The rubble women

I had already heard bits and pieces of stories like this, and not only about the Soviet invaders. There are stories about what some of the troops of the Western allies did as they moved into Germany in the spring of 1945. For an eloquent reflection by an American soldier who was there, who was tempted but resisted, but was also thoughtful enough to reflect on his temptation, see Meyer Levin's afterword to his history-based novel Compulsion.

From Linda Grant's review of A Woman in Berlin:

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we are also confronted, in this book, with a central moral ambiguity that pervades every war, just or unjust. The very Red Army troops who drunkenly ejaculated into the body cavities of a half-crazed elderly woman, screaming in terror, were likely to be the same individuals who, in the January of that year, had liberated the Auschwitz death camps, had been, in fact, Levi's own liberators. And so the faces of victim and oppressor switch and switch around, and this is why one can only regret that the author would not allow the book to be republished in her lifetime, after its hostile reception in the 50s, and did not live to know that others, even those who were the victims of her country, could read, and empathise, and understand.

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Every army we know of -- some members of every army we know of -- has done this to women of every conquered nation.

There have been no exceptions. It is a fact of war.

I recall talking to a young marine from the U.S. for many hours on a long bus ride. He told me about how cheap it was to get prostitutes when they were in Korea and I could see that that was definitely a perk of being in the marines.

Recently I read “The Natashas” by Victor Malerek . He describes the slave trade in young women from those countries impoverished by war. Young women hoping to help their families take “jobs” as nannies or waitresses or models only to discover there are no jobs and that they have been sold into prostitution.

“We were taken to an apartment building near Belgrade. There were many, many girls, perhaps as many as sixty, from Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria.
I cannot describe the horror that went on there. A few times a day, the owner would come and yell at us to get ready, buyers were coming. At all hours these men arrived and we would have to take off our clothes and stand in front of them. They wanted to see what we looked like naked. They touched us and examined us like we were cattle. Sometimes they took us to a room to see how we performed sexually.” Stefa goes on to say that once she was sold she was required to bring in $500.00 a night for her pimp.

Soldiers use these women, as Victor Malarek says, ”To most trafficked women the ‘enemy’ includes the police, border guards and immigration officers. But there is yet another formidable foe among those in uniform: military men. In war-torn regions under control of U.N. peacekeepers and U.S. soldiers the words ‘democracy’ and ‘peace’ ring hollow for thousands of trafficked women imprisoned in bars and brothels adjacent to military bases. In these far flung, out-of- sight hovels, fifteen year old girls….and rape is just another word for rest and relaxation.”

The rape of women is big business now and the “perks” are built into the system for the soldiers to enjoy. In South Korea outside of each of the hundred U.S. bases are “camp towns” where the soldiers go for the “juicy girls”. Years ago these women were Korean but not any more, as the Korean economy has improved young Korean women have not had to become prostitutes. Now these young women are from Russia and the Philipines and they have been sold into prostitution. This is, according to Victor Malarek, is an open secret in the Pentagon. The truth is governments all around the world sanction the ongoing enslavement and rape of women.

All over the world, women's lives and minds and souls are held cheap -- women and children are the first to be discounted when any society comes under pressure anywhere. That's true.

But something even worse happens when that pressure builds to war. When armies invade, the local men may or may not get shot, but the women get gang-raped before they are shot. They get nailed to barn doors and raped by entire military units until they are dead.

War produces a kind of frenzy that seems to be exhausted by nothing short of sexual violation.

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Originally posted by iPod:
How can someone possibly get turned on while on top of a victim who is screaming in pain?

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Originally posted by iPod:
Rape a "perk" of war? That is totally sick. For a man to rape a women, he must have some type of insanity. How can someone possibly get turned on while on top of a victim who is screaming in pain?

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The vicious attitude of GI Ivan entering Germany was largely encoraged by the vengeful tone of Soviet propoganda, and also the direct evidence of Nazi atrocities against Russians througout Europe. It was not only an expression of the rank sadism of a few, but sadism condoned and elevated to duty, and inculcated by peer preassure and state sanction into the group as a whole.

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Originally posted by Nikita:

It's about power, not sex.

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Nikita, with respect, in the case of invasion, as in hot pursuit, I think that this is a different case from other kinds of rape, which, I agree, are more usually about frustrated power.

The rape that is being described in the diary linked to above has to do with the first flush of victory, and all kinds of soldiers who would not normally be rapists in their own communities have engaged in it.

It happens because male soldiers get ... worked up. Their own lives are in danger, or have recently been. They are running on overdrive. And so ... they take it out, on the most obvious objects, which always means women and children (probably a few animals as well).

This isn't a Bernardo story. This is your granddad or your uncle or your father, put into uniform, placed in danger of his own life, and then suddenly liberated by the thought that he has won, he will survive.

This is not psychotic rape -- this is war, and it is what many soldiers will do, always have done. It seems to be in the nerves.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
This isn't a Bernardo story. This is your granddad or your uncle or your father, put into uniform, placed in danger of his own life, and then suddenly liberated by the thought that he has won, he will survive.

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not just personal power, but state power.

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“And I think that that frenzy is different from what drives so many men to a (to me) fairly normal exchange with prostitutes, however unjust the system may have been that trapped numbers of women -- often girls -- into prostitution.”

I think it is a good point that the men who wouldn’t rape a woman in their usual life, given the opportunity of war, tend to behave differently. To me this speaks of a profound disconnection from one’s humanity and the humanity of others but then, this is war isn’t it?

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Originally posted by Nikita:

This is what I was driving at. If one state or group asserting power over another, lots of times rape is used as a tool.
I should have been a little clearer about what I meant.

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I see. I think though, that this is a different form of the abuse of power as a tool, than the kind that might take place in civil society, which is what I think Skdadl is getting at. And also a radical transformation of "normal" personalities under the duress of war fighting.

It has been said many times that war is one of the stupidest things humans do.

There is also much love in the world too, and brave people who have tried and succeeded to make the world a better place. Sometimes it's hard to remember this when exposed (even through words) to so much pain and suffering...it can be very depressing looking at some of the things that happen in the world, but getting depressed (or even, imo, getting angry) will not be much help in stopping or preventing wars.

I encourage everyone to focus on the bad things, but focus on good things too, for the sake of your personal emotional health as well as that of the world. I know sometimes I get in a pretty scary place when I focus only on what's wrong with things.

I have heard stories from and about my grandfathers and great-grandfathers that saw action in both World Wars. They all came home affected by the experiences they saw, they all saw friends killed and my great-grandfather even witnessed his brother’s death.

Yet I find it hard to believe that most soldiers would rape an innocent woman no matter what activities he/she was involved in. I think for a soldier to rape a another person he/she would have to a deep hatred for the people they are fighting against, that he/she must have deep rooted problems that occurred before the war started and that he/she does not have respect for the opposite sex..

I think it would be interesting to know the ethnic backgrounds of the soldiers and units that where in Berlin in the last days of the war, and to see if that these backgrounds provided a part of the reason way these rapes took place.

Do certain ethnic backgrounds in the USSR military tolerated the raping of women in their own culture or did the soldiers that committed the rapes came from areas the Germans themselves committed war crimes in and were just taking their revenge against the German people?

I found this quote very interesting “An Russian army officer is as likely to be a peasant as his troops.” Does the lack of a formal education have any bearing on why a person may commit a war crime?

I noted two interesting points in the article above,

1. The article never made note of the rapes committed by Croatian and Bosnian militias.

“Both personal and state power play a role in turning a soldier into such a demon. and so does military training. every day of their training, soldiers are taught and reminded in various, creative ways that the targets they torture and kill are not "real" human beings, they are not "real" people. they are taught that if they don't kill first, they will be killed. military training impresses upon soldiers that human life is not to be respected.”

I do not think that the military creates demons. Soldiers are not trained to torture an enemy soldier, nor are they taught how to inflict pain for fun. Yes they are taught to kill, yet they are taught in a manner that will bring death quickly and without inflicting undue pain.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
I get a strong feeling that after living through the sieges on Stalingrad, Leningrad Kursk, Russian front line defenses in general and then seeing skeletal women and Mengele's children at Auschwitz, Red Army soldiers and volunteers were not of a normal frame of mind. Soviet field officers probably could not have prevented the revenge killings or rapes. Extreme acts of cruelty and barbarism by Nazi SS were well known among those who survived the war of annihilation against Russia.

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First, it's important to remember that Soviet soldiers were not the only rapists and plunderers at the end of the war. The diarist reviewed in my opening link met Soviet soldiers, of course, because she was in Berlin, but if you read the excerpts quoted in the review, she is struggling through to a much deeper understanding of what war means -- see her most affecting reflections on the silence of German women towards their own returning men.

Second, I know that the perspective I keep pushing here is pretty grim and gloomy and lacking in hope. I don't mean to say that I believe that all men will become rapists in the heat of battle -- obviously, many don't. Meyer Levin didn't -- but his reflections on how close he came, and how and why, have never left me.

That it will happen, in any invasion, I think simply has to be factored in to our understanding of invasions.

[ 05 July 2005: Message edited by: skdadl ]

But the U.S. army in Iraq isn't exactly a triumphant occupying force. Its numbers are very low; it is besieged pretty permanently; it is mostly cowering in its own protected spaces and shooting anything that comes close, near as we can tell.

There have been a few serious offensives, notably Fallujah last winter. I don't know how many women remained in the city during the offensive, and all the reports I saw suggested, again, that the GIs were so terrified that they just killed anything that moved.

It does seem to me that men who wouldn't rape in civilian life are more likely to rape as soldiers, when presented with the right opportunity, together with official condonation of rape as a "perk" of victory.

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Originally posted by Webgear:
Yet I find it hard to believe that most soldiers would rape an innocent woman no matter what activities he/she was involved in. I think for a soldier to rape a another person he/she would have to a deep hatred for the people they are fighting against, that he/she must have deep rooted problems that occurred before the war started and that he/she does not have respect for the opposite sex..

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webgear, i'm glad you joined the conversation. i was hoping you would with your military background. out of curiosity, would you use the same rationale to explain the atrocities at abu-ghraib? i think that racism also has a role to play in war-time rape and plunder. it certainly did in the rape of nanjing. i don't always understand what causes someone to be racist.

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posted by webgear:
I do not think that the military creates demons. Soldiers are not trained to torture an enemy soldier, nor are they taught how to inflict pain for fun.

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i don't believe soldiers are necessarily taught that inflicting pain can be fun, but i have to wonder if the training, on a psychological level, to see human beings as inanimate targets or as video game enemies can instill sadistic feelings in soldiers. "shooting these people in front of me... it's just like a video game... so much fun" - that's sadistic, ain't it? i should have been more specific and said that these training methods are more characteristic of the american military than the canadian.

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Can the thesis be corroborated in Iraq today? Such evidence would be especially damning of the alleged "liberating" role of the U.S. in Iraq.

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It is not surprising therefore that "ordinary men" who were trained to become stone killers in wartime would also become rapists, child-killers, and looters. Or that they would suffer long-term psychoses on returning home from the war.

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It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy and all feel the heavy weight of peer pressure. Few, once in battle, can find the strength to resist.

The German veteran of World War I Erich Maria Remarque, in All Quiet on the Western Front, wrote of the narcotic of war that quickly transformed men into beasts. He knew the ecstatic high of violence and the debilitating mental and physical destruction that comes with prolonged exposure to war's addiction.

"We run on," he wrote, "overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God knows what devils; this wave that multiplies our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance."

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I would use part of my rational in describing atrocities that happen at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I think some of the American Military Police would have had a deep hatred for the Prisoners of War (POW) held in their prison, I think it is a hatred for the type of soldiers they are.

I think some of the Military Police (MP) could have been uneducated in the culture of the Iraq and of Arabs thus the MPs did not understand that the fact that Arab men tend to look down on females. Thus having female MPs handling and giving orders to men was used a tool to gain information and to break the POWs spirit.

I do not think that all the MPs are racists, I would think the MPs would have treated women and children in a different way than they would have treated men. I would think that the MPs would have treated Iraqi children they would their own children. I think you can hate an adult of a different race very easy but hating children of a different race would be very difficult.

I was in the Infantry for almost 9 years, in all those years learning to kill, I always saw the enemy as a target. I saw the target as a place to focus my training against, to test my skill against.

I do not care for reports from organizations like RAWA, from my experiences they tend to forget what life was like before the Americans arrived in Afghanistan. I would doubt that any women apart of RAWA has traveled outside of Kabul in to the tribal areas because they know that any Afghan man would put them back in to their place.

I am not saying that the western world has lived up to all their promises yet there are only about 40,000 soldiers and NGOs in a country of about 26 million. Changes to the Afghan way of life will not happen over night, this process will take years if not decades.

Look at the SSM issue here in Canada, as a nation 25-50% of the people do not approve of SSM and I believe the SSM issue has been on going in Canada for at least 10 years. This issue was on the bottom of the list of things the people wanted to see done here in Canada, any we do not even have to worry about problems the average Afghan Family has to deal with like getting enough food and trying to make a living. Now take an issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan that to, is on the bottom of a long list that needs to be done.

Has there been any cases of Americans soldiers raping in either Afghanistan or Iraq at this date? I think some of the incidents that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison could have been considered rape, but that was women abusing men.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
I was responding to skdadl's thesis ["That it will happen, in any invasion ..."]. Do I need to see the film to do so? Please explain.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
I don't know if military training has changed much since WWII, but I know that long after the war the regular methods of training ordinary men to become unthinking killers included massive doses of misogyny. Recruits were constantly assaulted by their trainers with hateful language about women. Calling a soldier a woman or a girl, or a female body part - thereby implying weakness, cowardice, or general loathsomeness - was part of the routine verbal abuse that was used to break down their inhibitions against murder, to desensitize them and dehumanize them.

It is not surprising therefore that "ordinary men" who were trained to become stone killers in wartime would also become rapists, child-killers, and looters. Or that they would suffer long-term psychoses on returning home from the war.

Source: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges (P. 87)

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Actually, in the Russian army of World War Two, most of the recruits came with their own built in prejudices, as there was no training. They were told: "There are the Germans over there. Go kill them. If you come back. We will kill you." More or less.

And I don't think they were unthininking killers. They thought about killing German extensively and devised all kinds of unique ways of killing Germans and Finns, and Italians, and Hungarians, and Rumanians and got quite good at it after a while. They also loved their wives girlfriends, children and so on and so forth.

It is also quite possible that the Soviet army was far less mysoginist than other armies of the era, if the number of women in combat roles (pilots and so forth) and among officers is anything to go by. I remember reading somewhere about female Soviet soldiers being not very sympathetic to the plight of their German female counterparts, as well.

Women in War and Resistance: Selected Biographies of Soviet Women Soldiers

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Her (Samsonova) exploits legendary, she had survived, without a scratch, the fighting of the Battle of Stalingrad and on the Voronezh Front, as well as the hell of the Dnieper River crossings. Jokingly referred to as "our battalion commander," she was always in the lead and when a girl is in the lead, how could a man display fear? Her grey eyes calm, she urged those who went to ground to get up -- after all, eventually they were going to have plenty of time to lie in it!

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But then of course we are often handicapped by the entrenched prejudices we are imbued with by society at large, and sometimes inadvertently discount the ability of women to be more than just victims, even as we righteously pose oursleves as their defenders.

[ 06 July 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]

What about situations where the rapes are not only condoned, but encouraged, as part of a long term defeat strategy of the 'enemy' nation? The agressor 'breeding' into, and diluting the ethnography of the attacked over time. Genocide? Seems like a middle ages type-of-thing, but it still goes on, doesn't it? Could that be what some of these soldiers are thinking, or how they justify it in there own minds. Attack the enemy gene pool.

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I think some of the incidents that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison could have been considered rape, but that was women abusing men.

That brings up an interesting point with women soldiers now in combat, is there a possibility that women would act in the same way the men would. Would a stronger woman rape a weak man or possible abuse him because he is weaker?

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As for Webgear's second question, in the course of my work with refugees, I read a lot of human rights reports (reports of US State Dept, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights circa 1989-92) on the civil war in Peru in the early 1990s. According to these reports, both the government forces and the Sendero Luminoso (Communist Party Shining Path) were known to kidnap, torture and summarily execute their opponents (and their opponents' family members). As you would expect in such circumstances, the government soldiers were also reported to commit widespread rape of villagers and female detainees. The government soldiers were all men. The Shining Path guerrillas, though they committed all other kinds of atrocities, were not reported to rape in the course of their torture and killings. About 50% of the Shining Path guerrillas were women.

It's my understanding that in most regimes where torture and abuse of detainees is permitted or condoned, that torture and abuse includes sexual abuse (as we've seen at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, as well as in dictatorial regimes like Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, former Yugoslavia, Uganda under Amin, and various murderous Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s and '80s, like the Somoza and Pinochet regimes). It is not uncommon that male detainees in such regimes were raped (by male guards or male dogs) and otherwise sexually tortured in detention.

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Originally posted by Webgear:
I do not care for reports from organizations like RAWA, from my experiences they tend to forget what life was like before the Americans arrived in Afghanistan. I would doubt that any women apart of RAWA has traveled outside of Kabul in to the tribal areas because they know that any Afghan man would put them back in to their place.

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I do not care for reports from organizations like RAWA, from my experiences they tend to forget what life was like before the Americans arrived in Afghanistan.

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Oh yes, it is so very likely that you have a better memory of life in Afghanistan than they do.

I am only speaking from my personal experience; maybe RAWA is successful in the Kabul however out in the country sides I really doubt they accomplished a lot. From the rural areas of eastern Afghanistan I was in, women were still doing their tradition roles, and there were few schools of females if any.

I am just saying that I can not believe all what RAWA reports. I think they like all organizations are trying to put their spin on thing to accomplish their goals. It is their version of propaganda.

The areas surrounding Kabul have always been more modernized, with more free thinking and different ways of life. Yet the rural areas have always followed the strict traditional ways.

Returning to the topic thread, I think fear could be a reason why some soldiers may turn to rape. The fear of death may turn a soldier into a rapist, never knowing when one may die could make a soldier want to have a women when ever possible.

I think the fear of death could drive a normal person to that extreme, the wanting to be with another person would block normal sense of right and wrong, thus making a woman a target of desire.

I was speaking from personal experiences, talking about what I saw and heard.

I still remember a young female covered head to tail in a burka begin push into a compound by an elder male after she was caught looking at the patrol that was leaving the town.

Even in Kabul, women are often seen in the traditional dress doing the tradition jobs.

I talked to a young female adult on my last tour; she had to hide the fact that she knew how to use a computer from the male members of her family because if they found out she would be beaten, and made to stay inside the family compound.

The male members of her family thought her job was to cook and clean at the NGO building down the street from their compound. She was not suppose to be there to learn anything, she was there to do menial work.

No matter how well-trained and motivated the troops, either, although obviously the rate of atrcotiy will vary. (And I could never pretend to come close to understanding the mindset of a Russian soldier in the nightmare of 1945.)

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Originally posted by Webgear:
[
Returning to the topic thread, I think fear could be a reason why some soldiers may turn to rape. The fear of death may turn a soldier into a rapist, never knowing when one may die could make a soldier want to have a women when ever possible.

I think the fear of death could drive a normal person to that extreme, the wanting to be with another person would block normal sense of right and wrong, thus making a woman a target of desire.

I think when a person is constantly face with death he/she will try in take pleasure in whenever possible way by whatever means necessary.[/QB]

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Maybe in conditions other than war I would agree however I think in wartime, raping a person may be something greater than power.

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