Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War

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A book project on the rape of German women at the end of the Second World War and during the occupation has first to confront certain prejudices. It is as if a single frame in a film has been frozen in our collective memory. It shows a Russian with Asiatic features yelling ‘Urri, Urri’, but demanding not only the watch but also the woman. We have all seen it on television: blonde woman, played by Nina Hoss, amid the rubble, with a slavering Mongol waiting in the shadows. Is there still anything important to say on this subject? The war is long over, the victims are very old or dead, and later generations find the war stories from Hollywood or Babelsberg more exciting. And then rape – is that not a relic, an archaic crime that always proceeds along much the same lines whether in Germany then, or in Iraq, Syria or South Sudan today? At best the subject offers a cheap platform for the eternal moralists and nationalists with their clear ideas about good and evil. Then it was the Russians who were the wrongdoers; today it is others – in any event, evil men once again.

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