Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller

liberated from the ghetto I was aske an important question which touched not only on the person who came before me but many other Jewish women as well who had survived humiliation and physical abuse by German officers. The specific question was this: A young woman of good family came to me crying that she was one of our poor sisters who had been humili ated by the Germans. Besides abusing her body, the Germans had tattooed on her arm the legend, Whore for Hitler's Troops. Af ter liberation she had succeeded in finding her husband, and they hoped to resume their marriage and set up a proper Jewish home. They had lost all their children at the hands of the Germans. But, seeing the fearf ul tattoo on her arm, the husband was taken aback
    . . . Before living together as man and wife they had first to clarify whether she was permitted to him.

    The rabbi responded,

    Far be it from any man to cast aspersions on pious Jewish women in such a plight as this. Rather, it is our duty to proclaim the reward they will receive for their suffering. We must avoid causing them any unnecessary anguish. Certainly husbands who have divorced their wives under similar circumstances have acted repre hensibly. Nor, in my opinion, need husband and wife in this case make any effort to remove the cursed legend on the wife's arm. Rather, let it be preserved and exhibited-not as a sign of disgrace and humiliation, but as the symbol of honor and courage, in behalf of those who were slaughtered. Let it be a reminder to us and to the world that God has taken and will take His revenge on His people's oppressors.

    Jewish women alone did not suffer rape as the German Army advanced into Russia. All women were prey. From evidence pre sented to the Nuremberg tribunal the pattern becomes clear.
    The people who came to Nuremberg armed with the bitterest memories and the best-kept records were the Soviet prosecutors,

    WAR 55
    for the Soviets, who sustained the worst numerical losses of any of the Allies, had been collecting their data and gathering their depo sitions throughout the long war. A distillation of atrocities com mitted by the Nazi invader during the dark days of i941 was submitted as U.S.S.R. Exhibit No. 5i. Prepared by the Russian foreign minister, V. M. Molotov, in January, i942, as an interim war report directed to the Allied governments, it was entered into evidence at Nuremberg as "The Molotov Note." "Women and girls are vilely outraged in all the occupied areas ," the diplomat had written.
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In the Ukrainian village of Borodayevka, in the Dniepropetrovsk region, the fascists violated every one of the women and girls.
    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.

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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