Rape, abuse, sexual violence? It seems to us that nothing more needs to be said. If rape is a rape of a woman. Mistake. Because in occupied Poland, men were also raped.
75 years ago, many people did not even know that there was such a thing as homosexuality. The cases of harassment of Poles by the Germans and Volksdeutsche simply could not happen. Or at least… not officially.
Among the people whom the Nazis did not intend to tolerate were, first of all, Jews and Roma, but also gays. There was even a special provision penalizing homosexuality in the penal code of the Third Reich. The famous paragraph 175 read:
Unnatural harlotry between males or between humans and animals is punishable by imprisonment with the possibility of losing civil rights
Homosexual =zoophile?
The occupiers not only equalized sexual relations between men with zoophilia, but also prohibited them under the threat of losing their freedom. It is worth noting:it was by no means a dead recipe. This is clearly demonstrated by a large group of homosexuals detained on its basis in KL Auschwitz. These prisoners were distinguished by a pink triangle sewn onto their clothes and increased harassment from both camp staff and fellow prisoners.
Camp markings. Homosexuals were marked with a pink triangle.
However, there were only a fraction of German homosexuals in the camps. Those who remained at large and did not admit openly to their orientation, and even hid in the ranks of the Nazi party, could live relatively peacefully.
Regardless of their sexual orientation, war and a sense of superiority and power over the inhabitants of the conquered country stripped people of humanity and triggered animal instincts in many of them. German soldiers, civilians and Volksdeutsche began to satisfy their urges with violence with almost impunity.
The vast majority of their victims fell victim to women regardless of nationality, but they took particularly sadistic out of the captured Jewish women. Michaela Hampf notes that the topic of women as victims of various forms of sexual violence has been studied since the very beginning of women's studies. In the work “Release a Man for Combat. The Women's Army Corps during World War II "explicitly states:[...] other aspects, such as sexual violence against men […] has been studying only recently .
In official textbooks and studies concerning this period, one cannot find accounts of men who were victims of sexual violence. One should take the shame off this issue and talk about it openly, after all, there were many such cases both in freedom and in concentration camps.
In the latter, it happened that high-ranking prisons, kapos, and even a German guard chose handsome young boys from among the newly arrived inmates, like at a slave market in ancient Rome.
Maren Roger, the author of the book "War Relationships", tells the story of a German baker who served as a cook in Poland during the war. His victims, young Polish men, would never file a complaint or report for fear of reprisals. On the very first day, he called them "Liebling" (German for darling) and grabbed their genitals.
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The molestation came to light by accident - one Polish woman asked a German medical service officer for whom she worked as an interpreter if there was such a thing as sexual intercourse between men and what is it called. She summoned her courage because her friend was being forced into sexual activity by this baker. As Maren Roger writes:
The young officer [...] inquired about the name of the offender, reported in and thus initiated an investigation .
Although the author of the book does not specify the further fate of the baker and his victims, we can guess that the situation of raped Poles ... has only worsened. The logic of the German judicial system regarding homosexuality was downright inhuman.
The "pink triangles" in Sachsenhausen.
In many cases, if the accused of breaking article 175 raped a Pole, the nationality of the victim was considered ... a mitigating circumstance. After all, it was only Untermensch. At other times it was considered a lack of dignity and at the same time, in a sense, a crime against the race. Regardless of the "qualification of the deed," the victims experienced the ordeal each time. First of all, nothing could erase the trauma. To make matters worse, for the fact that someone satisfied them at the expense of their animal drive, they could go to jail. After all, whether with their consent or not, they committed a crime!
To the camp for being raped by someone…
Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen in the book "Vicitms, Heroes, Survivors. Sexual Violence on Eastern Front During World War II "quotes Hanns Christian Witt's testimony to the soldiers of the United States Army:
It was particularly barbaric to treat Poles, Russians, Jews and political prisoners who had broken paragraph 175. Suspicion was enough to lead to a cruel death. […] Without trial, without justice, only because of the sadistic and bestial desire of the SS gangsters […] to satisfy their sadistic desires by looking at the slow death and agony of their victims.
Such was the fate of the farmer R., a volksdeutsch from the General Government. He repeatedly raped his Polish apprentices who were afraid of being arrested if they told someone what had happened. R. was not afraid of anything that seems to confirm the fact that he committed rapes even in the presence of his wife. She slept on one bed in the room and he made the apprentice have sex on the other.
The story of two brothers who ended up in an apprenticeship with a torturer shows how much trauma and how deeply taboo was the molestation and sexual violence of a man against a man. The elder, who had previously been on his farm and raped by him, did not say a word about what happened to him when his younger brother was taken into the care of the same degenerate and was also abused.
German soldiers in the shower. Photo from World War II period.
The taboo mentioned above is one of the reasons why it is impossible to say the exact number of men who fell victim to German rapists in the occupied country. The sexually abused Poles concealed their experiences, fearing social ostracism, diminishing their own masculinity by this act, and outright mockery. The ominous role of paragraph 175 cannot be ignored either.
The raped men refused to give any complaints or testimony. They knew that in Hitler's state, victims could quickly turn into alleged perpetrators. Nevertheless, cases of sexual violence in which it was the occupier who by force forced Polish men to submit and exploited them more often than one might imagine. Certainly too often.