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

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

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    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