I was vaguely aware that there had been rapes of German women in World War 2. It was mentioned somewhere in a tumblr post, and the number of victims certainly made an impression on me, but as I started this book to write about women and war, I came to realize it was far, far worse.

Women are underrepresented in the military and government, so the role women as a class play in war is negligent. When the discussion of victims of war arise, men often like to point out that mostly men die in wars, and that women are lucky to avoid military service- as if women are not expected to fuel war with reproductive labor, or that the high rates of sexual assault in the military hasn't played a large role in keeping women out. And of course, there is the depiction that death in unequivocally worse than sexual assault, which ignores the impact sexual assault has on a person's mental and physical health, denies the reality of death often being preferred over torture, and ignores that many women are killed after they are raped.

When you hear acts of terror such as:

"In Lauenburg in Pomerania, Red Army soliders stood in line in front of every house. One German woman was raped by as many as forty five men, despite the fact that she was half dead by the end. Victims included the 78 years old women and 9 year old children. The Russian soliders said that their wives and sisters had been treated far worse by the German soliders. When leaving the villlage, B. met a farmer who told him that his 13 year old daughter had been taken for the fifth time that morning."

How do you rationalize that away as being better than death? That it is an understandable but unfortunate side effect of a conflict women do not spur on, or honeslty have any control over? It illustrates not only the pervasive belief that women are property to be used as 'spoils of war', an attitude which continues to this day- but that there are no good men.

These rapes were perpetuated not by a singular group, but by many, including GI’s and Red Army Soldiers, British and French, Belgians, Poles, Czechs, and Serbs. The soldiers did not discriminate. As they marched across Europe, “on their way to germany, the americans raped the wives of allied british and french and also freed slave laborers and concentration camp inmates”.

And of course, this is not he only example, merely one of the worst for the time it went on, as well as the number of women involved. We can see this more in cases all around the world. It reminds me of an anecdote I heard, where a woman quit her job at a rape hotline because she was starting to hate men, and another woman told her that the only women who could remain were lesbians and women who lived without men; the reality of gender relations was laid bare, but still the concept of fearing or hating men was construed as 'extreme'. In fact, it appears very logical.