourers from Poland and the Soviet Union were killed by forced abortion or by calculated neglect after birth in Germany. By other estimates, up to 200,000 children might have died. A German general and NSDAP government official, Erich Hilgenfeldt, while inspecting some of those locations was troubled by what he saw. He reported that the children were dying in an unnecessarily slow, tortuous process lasting for months, due to inadequate food rations:

I consider the manner, in which this matter is treated at present, as impossible. There is only one way or another. Either we have no desire to keep these children alive – therefore we should not allow them to slowly starve to death and [at the same time] swindle so many litres of valuable milk from the general food supply. Or [presumably] we intend to raise these children in order to utilize them later on, as labor. In this case they must be fed in such a manner that they will be usable as workers.

— Erich Hilgenfeldt,

At the Waltrop-Holthausen birth and abortion camp, 1,273 infants were purposely left to die in the so-called baby-hut and then simply checked off as stillborn. Historians believe that it was Himmler himself who intentionally gave these "assembly stations", a pompous name of the nursing homes for the non-German children, while all along planning their mass murder known euphemistically as "the special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung). The immediate reason for the local Gestapo to insist on setting up so many of these institutions was that pregnant German women absolutely refused to enter the facilities where the Ostarbeiter women were taken. According to the last decree of Reichsführer-SS in this matter, signed on 27 July 1943, foreign mothers who were unable to get back to work after giving birth were to be exterminated along with their babies.

The killing wards for the Zivil- und Ostarbeiter children, including their intentionally misdiagnosed mothers (usually as being "mentally ill"), were established at the Bavarian state hospital at Kaufbeuren and its branch at Irsee. They continued to function as euthanasia centres for 33 days after the end of the war until discovery by American troops on 29 May 1945.

Sexual misconduct

The Hitler Youth was a known center of degenerate youth hijinks and all around general molestation. Reproduction taking place like this was not seen as a mistake but instead a positive for the German people. Despite official Nazi condemnation of Homosexuality and the violence that was employed against the traditionally liberal democratic homosexual activists of Weimar by the party, homosexuality was still present in the ranks of the Nazi party. Most notable was Ernst Rohm, head of the most militant faction of the Nazis and leader of Sturmabteilung paramilitary. Present also was the prominence of cross dressing within the German military.

Red Army "rape"

A common claim that circulates around bourgeois history regarding the Second World War is that the Soviet Red Army committed war-time sexual violence (and other atrocities) on Germans to an extent equal or greater to what the Axis powers had done. This narrative of a "raped Germany" was propagated by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in an effort to reduce the role of the Red Army from liberators and protectors against fascism to merely a gang of rapine looters and rapists. While the initial "estimates" of the number of Germans "raped" by the Red Army were relatively small at around 20,000-150,000 total, Western Cold War propaganda would later drastically increase the number of Germans supposedly "raped" to a number in the millions. While rapes by Red Army personnel did happen, they took place on a much smaller scale than what anti-communist propaganda would suggest, and when they did take place, the perpetrators would be punished by all means available, up to and including the death penalty.