Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (13 page)

t
• In
the village of Berezovka, in the region of Smolensk, drunken

German soldiers assaulted and carried off all the women and girls

between the ages of i6 and 30.

f

• In the city of Smolensk the German command opened a brothel for officers in one of the hotels into which hundreds of women and girls were driven; they were mercilessly dragged down the street by their arms and hair.
  

• Everywhere the lust-maddened German gangsters break into the houses, they rape the women and girls under the very eyes of their kinfolk and children, jeer at the women they have violated, and then brutally murder their victims.
  

• In the city of Lvov, 32 women working in a garment factory were first violated and then murdered by German storm troopers. Drunken German soldiers dragged
  .
  the girls and young women of Lvov into Kesciuszko Park, where they savagely raped them . . .
  

• Near the town of Borissov in Bielorussia, 75 women and girls at tempting to flee at the approach of the German troops fell into their hands. The Germans first raped and then savagely murdered 36 of their number. By order of a German officer named Hummer, the soldiers marched L.
  I.
  Melchukova, a i6-year-old girl, into the forest, where they raped her. A little later some other women who had also been dragged into the forest saw some boards near the trees and the dying Melchukova nailed to the boards. The Germans had cut off her breasts in the presence of these women, among whom were V.
  I.
  Alperenko and V. H. Bereznikova.
  

• On retreating from the village of Borovka, in the Zvenigorod dis trict of the Moscow region, the fascists forcibly abducted several women, tearing them away from their little children in spite of their protests and prayers.
  

• In
  the town of Tikhvin, in the Leningrad ·region, a 15-year-old girl named H. Koledetskaya who had been wounded by shell splin ters was taken to a hospital (a former monastery ) where there were wounded German soldiers. Despite her injuries the girl was raped by a group of German soldiers and died as a result of the assault.
  

All of this occurred in the first flush of the German invasion.

Yet another aspect of wartime rape-rape as a method of military retaliation or reprisal-was briefly illuminated at the Nuremberg tribunal when it came the turn of the French prose cution.

Accounts of punitive measures taken by the Germans in occu pied France during the summer of 1944 in response to the active presence of the Maquis ( resistance fighters ) were marked as evi dence and read into the trial record. One Maquis stronghold was the region of Vecours. On June 15, 1944, the Germans staged a "surprise" raid on the village of St. Donat: "The Maquis had evacuated the town several days earlier . . . 54 women or young girls from 13 to 50 years of age were raped by the maddened soldiers." A raid at Nice on July 20, 1944, had a similar conclusion:

. . . having been attacked at Presles by several groups of Maquis in the region, by way of reprisal this Mongolian detachment, as usual commanded by the SS, went to a farm where two French members of the resi'tance had been hidden. Being unable to take them pris oners, these soldiers then arrested the proprietors of that farm (the husband and wife ), and af ter subjecting them to numerous atroc ities, rape, et cetera, they shot them with machine guns.

As the French prosecutor sif ted through his documents, the standard censoring mechanism that men employ when dealing with the rape of women was put into effect. "The Tribunal will forgive me if I avoid citing the atrocious details," he said with gallantry. "A medical certificate from Doctor Nicolaides who examined the women who were raped in this region-I will pass on."

The Far East equivalent of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal was held in Tokyo in 1946. Now it was the Japanese war machine that was held under scrutiny, and now it was the master-race theory of the Land of the Rising Sun-with the Chinese nation forced to play the role of "inferior people"-that

WAR
I
57

the ultimate victors of World War II had cause to examine and pass judgment upon. At the Tokyo tribunal the full story of the Rape of Nanking, almost ten years af ter the fact, was finally made known.

Hard news out of Nanking was slow in coming when the Japanese Army took China's capital city in December, 1937. Gen eral Chiang Kai-shek had pulled out his Nationalist forces prior to the invasion, moving his capital westward to Hankow. Any Chi nese civilian with the wherewithal had also fled, leaving the de fenseless city to the poorer classes and a handful of foreign missionaries, including some Americans, who elected to stay. What happened next when the Japanese conqueror entered Nanking can only be described as an orgy of wholesale assault against the re maining civilian population.

Reports of unchecked violence, including terrifying accounts of mass rape, filtered out of the captured city despite an official news blanket ordered by Generalissimo Chiang. But when the silence was finally broken in January, a curious thing happened. Nanking had clearly been the victim of unlawful atrocity. As the Western press jumped into the breach, accounts of wanton murder and looting were gravely brought to the world's attention, but stories of rape were handled gingerly-almost reluctantly-by international reporters. "A few uninvestigated cases of rape were reported" was the way Life magazine cautiously chose to inform its readers.

Despite the cynicism brought to bear by the Western press, stories of systematic mass rape in Nanking were unusually persis tent, so much so that the "Rape of Nanking" soon passed into common usage as the world-wide metaphor for that city's invasiop. In June of 1938 the Nanking International Relief Committee, the missionary group that reained in the city, completed a survey of damage in the Nanking area. Its sixty-page report was a model of the detailed fllinutiae of devastation. Injury and death to the Chi nese population was reported on a percentile basis, broken down by age, sex, previous employment and mode of death. Property loss from fire and looting by Japanese soldiers was estimated in neat, round sums from street to street. Loss of labor animals and damage to winter crops found permanent validation in separate columns marked water buff alo, oxen, donkeys, wheat, barley, broad beans, field peas, and, irony of ironies, rapeseed. As for the act that gave

its name to the Rape of Nanking, the compilers of the official report had only this to say: "Among the injured females, 65 per cent were between the ages of 15 and 29, although the terms and method of inquiry excluded rape per se."

Rape in Nanking might have passed out of history then and there, relegated in typical fashion to the dubious area of unsup ported wartime rumor. But as it turned out, the Allied Powers elected to hold an International Military Tribunal for the Far East once the global war was finished.
In
order to prove the awesome crimes against humanity, facts that a few years before had been inaccessible-"excluded" from the ever-so-proper "terms and method of inquiry"-suddenly loomed important. One of the de fendants in the docket at Tokyo was General
I
wane Matsui, the man in charge of the Nanking invasion.

No raped women were called to testify at the Tokyo tribunal, but there were witnesses enough. The star witnesses, by and large, were the very same missionaries who had chosen to exclude rape from their official report of war damage. As it turned out, they had not been unmindful of the crime. Rather, the enormity of it appar ently had paralyzed them. A page from the Nanking diary of American missionary James McCallum was entered into evidence:

Never have I heard or read of such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least i,ooo cases a night, and many by day. In case of resistance . . . there is a bayonet stab or a bullet. We could write up hundreds of cases a day.

Mrs. Shui Fang Tsen, director of dormitories at Ginling Col lege, a missionary institution, submitted a lengthy deposition. At the start of the invasion the missionaries proclaimed Ginling an international safety zone, and the college grounds became a refuge for more than ten thousand frightened women and children. The "safety zone" hardly proved safe for women. According to Mrs. Shui, "Japanese soldiers would enter the grounds on the pretext of looking for soldiers, but were in fact looking for our girls." On the night of Decemoer 17, 1937, a gang of soldiers forcibly entered the college and carried off eleven young women. Nine later made their way back to the grounds, "horribly raped and abused." "We never heard any more of the other two girls," Mrs. Shui reported. This was a typical incident.

Witness af ter witness told similar stories-girls dragged off by gangs of four or five men in uniform; abducted women forced to wash clothes for the Army units by day and to "service" as many as fifteen to forty men at night; women forced to perform sex shows for troops at play; fathers forced at gunpoint to rape their own daughters. Many ,of the stories had similar endings. When a group of soldiers was finished with a captured woman, a stick was some times pushed up into her vagina; in some cases the woman's head was severed. A statement from Mrs. Chang Kia Sze was read into the record:

I
.•.

The first day the Japanese entered Nanking they fired and burnt our home and we were proceeding to the refugee camp. There were the following in the party, my mother, my brother and his wife, two children of mine, and my brothei;ls two children, aged 5 and
2
years of age.

As we were proceeding and came to a place called Lao Wong Fou in Nanking City, we were met by twelve Japanese soldiers, in cluding some officers who wore swords. One of the soldiers wearing a sword, whom I thought was an officer, grasped my sister-in-law and raped and then killed her in the presence of her husband and chil dren, who were killed at the same time. The husband was killed for trying to defend his wife and the two children were killed because they wept when their mother was being raped. The five-year-old girl was suffocated by having her clothing stuffed in her mouth and the boy was bayoneted. Their father and mother were both bayoneted and thereby killed. My mother was also bayoneted and died twelve days later. I fell to the ground and escaped later with my two chil dren.

This all happened about io o'clock in the morning and in broad daylight on the streets of Nanking. I was an eyewitness to all of this. I went to the refugee camp and on the way saw many corpses, women and civilian men. The women had their apparel pulled up and looked Jike they had been raped. I saw about twenty, mostly women.

Wong Pan Sze, who was fif teen years old at the time of the Nanking invasion, submitted the following affidavit:

At the time the Japanese entered the city on December
i
3, i937, I and my father and my sister had. already been removed to live in a house on Shanghai Road No.
ioo
which was in the refugee

zone. There were about
500
persons living in that house, and I often saw the Japs come to the house asking and searching for women. On one occasion one woman was raped in the open yard. This happened in the night, and all of us could hear her cry while she was being raped. But when the Japs lef t we could not find her, they had taken her away with them. Twice
I
saw the Japs' truck come to the house and round up women living at the house. These women were taken away by the Japs and none of them returned with the exception of one girl who managed to get back home af ter having been raped by the Japs, and she told me that all the girls who had been taken in the trucks had been raped many times by the Japs, one af ter the other. This one girl who managed to get back to the house told me that she had seen one of the girls raped, and af ter being raped the Japs stuck weeds into her vagina, and the girl died from this treat ment. At this time
I
was about
15
years of age.
I
hid every time a Jap came near the house and this is why the Japs never caught me . . .

Nanking was a totally defenseless city. The twenty or so for eign missionaries were totally unable to stem the tide. Reading through the pages of their testimony, one can't help thinking how woefully inadequate and ludicrous their efforts were as they liter ally ran about and tried to shoo away the Japanese soldiers they found assaulting Chinese women within their self-declared neutral ity zone. For a time they made a stab at reporting a daily list of atrocities to the Japanese authorities. The reports averaged at least ten gang rapes a day-"sample cases" they called them. Chinese names were rarely recorded. The report filed on December 16, 1937, duly entered into evidence, is pathetic, both in its sense of outrage and priority. Items No. 12 and 13 were as follows:

1. At
   10 P.M.
   on the night of December 14, a Chinese home on Chien Ying Hsiang was entered by
   11
   Japanese soldiers who raped four Chinese women.
   

   

2. On December 14, Japanese soldiers entered the home of Miss Grace Bauer, an American missionary, and took a pair of fur lined gloves, drank up all the milk on the table, and scooped up sugar with their hands.