Two heartless Germans smiling on as a woman is hung in the background. German troops used mass rape as a means of terrorizing the local populace

Two heartless Germans smiling on as a woman is hung in the background. German troops used mass rape as a means of terrorizing the local populace


The way women were treated by the German armed forces during the second World War hinged on a variety of factors, ranging from the specific unit involved, to the location and time period. The behaviour which members of the German armed forces exhibited towards women was quite varied, ranging from kind and humane, to downright barbaric.

On the Eastern Front, rape was (at least officially) discouraged. Army High Command feared outbreaks of venereal disease (due to poor sanitary conditions) as well as violating Nazi racial policy (it was illegal for an Aryan to have sex with a “lesser” Slav). This did not mean that rape didn’t happen. On the contrary, instances of brutal sexual assault were shockingly common.

Jewish women and girls were subjected to sexual violence before being murdered during the invasion of Poland in 1939. In occupied parts of the Soviet Union, it is estimated that the number of rape victims and children born out of rape may very well have exceeded several million. On at least two occasions (at Smolensk and Lviv), German troops used mass rape as a means of terrorizing the local populace. Although rape was technically punishable by a lengthy prison sentence and even death, most cases of rape by German soldiers were not prosecuted, unless letting the criminal get away risked undermining discipline within the unit. In addition to sexual assault and rape, the German military forced tens of thousands of Eastern European women, many of whom were merely teenagers, to work in army brothels.

It should be noted that instances of sexual violence were more likely to be perpetrated by rear-echelon troops than by frontline soldiers.

That’s not to say that all civilian women in Eastern Europe were treated like this. Acts of kindness, such as German soldiers sharing food with starving mothers and children, were fairly common. In addition, numerous women (especially in Ukraine and the Baltic states, where the local populace had suffered under Soviet rule too) actively collaborated with their German occupiers.

On the other hand, captured female Soviet soldiers, nurses and resistance fighters would almost certainly be subjected to horrific acts of sexual violence before being murdered. For example, during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, certain SS units (the infamous Dirlewanger and RONA brigades) conducted a deliberate policy of brutally raping both captured female resistance fighters as well as female civilians. In addition, members of SS Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union would often rape female victims before mass executions. Members of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, the ethnic German militia, did pretty much the same thing in Poland, assisted by the regular German army at time.

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