By the summer of 1945, Germany had become the world’s greatest slave market where sex was the new medium of exchange. While the wolf of hunger might be kept from the door, grim disease was always waiting in the wings.
“As a way of dying it may be worse than starvation, but it will put off dying for months—or even years,” commented an English journalist.
In addition to all the venereal diseases known in the West, German women were infected by a host of new evils, including an insidious strain of Asiatic syphilis. “It is a virulent form of sickness, unknown in this part of the world,” a doctor’s wife explained. “It would be difficult to cure even if we were lucky enough to have any penicillin.”
Another dreaded concern—not only for those who were selling themselves, but for the millions of rape victims—was unwanted pregnancy. Thousands who were if fact pregnant sought and found abortions. Thousands more lived in dreadful suspense. And for those infants who were carried and delivered, their struggle was usually brief.
“The mortality among the small children and infants was very high,” noted one sad woman. “They simply had to starve to death. There was nothing for them… Generally, they did not live to be more than 3 months old—a consolation for those mothers, who had got the child against their will from a Russian… The mother worked all the time and was very seldom able to give the child the breast.”
As the above implied, simply because a mother sold her body to feed a child did not necessarily save her from back-breaking labor. Indeed, with the end of war, Germans old and young were dragooned by the victors for the monumental clean-up and dismantling of the devastated Reich. Sometimes food was given to the workers —“a piece of bread or maybe a bowl of thin, watery soup”— and sometimes not. “We used to start work at six o’clock in the morning and get home again at six in the evening,” said a Silesian woman.” We had to work on Sundays, too, and we were given neither payment nor food for what we did.”
From the blasted capital, Berlin, another female recorded:
Berlin is being cleaned up… All round the hills of rubble, buckets were being passed from hand to hand; we have returned to the days of the Pyramids—except that instead of building we are carrying away… On the embankment German prisoners were slaving away—gray-heads in miserable clothes, presumably ex-Volkssturm. With grunts and groans, they were loading heavy wheels onto freight-cars. They gazed at us imploringly, tried to keep near us. At first I couldn’t understand why. Others did, though, and secretly passed the men a few crusts of bread. This is strictly forbidden, but the Russian guard stared hard in the opposite direction. The men were unshaven, shrunken, with wretched doglike expressions. To me they didn’t look German at all.
“My mother, 72 years of age, had to work outside the town on refuse heaps,” lamented a daughter in Posen. “There the old people were hunted about, and had to sort out bottles and iron, even when it was raining… The work was dirty, and it was impossible for them to change their clothes.”
Understandably, thousands of overworked, underfed victims soon succumbed under such conditions. No job was too low or degrading for the conquered Germans to perform. Well-bred ladies, who in former times were theater-going members of the upper-class, worked side by side with peasants at washtubs, cleaning socks and underclothes of Russian privates. Children and the aged were put to work scrubbing floors and shining boots in the American, British and French Zones.
Some tasks were especially loathsome, as one woman makes clear: “As a result of the war damage… the toilets were stopped up and filthy. This filth we had to clear away with our hands, without any utensils to do so. The excrement was brought into the yard, shoveled into carts, which we had to bring to refuse pits. The awful part was, that we got dirtied by the excrement which spurted up, but we could not clean ourselves.”
Added another female from the Soviet Zone:
We had to build landing strips, and to break stones… From six in the morning until nine at night, we were working along the roads. Any Russian who felt like it took us aside. In the morning and at night we received cold water and a piece of bread, and at noon soup of crushed, unpeeled potatoes, without salt. At night we slept on the floors of farmhouses or stables, dead tired, huddled together. But we woke up every so often, when a moaning and whimpering in the pitch-black room announced the presence of one of the guards.
As this woman and others acknowledge, although sex could be bought for a bit of food, a cigarette or a toothbrush, some victors preferred to take what they wanted, whenever and wherever they pleased. “If they wanted a girl they just came in the field and got her,” recalled Ilse Breyer who worked at planting potatoes.
“Hunger made German women more ‘available’,’’ an American soldier revealed, “but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. In particular I remember an eighteen-year-old woman who had the side of her face smashed with a rifle butt and was then raped by two Gls. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive.”
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