Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (11 page)

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   Hitler always said that the masses are essentially feminine, and his aggressiveness and charisma elicited an almost masochistic surrender and submission in his audience-a form of psychic rape. . . . He didn't convince his audiences; he conquered them.
   

   We owe this vivid image of a Hitler speech to Albert Speer, but the metaphor is clearly Hitler's. The Nazi aim was to cong!l.
   .
   not merely to win or convince, and that, of course, was the heart of the
   m
   atter.
   A mind that perceived-and then set about to institu
   tionalize-the masses as weak and feminine, and the Jewish masses as especially weak and teminme, and the .Bolshevik masses as equallv weak and feminine ( and strangelv susceptible to the femi nist notion that women are the equals of men ). was a mind that
   

   --natu°rally turned to rape as aifueans of suppression]
   

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     The analogy between Jews and women-and between Aryan supremacy and male supremacy-that the Third Reich promul gated has been discussed by Eva Figes and Kate Millett.
     The point
     I . want
     to make here is that as rape is t
     he quintessential act by which a male demonstrates to a female that she is conquered vanguished-by his superior strength and power.
     it
     wac;:
     pP.rfedly k>gal within the framework of fascism that rape would be em
     

_
ployed by the German soldier as he strove to prove himself _a worthy Superman. In fact, it would have been highly
illogical
if pe were not m the German soldier's kit bag of weapons. Rape for the Germans, and to a similar extent for the Japanese, played a serious and logical role in the achievement of what they saw as their ultimate objective: the total humiliation and destruction of "inferior peoples" and the establishment of their own master race.

Reports of mob rape directed against Jewish women made their first appearance during the secretly ordered "spontaneous" riots of November, 1938, the
Kristallnacht
that began in Munich and spread throughout Germany in planned response to the assas sination, by a Jew, of a minor German Embassy official in Paris. The
Kristallnacht
became the model for a pattern that was to be repeated in many towns in many places once the official war began. When the advancing German Army approached a Polish or a

50
I
AGAINST OUR WILL .

Russian village, the pattern of first-phase violence was almost in variable. Homes were looted, but first and especially the Jewish homes, and Jewish girls were singled out for torture and rape, of ten in front of their parents. Days, weeks or months later, depending on the timetable, the second, or "serious," phase began: the round ups of the Jewish population, the mass shootings, the herding into ghettos, and the eventual dispatch in boxcars to the concentration camps and the Final Solution. A Russian-Jewish woman named Sophia Glushkina ·gave this eyewitness account of the pattern of German terror in the city of Krasny, preserved for us in the unemo tional form of a war-crimes trial deposition.

Before the war I lived in Minsk. On June 24, i941, I saw my husband off to the front. I walked out of the town with my eight year-old child, heading east. I decided to go to my birthplace-the city of Krasny-to get to my father and brothers. In Krasny the Ger mans caught up with me, on July i3th..

On July 25th a notice was posted ordering a meeting of all. residents of the town. At the meeting the Germans said that any body may move into the houses of Jews. The Germans also an nounced that the Jews must obey all orders of German soldiers.

They began to raid apartments, to undress people, to beat them with sticks and whips.

On August 8th, SS men invaded my house. They grabbed my

brother, Boris Seenovich Glushkin. He was 38 years old. They began to beat him; then they threw him out onto the street, tor mented him and finally threw him into a cellar. The next morning they posted notices: "All inhabitants are invited to the public execu tion of a sheeny." My brother was brought out, he had an inscrip tion on his chest saying that he was to be executed. He was un dressed, tied to the tail of a horse and dragged off. When the moment of execution came, he was already half dead.

The next night at 2 o'clock they knocked on the door again. The commandant entered and demanded the wife of the executed Jew. She wept, being shaken by the dreadful death of her husband; the three children wept. She was taken away. We thought that she would be killed, but the Germans acted more beastly than that; they raped her right here in the yard.

On August 27th a special detachment arrived. The Jews were driven together and were told to bring all of their belongings im mediately and turn them over to the Germans. Then they moved to the ghetto. The Germans fenced a plot of land in with barbed wire

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and hung up a sign-"Ghetto, Entrance forbidden." All Jews, even children, had to wear six-pointed stars made of yellow cloth on their chests and on their backs.

In
February one night the SS men dashed into the barracks. Their choice was an eighteen-year-old girl, Etta Kuznetsova. She was ordered to take her skirt off. She refused. She was beaten for some time. Her mother, fearing that they would kill her, whispered: "Do not resist." She undressed. Then she was placed on a chair, spot-lighted with a flashlight, tortured and assaulted.
It
is difficult to describe it all . . .

Af ter witnessing this
·
second rape, Sophia Glushkina escaped to the forest with her young son and joined the partisans. Within hours of her flight, the remaining Jews of Krasny were herded into the town square and shot. She concludes her terse narrative, "For two years we fought, and then the day came when I saw the Red Army . . ."

Technically it was verboten for a German to rape a Jew under the stern prohibition against "race defilement"-the injunction against contaminating Aryan "blood" contained in the Nuremberg race laws of 1935 that extended under its own twisted logic to forcible intercourse as well as to marriage or extramarital liaison.* The fear of being caught at race defilement apparen tly created an arena of acute conflict for some of the Soldaten. In her published memoirs Sala Pawlowicz, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, tells of a terrifying visit to the police station in Lask, her German-occupied Polish village. She was called in on a minor pretext, forced to strip before the assembled Gestapo men, slapped about and then dragged by one of them into an adjoining room.

I
was in a small office and the German had a long heavy whip in his hand. "You don't know how to obey . . . I'll show you. But
I
can't have you, scum, because you're Jewish, and filthy. What a shame!" He swung the whip across my breasts. "Here's what you can have for being a dirty Jew-instead of me-this!" He lashed the whip again and again and
I
fainted.