Kent State doctoral candidate Monika Flaschka.

Unheard Voices

Study examines sexual violence during the Holocaust

By Melissa Edler, ‘00, M.A. ‘07
Photographs by Jeff Glidden, ‘87

The suffering of the estimated six million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II has been given voice through numerous examinations of the Holocaust. Voices less often heard are those of the women and children who were victims of rape or sexual abuse by Nazi soldiers during that time.

In a 2006 study published in the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, researchers from Haifa University in Israel found that Holocaust survivors who suffered sexual abuse during WWII were more traumatized by molestation than by any other of the horrifying events they experienced during that time.

“There’s always this assumption that German soldiers never raped anyone during WWII, which is completely wrong,” says Monika Flaschka, a Kent State doctoral candidate in history. Because of the Nazi regime’s racial ideology, people believed German soldiers wouldn’t rape “racially inferior” Jewish or Slavic women and children because it was against their ideals, she explains.

Using court-martial documents from 1933-45, Flaschka investigated the influence of race and gender on punishments of German soldiers during WWII for her dissertation. She spent four months combing through the court-martial records in Freiburg, Germany, and translating them into English.

In contrast to the amount of scholarly attention devoted to sexual violence in other genocides, rapes committed by German soldiers and members of the Nazi Party during WWII have been the focus of relatively few scholarly analyses, Flaschka says. “How can we talk about rape in other genocides when we don’t discuss it in our fundamental example of genocide?” she questions. Even less attention has been paid to the sexual assault of children, female and male, under the Nazi regime.

“It’s important to note that women and children in the Holocaust faced different experiences than men in the Holocaust — not worse, but different,” says Flaschka, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Arizona and master’s degrees in anthropology (’01) and history (’04) from Kent State.

Blaming the victim

Similar to military court cases dealing with the rape of adult women, court-martial records of men accused of raping or abusing children are filled with assumptions about normative gender roles of the accused and the young women and children who were assaulted by them.

“Heterosexual masculinity was extremely important to the German military,” says Flaschka. For example, in a 1942 case, a German soldier was accused of having homosexual contact with a 13-year-old boy. During sentencing, the judge stated: “With [his conduct], he demonstrated that he poses a significant threat for our youth, and that only a very severe punishment can, in the future, deter him from his actions, which are detrimental for the nation.”

Men who abused male children were more severely punished than those who abused female children, because their behavior violated norms of heterosexual masculinity. The courts viewed this as a severe threat to the normal heterosexual development of male children and the German nation, adds Flaschka.

While the behavior of men who abused male children was called “abhorrent,” German soldiers who abused female children were not given this label as their conduct did not violate heterosexual norms. Instead, punishment often was based on the previous behavior and morals of the female children being abused. Girls were considered sexual beings who invited sexual contact, so if the girl was believed by the court to be at all sexually precocious, her behavior could be a mitigating factor in determining punishment of the accuser.

For instance, in 1940, a German soldier was accused of sexual misconduct with a seven-year-old girl. According to the court, the girl belonged to a father who had been sterilized and a mother who had questionable morals. During sentencing proceedings, the judge explained: “To be considered is the fact that the immoral acts of the accused were not yet of a very severe nature, and the girl, already not entirely morally pure, very much accommodated the efforts and propensities of the accused.”

In October 2007, Flaschka presented her research at the Fourth International Conference on Holocaust and Women in Israel. She hopes to publish her dissertation as a book, and to teach and continue her research on issues of gender, identity and sexual violence.

“It’s incredibly important to understand what happens in the past and how gender influences not only what happens, but also how those events are experienced and articulated by those who survive them,” says Flaschka. “While it’s important to me to hear their voices, it also should be important to everyone else.”