A female survivor forced into sex slavery at Auschwitz bares the inscription Feld-Hure, tattooed on her chest in, 1945

A female survivor forced into sex slavery at Auschwitz bares the inscription Feld-Hure, tattooed on her chest in, 1945. 

Forgotten by too many are the millions of rape victims of the Wehrmacht. Once praised for honorable conduct, the “clean hands” of the German Army was once one of the most well-kept myths of the Second World War until the 1990s. Over time, historians have deconstructed the lies surrounding the myth, revealing a far more sinister military organization with an affinity for the National Socialist world view and the violent means to assert it across Europe. Remnants of that clean image, however, remain in discussion of the Wehrmacht’s sex crimes—or rather the complete absence of such discourse.

Rape was used as a weapon of mass terror by the Wehrmacht. An unprecedented level of sexual violence was committed on the Eastern Front, where over 10 million women and young girls were raped by German soldiers. Nazi authorities and policies, through the Criminal Orders, created a permissive culture in which sex crimes could be treated as commonplace behaviors. The most important order for this discussion, the Jurisdiction Decree, stated offenses against civilians no longer fell under the courts-marital and the summary courts-martial, effectively removing civilians from the protections of military law and granting German soldiers near impunity in their treatment of the civilian populace. Nazi laws on “race defilement” were wholly ineffective at deterring outrages.

The Security Service Reichfuhrer-SS noted in 1942 that Wehrmacht orders “to ban any kind of sexual intercourse with Russian women and girls have been without any noteworthy effect”. The dispensation for sex crimes went far beyond the bounds of what is to be “expected” in war.

The war of annihilation being waged in the East by the Wehrmacht in the name of Nazi ideological goals removed humanity from its consideration for the occupied populace. In many places, with Soviet men of military age drafted, German soldiers encountered populations of mostly women, children, and the elderly, allowing them to be easily exploited and victimized. Disturbed by just one of numerous accounts, Minister of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov described how “In the village of Semenovka, in the Kalinin Region, the Germans raped 25-year-old Tikhonova, wife of a Red Army man and mother of three children, who was in the last stage of pregnancy. They tied her hands with a piece of string. After raping her the Germans cut her throat, stabbed both her breasts, and drilled them in a sadistic manner.” The German Army and SS also organized a widespread sex slavery system; women and young girls were kidnapped to served as prostitutes in military brothels. Young Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian girls would have their hair yanked and endure further abuses as they were herded onto vehicles to the facilities. In concentration camps, female inmates were selected or incentivized with humane treatment to work as sex slaves, most times being tattooed with the term “Feld-Hure” (field whore) on their chest. Executions of Jews often included mass rapes of female victims prior to being shot into a shallow grave.

For a more in-depth survey of the topic, I recommend the books used to find this information: *Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe*, edited by David Stahel and Alex J. Kay, and *Against Our Will* by Susan Brownmiller. For the full Molotov note on German atrocities, written in 1942, use Continue reading