The exact number of rapes is unknown, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to millions. It is clear, however, that this violence was driven in no small part by a desire to exact revenge on the Germans for atrocities committed in the East, including mass sexual violence perpetrated against “non-Aryan” women. [...]
However, wartime sex between soldiers and enemy civilian women occurs within a complex sexual economy. During the Second World War, it was common for both German women and women living in German occupied zones to enter into negotiated relationships of exchange, wherein sex was traded for protection and provision. [...]
This approach makes virtually all wartime sex between civilians and enemy soldiers criminal, regardless of whether the women involved saw it that way. The reality is that women engage in strategic bargaining under wartime conditions, often using their sexuality as a lever of power. Many of these women regard their exchange of sex for survival as a choice; a constrained one, to be sure, but nevertheless a meaningful choice. [...]
The question of how we should make sense of Allied sexual violence perpetrated against German women must be considered within the broader context of political struggles over wartime cultural memory. Feminist mobilization around the rapes, led in part by the activist and filmmaker Helke Sander, began in the 1990s and was explicitly structured around the idea of silence-breaking for the purpose of combating a patriarchy premised on women’s sexual subjugation.
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