The Wartime Battlefield of Sex

Abstract

When American forces broke through German resistance in the spring of 1945, U.S. Army commanders began to worry about rising reports of sexual violence. “Since the entry into Germany by the Seventh Army the number of cases of rape have increased greatly,” General Alexander Patch reported. “The situation is one in which it is believed emergency action is required.” Omar Bradley, commander of the largest group of armies on the continent, warned General Dwight D. Eisenhower that “certain conditions of looting, pillaging, wanton destruction, rape and other crimes” were widespread. By the time of his writing, in April 1945, some 500 reports of rape per week were flooding into the Judge Advocate General’s office. An after-action report would later confirm these concerns: “We were members of a conquering army and we came as conquerors. The rates of reported rapes sprang skyward.” This report acknowledged that many more rapes occurred than were reflected in general court-martial records, which listed 552 trials for Germany as a whole until the end of the war. The Judge Advocate said that not more than 25 percent of reported cases ever made it to trial. The situation was “ripe for violent sex crimes,” the report concluded, and “the avalanche came.” The history of Allied sexual violence in Nazi Germany is a troubled one. Numerous historians have documented the extensive sexual assaults that German women suffered at war’s end; in popular memory, this history is associated above all with the Soviet “Rape of Berlin,” though French and American troops were also regularly accused of gendered violence. After Germany’s defeat in 1945, such stories of sexual violation would be transformed into a mythology of national violation that was effectively racialized and put toward neo-fascist ends. This prospect was immediately discernible to black soldiers and journalists on the ground in Germany in the spring of 1945, who saw how the U.S. Army’s commitment to Jim Crow segregation—including prohibitions on sex and fraternization across the color line—aligned with