Perry Biddiscombe. Journal of Social History. Volume 34, Issue 3, Spring 2001.
During World War Two, relations between soldiers and civilian women often reflected inequalities in power and status characteristic of a wider pattern of gender relations. Feminist theorists note that because women have traditionally been considered property, in wartime they are often treated as booty or as adornments for victorious armies. Some have gone further to claim that war is, in itself, a misogynist activity, and that wartime rape is the ultimate metaphor for military victory. The condition of women as spoils of war is the topic of a growing literature, much of it informed by Susan Brownmiller’s pioneering analysis of the role of rape in war. While some theorists consider even the wartime mobilization of women’s energy and resources as a form of abuse, most of this literature focuses upon more straightforward and unequivocal forms of exploitation, particularly rape and the “colonization” of women as prostitutes or dependent supplicants.
Relatively less attention has been paid to the reactive strategies that such behavior prompts, particularly among men in countries subjected to conquest and military occupation. This essay addresses the movement against “fraternization,” ie., social and sexual contact between American occupation troops and local women in the U.S. occupation zones of Germany and Austria. Gender tensions in these countries had already increased during the war, and such stresses and strains got worse when foreign occupation forces arrived, especially since occupation troops from the richest country in the world proved a considerable lure for women from populations in a deep state of material distress. In other words, the particular conditions in the U.S. zones of Germany and Austria provided a special catalyst for the puritanical anger and resentments of local men, and this was reflected in a rate of anti-fraternization violence—mainly beatings and haircuttings—that was probably worse than in the other occupation zones
The link between vigilante violence against women and the political and social collapse of German-speaking Central Europe must also elicit our interest. There was in post-World War Two Germany and Austria no direct parallel to the counter-revolutionary movement that flourished in these countries in 1919/20. However, it was here at the household strata—at the level of gender politics—that similar sentiments were focused. With the family as the main surviving sociopolitical unit of German and Austrian society, the battle for power and control shifted to this basic terrain. Sociologist Gerhard Baumert noted, for instance, the existence of a reactionary movement “which has as its goal the restoration of the family structures characteristic of past centuries,” ie., those with authoritarian fathers and submissive females. This time, vigilante bands were less organized and less heavily armed than their Freikorps predecessors of 1919/20—the dense presence of Allied occupation forces (if nothing else) caused this difference—but the vigilantes were no less intent on recreating as much as possible of the old order in a way that Allied authorities officially rejected, but to which they often turned a blind eye. All the major belligerents in World War Two were affected by a campaign of domestic moral reconstruction in 1945/46, and the anti-fraternization movement was one of its main manifestations in Germany and Austria.
It is extremely difficult to disentangle elements of sexual tension from racial, class and economic factors, as well as from German and Austrian resentment over some of the more imperious aspects of U.S. occupation policy. However, an application of the comparative method—matching the social and sexual experience of U.S. soldiers in Central Europe with that of American forces elsewhere—suggests that U.S. troops tended to provoke local male envy and anger wherever they went. On the other hand, no one would deny that the particular—almost singular—conditions in Germany and Austria, especially in the postwar American occupation zones in these countries, helped foster a degree of antagonism that lay behind a widespread pattern of intimidation and violence. Perhaps as Mire Koikari notes, gender can never be entirely detached from other categories of power, and the triad of race, class and nationality must form an essential part of a gendered articulation of the occupation experience.
Before directly approaching the matter of the anti-fraternization movement in the U.S. zones of Germany and Austria, we must first confront two issues that affected both these countries and provided the crucial background against which the anti-fraternization movement took shape: first, the rise and acceleration of gender tensions in the Third Reich and in immediate post-Nazi Germany and Austria; and second, the consequences related to a horrendous wave of rapes and sexual brigandage that swept Central Europe in 1945, as the armies of the Allied coalition fought their way into the interior of the continent. Each of these issues affected areas well beyond the boundaries of what eventually became the U.S. occupation zones in Germany and Austria, but they also contributed to the unfortunate set of intense conditions that developed in those zones.
I.
Increasing sexual tensions were linked to the collapse of 19th century morals, a process that had begun in Germany and Austria during the early 20th century and had quickened during the time of the Third Reich. The Nazis were hardly prudes on matters sexual, and their eugenic obsessions prompted a liberal code of rules and mores on procreation. This erosion of traditional moral guidelines escalated further during the chaos and confusion of the war, when a romantic idyll often provided a welcome diversion from the pressures of either the battlefield or the home front. Prostitution was tolerated as a contribution to the war effort. German mail captured by American forces at the turn of 1944/45 gave evidence of increasing promiscuity among Germans. Wehrmacht soldiers typically had multiple liaisons, and almost all unmarried men captured by the Allies carried letters from two, three or four women whom they were seeing simultaneously; one officer carried correspondence from fifteen different women. Some men came home sick with venereal diseases. The wives of married troops were also commonly involved with other soldiers, civilians or slave labourers. Some farm wives in Wurttemberg had already begun using sex as a commodity, employing carnal favours as a means of getting a full day’s work from foreign labourers. German and Austrian soldiers occasionally came home in 1945/46 to find their wives living with other men.
With such changes afoot, the old balance of power between the sexes shifted, an irony considering that the Nazis had consciously intended to reinforce male patriarchy, but had set in motion a train of events that created the opposite effect. In the absence of young men on the home front, German and Austrian women had become more forward and assertive at the same time that traditional sexual mores were loosening. This strong, self-confidant demeanor contrasted in 1945 with the defeated, bedraggled and uncertain mien of husbands and boyfriends in the Wehrmacht, who straggled home as they were released piecemeal from prisoner-of-war camps and holding areas. Some were physically crippled or sick; others were psychologically unable to cope. An American ethnologist working for U.S. Military Government noted: “It was our feeling after observing hundreds of Germans in all classes, that the women were in almost all cases far more aggressive and self-reliant than their husbands.” Unable to recreate the old domestic order, many former soldiers felt bewildered. “We men come home,” noted veteran Eduard Kraesse, “and find that so much is different from what we had imagined … A home is no longer available, many loved ones are dead, or the future is uncertain. Often there is no prospect of finding a job again.” Naturally, amidst such conditions, divorce rates soared, particularly as rushed, wartime marriages broke down. With fatal casualties in the Wehrmacht numbering over three million, many men never came back at all.
Returning POWs were also deeply resentful of the jobs now held by women, and of the fact that more women had enrolled as students in universities, occupying available slots. Correspondingly, there were attempts in 1945/46 to shove women out the doors of both the workplace and the academy; in any case, the meager cash salaries earned by women, only a fraction of the compensation offered to men doing equal work, hardly made paid labour worthwhile, particularly in a time of horrendous hidden inflation. The bitter retort by some women was that men who had failed to prevent the country’s collapse and were unable to provision its womenfolk ought not to be impeding the latter, in one way or another, from earning enough to survive.
It is certainly an irony that the same young men so intent on pushing women out of the paid labour force and out of higher education were practically driving them toward more desperate measures in order to make ends meet. Some men trotted out an antiquated platitude about women not needing to work or study because husbands would eventually tend to their needs, but this old chestnut no longer applied (if it ever did). Due to the numerical imbalance between the genders, many women had no spouse and were destined never to find a countryman to marry. The outlook was particularly bleak for girls just out of school, who complained that there were “no men [for them] to get.” If they could not earn a decent wage or get an education, then they were forced to look for support outside the restricted circle of German and Austrian manhood, particularly since the cigarettes and chocolate they got from friends in the occupation forces allowed them to profit from Black Market operations. Unfortunately, few advocates of paternal traditionalism ever seemed to make this essential connection.
The new presence of women, and the fact that they now made up a majority of the population (56 percent in 1946), also had political implications: for the first time since the Weimar period (and in some cases for the first time ever), there were female Burgermeister, university deacons, Spruchkammer chairs and senior administrative officials; each zone saw the creation and growth of “Women’s Committees,” which demanded equal pay for equal work and fair access to the job market; and women (ironically) made up the bulk of a popular movement calling for a return of German and Austrian POWS. Although many females remained passive politically, and some young women remained under the influence of the Nazi Weltanschuung, others contended that it was “the hour of women” and that as such it was the duty of the gender to repair the bankrupt social and political order created by German and Austrian men.
Obviously, it would be difficult to claim that this higher female profile was related directly to eventual threats or attacks against fraternizing women. On the other hand, it would be naive to not to see any connection at all: the women most willing to reject traditional role models and to flout conventional “morality” were also the first subjected to physical violence and social censure. Certainly, there was an implicit message here for all German and Austrian women interested in radically new social and political enterprises. One letter-writer to a Bavarian newspaper noted: “Before women go political, they should measure their honour against their moral barometers. The number of those afflicted with venereal disease is climbing to pyramidal heights. Women are sacrificing their beauty and integrity to the material desire for consumer goods and food.”
II.
A second matter necessary to establish the context for our story involves the wave of rapes and sexual violence that occurred in Central Europe in 1944/45. As Allied and Soviet troops battered their way into the Third Reich, a negative assessment of all-things-German governed their thinking. Given this “come-as-conqueror” mentality, superimposed upon even more primal desires to breakdown resistance and reinforce male domination, some soldiers saw fit to brutalize and rape German women, a situation that particularly marked the invasion of the eastern German provinces by the Red Army. With Soviet troops openly encouraged to regard German women as plunder, it is no surprise that nearly two million German women may have been raped. Even in western Germany, however, there was a considerable spate of raping by French and American forces, particularly during April and May 1945.
While the tottering Nazi regime used such incidents as propaganda, there was not much that German menfolk could do. Few German soldiers were still in the affected areas, except for prisoners-of-war, and the male civilians who were on hand were ineffective because they were either too young, too old or too infirm to mount meaningful resistance. In the East Prussian capital of Konigsberg, wounded German soldiers could only watch helplessly as Soviet troops stormed into their Lazarett and literally lined up to rape the nurses. There were a few cases where Soviet or Allied soldiers were killed in retaliation for rapes, but such actions typically resulted in collective counter-reprisals that discouraged any further incidents of the same type. Mostly there was just an embarrassed sense of resignation, as if such things were to be expected: Ernst Junger noticed the reemergence of the age-old expression “Sie haben die Frauen unter sich gebracht.” Near Zerbst, a man complained that his wife had been raped by American troops, but that at least they had “asked”—”The Russians would have come in and grabbed.”
Even more disturbing than this forebearance was the fact that the boundary between rape and consensual sex was blurred in the minds of some men, so that the reputation of German women was actually called into question by the disaster that had befallen them. One Ruhr metalworker later remembered vividly a comment made to him by a Black American serviceman: “The German soldiers fought for six years, the German women for only five minutes.” Rather than inspiring a spirited defence of his countrywomen, his only reaction to this remark was one of shame. Similarly, in Upper Austria, a man reported that “ein Neger” had raped one of his neighbours, but that, strictly speaking, the latter was “a whore anyway.” Such blame-the-victim sentiments were definite precursors to anti-fraternization attitudes; in particular, the dichotomy of supposedly soldierly resistance versus female receptivity was soon to become a popular theme in anti-fraternization propaganda. Moreover, men who harboured suspicions about the loyalties of German and Austrian women later concluded that their initial impressions during the rape phase of the occupation had been confirmed by the reality of widespread fraternization, particularly since a few women who had been subjected to rape and other soul-destroying experiences eventually drifted into prostitution.
It also seems likely that the sense of impotence induced during this period caused later reactions against liaisons between Americans and Germans or Austrians to take an even more violent form than would have been the case otherwise. In a classic case of transferrance, the hostility of German and Austrian men was refocused away from the enemy and toward their own countrywomen, who eventually came to face an increasing amount of intimidation and violence. The meaning of vigilantism was contorted so that it came to suggest “protecting” women not from sexual predators, but from the worst side, supposedly, of their own natures.
III.
It was against this background that personal and sexual relations began to develop between American soldiers and German and Austrian women. The tensions noted above, which were general throughout Germany and Austria, were intensified in American-occupied areas by several factors specific to those regions. In particular, the U.S. occupation zones were places where the relative wealth and surety of occupation forces—the “arrogance of strength”—compared starkly with the collapse of local society and the corresponding misery of German and Austrian women. American occupation troops had ready access to food and luxury items that looked attractive to German and Austrian civilians suffering deprivation; by the end of 1945, the official ration in the U.S. zone of Germany had slid to 1550 calories per day, and it later fell even lower, to 1275 calories by the spring of 1946, although some areas were probably not receiving consumer rations of much more than 700 calories per day. These allotments were well below the minimum necessary to maintain health and the capacity for productive labour. And there is no doubt that in the midst of this desperate situation, some Americans employed their access to foodstuffs and cigarettes, so-called “fra’ bait,” in an exploitative fashion. A few Americans did not even like the German and Austrian girls that they dated—they felt that they were still the enemy—but they seemed available for casual sex. It may also be, as Cynthia Enloe claims, that degrading women buttressed male superiority and cohesion. Certainly, the U.S. Army did little to discourage such assumptions, considering that it would take no responsibility for illegitimate children fathered by occupation troops, or that it would not permit marriages between American troops and Austrian women until January 1946, and between American troops and German women longer still, until December 1946. Even then, the army bureaucracy continued to obstruct nuptials involving couples of mixed race.
The fact that American soldiers were billeted separately from German and Austrian civilians and that their needs were met by an excellent system of commissaries, sports facilities and entertainments also meant that they lived in Germany and Austria to a lesser degree than their British, French and Russian counterparts. “In Germany,” noted one soldier, “you never quite hit reality … The ground beneath you is earth, but it is unfamiliar. The people are alive and human, but they are not your own. Even the things like stoves, plumbing, and windows have a puzzling quality of familiarity and strangeness.” This sense of distance helped foster superior attitudes toward the “natives,” and a distinct lack of identification with German and Austrian problems. When American troops did involve themselves with the society around them, it was often the prospect of sex that aroused their interest rather than any concern with developing a greater social or cultural awareness, something illustrated by their hesitancy to engage young German males in sporting events or youth training, and in their reluctance to associate with German civil officials outside of a formal environment. A poll of Military Government personnel in Bavaria taken around the turn of 1945/46 suggested that American soldiers believed they had few points of common interest with German males. “Fraternizing” thus obviously meant associating with German and Austrian women.
Kit Steele, the British Political Advisor in Germany, reported that the tone of fraternization in the American Zone was a symptom of a more general arrogance and disinterest that was clearly recognized by the civil population. Steele noted in February 1946:
… in a short space of time, the Americans have built up against them a strong feeling of resentment, if not hate, and of contempt among nearly all classes of the German population, that has no counterpoint in the British Zone. The feeling has been widely attributed to the treatment of German women by American soldiers, but I do not feel that this is the only reason. The American attitude towards the German has much to do with it. In their personal relations their attitude is continually changing from hot to cold, and in their official dealings with the Germans there seems to be a lack of singleness of purpose
Even Germans and Austrians sympathetic to Allied goals felt that the Americans prejudiced their interests through their rudeness and by considering all women “available,” at least for a price. Underaged girls were regarded as fair sport: in Berlin, it was not unusual to find fifteen year olds loitering around military clubs, unattended by overworked mothers who naively believed (or hoped) that their girls were out “foraging.”
It would be a bad mistake, of course, to forget the nobler sentiments of life and see at play only factors of lust and base exploitation. The strongest argument along these lines was made by the U.S. Army’s German-language press organ in Bavaria, Die Neue Zeitung, which noted that love was not solely dependent on the provision of chocolate and cigarettes. Rather, they argued that relations were usually based on a common humanity, on fondness, or simply on a desire for social contact. The editors also claimed that U.S. troops were happy to share surplus supplies with women as an act of kindness, not just because they expected sexual favours in return, and they pointed out that American soldiers gave twice the amount to orphans in refugee camps, supposedly clear evidence of their altruism. Helmut Kindler, writing from Berlin, also claimed that the tenderness of relations between occupation troops and German women was often genuine, and that soldiers rejected aggressive gold-seekers. He noted that many Allied troops negotiated with German women to do their washing and sewing, and that from this acquaintance real friendships arose.
The feelings and motives of German women were also mixed. Certainly, some camp followers associated with the Americans mainly for purposes, and if this was perhaps not admirable, it was entirely understandable. Even Die Neue Zeitung admitted that hunger and difficult circumstances had forced many women into the arms of men, both in uniform and in civilian garb. Some young women even equipped themselves with medical certificates testifying that the bearer was free of venereal disease. However, said Neue Zeitung, such prostitution was the concomitant of a hierarchical social order and had increased amid the moral chaos of war, both in Germany and abroad. The paper also claimed that such activity would have been no less significant in Germany, even had the country not been occupied. Estimates suggested that as much as ten to twenty percent of the female population had ventured into practicing some form of prostitution, and initially, at least, young women from both the working class and the bourgeoisie were involved.
Material considerations were not, of course, the only operative factors; many German women also had genuine emotional needs. They had lived through tough times during the war—constantly in fear for loved ones, their own lives in danger, often overworked, sometimes bombed out and homeless—and many were in want of a kind word. Some young women had been denied by circumstances the normal teenage dreams and minor flirtations of adolescence, and they too were looking for romance. Some liked the relatively liberal views and social mores of the Americans; some appreciated the fact that they were clean, healthy and well-fed; some were drawn to their physicality and machismo; some were attracted by the legend of Black male virility and power.
Obviously, this environment provided a fertile field for fraternization, as well as for the growth of an attendant anti-fraternization movement, and there was nothing quite to compare with it in the other occupation zones. It is true that the British and French had their own experiences with fraternization, and that certain manifestations of an anti-fraternization campaign also developed in their zones. In the French zones, anti-fraternization propaganda circulated and there were blacklists of offending women posted. In the British zones there were attacks against the girlfriends of British and Polish occupation troops, and even a few assaults against soldiers seen in the company of German or Austrian women. On the other hand, the French and British had less food to distribute than their American confreres, which made them relatively less attractive as consorts, and most French soldiers were wise enough to keep their liaisons with German and Austrian women from becoming public affairs. Correspondingly, there was less direct resentment of French occupation troops (if not of the women who sought their company).
In the Soviet zones, there was no lack of hatred for Russian occupation troops; the wild raping and looting of the spring of 1945 had created a background with no real parallel in the western zones. Even here, however, there was evidence of voluntary fraternization, particularly because Soviet military police (like their French counterparts) turned a blind eye to the formal nonfraternization rules supposed to govern the behavior of Red Army troops. After everything that had happened during the initial Soviet advance into Germany and Austria, enforcing nonfraternization seemed pointless. Although fear of the Soviets was pervasive, there was considerable evidence of liaisons between Russians and German or Austrian women; Swedish diplomatic personnel in Berlin reported as early as May 1945 that Soviet officers and troops were often seen arm-in-arm with German girls. Some of these relationships stemmed from fear—women made “friends” with decently-acting Russians to get guardians for themselves and their children; some comprised the same form of semi-prostitution evident in the western zones; some were built on a more genuine emotional interplay, particularly because Soviet troops were often billeted with German and Austrian families. There were, however, few signs of an anti-fraternization movement; fear of the type of severe punishments meted out by the Soviets for even the slightest infractions muted such forms of protest. In addition, the fraternization that prompted anti-fraternization sentiments declined as the Soviets allowed the dependents of Red Army soldiers to live in Germany and Austria, a policy development that unfolded more quickly and on a wider scale than in any other occupation zone.
IV.
As noted, things were different in the American zones of Germany and Austria, where there was a sharper contrast between the wealth and bravado of the occupation forces and a civil society deep in a state of crisis. While the personal and sexual relationships that derived from this situation infuriated German and Austrian men, it took a while for them to launch their sexual counter-revolution. It is true that before the final Nazi collapse in May 1945, the Hitler regime had itself made plans to combat fraternization, and that fanatic Wehrmacht troops, Hitler Youths and Nazi Werwolf guerrillas occasionally attacked German women who had been friendly to Allied troops. During this period, however, fraternization was held in check mainly by the fact that the Allies themselves chose to do the dirty-work of the Nazis: an official “nonfraternization” policy governed the behavior of Allied soldiers well into the summer of 1945, and the onus of obeying nonfraternization directives lay with Allied troops rather than with German and Austrian civilians. The purpose of this measure was twofold: to guarantee the security of Allied troops, and to impress upon the population “Allied disgust of their past conduct.” Amongst the Allies, the Americans were the main proponents of this tough policy, even though efforts to enforce nonfraternization had failed miseribly during the American occupation of the Rhineland from 1918 to 1923, the one historical experience that formed a clear precedent. It was felt, however, that keeping American soldiers out of German billets, which had not been done after World War One, would serve as a necessary corrective.
Despite good intentions, implementation of the nonfraternization policy was always leaky, with combat forces flouting it and even officers criticizing it in public. The Military Government bureau of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) noted in early June 1945 that “although it would be wrong to say that the non-fraternization order has broken down, it is abundantly clear that a few coaches-and-fours have already been driven through it …” After the fighting ended in May 1945, the State Department and individual US congressmen began pressuring the War Department to retract the nonfraternization policy, particularly in Austria, and it was in fact abandoned in stages through the summer of 1945: in June, prohibitions against speaking with children were loosened; in July, nonfraternization was amended to allow conversations with adults; and in September, the policy was dropped entirely, first in Austria and then in Germany. All that remained were bans on billeting with German and Austrian families and an interdict on marriages between Americans and German or Austrian civilians; even the latter measure was eventually rescinded.
While nonfraternization regulations were still in place, German and Austrian males maintained an attitude of cool disengagement toward the whole issue. Correspondent Daniel de Luce reported on 12 June that when addressed on the matter, men “shrugged off the question as unimportant and uninteresting.” Some thought it would be a good thing if Americans could talk to people in the very country that they were occupying and they therefore did not object to the prospect of the ban being lifted, presumably on the assumption that once it was revoked, the occupiers would naturally want to chat with German and Austrian men. They were soon disabused of that notion.
As Allied nonfraternization measures lapsed, it quickly dawned on many German and Austrian males that the “responsibility” for maintaining proper social and cultural boundaries had now perforce passed to them. Their ranks were being concurrently swelled by releases of former Wehrmacht personnel from POW camps and enclosures for “Disarmed Enemy Forces,” and, as noted above, these returnees were generally in a confused frame of mind. While they typically proclaimed an interest in the crucial issues of food, fuel, labour and housing, there is no doubt that some of them could not bear to face these matters—a situation attested to by German women—and they had a difficult time accommodating themselves to the conditions created by a lost war.
In a world gone mad, one thing the repatriates had counted on was returning to a domestic order of stability and contentment, and some of them were willing to take steps to “recreate” this condition, however much it may have always been a romantic fiction. The New York Times noted on 9 October 1945 that “the freedom with which German girls associated with American troops has been decreasing in a marked manner in some areas where the influx of returning German soldiers has been heavy …” In Heidelberg, the first case of a young German to be tried for anti-fraternization activity was brought to court in the summer of 1945. The accused in this case, a twenty year old soldier recently released from a POW cage, had attacked a young woman he saw chatting with an American serviceman. After the American had left, the assailant had grabbed his victim and began, with a pair of nail scissors, to clip off the girl’s hair. When the young woman’s wailing eventually embarrassed her attacker—the assault took place in a public forum—he stopped cutting the girl’s hair and told her to cut it herself; he would give her ten minutes to complete the job. Before she could either succumb or rise to defy this threat, however, the attacker was arrested by American military police. In southern Bavaria and Austria, such efforts to coerce women were aided by SS troops holding out in the Alps, some of whom swooped into small towns, particularly at night, imposing their will.
One of the most common sentiments of these men was a maudlin self-pity, based on the assumption that German women were failing to live up to codes of honour associated with the German military tradition. Married veterans seldom caught their own wives consorting with occupation troops, particularly if the latter were gainfully employed, but it was apparently the more general situation that bothered them—”Dead tired, after many weeks, soldiers come creeping along the roads, sore of foot, to find German women with foreigners in a most shameless manner.” German and Austrian men had sacrificed everything, but women were supposedly refusing to subject themselves to any inconveniences. “For six years the German soldier offered brave resistance,” noted one placard. “The German woman cannot resist one bar of chocolate. Did none of your relatives die at the front or through air attack?” A ditty posted in Karlsruhe read:
He lies in a mass grave
She in a strange bed
He fell for the Fatherland
She for cigarettes!
Another tear-jerker, which appeared on the Max Weber Platz in Munich, complained about women ignoring maimed war heroes so they could consort with foreigners capable of supplying coffee and butter. After this strain of pathos came the inevitable warning—”Oh God, if it depends on us, you will pay for it.” A placard from Linz spelled out the nature of such threats in graphic detail: “We’ll watch you on the street, we’ll cut your hair, and we’ll tear off your clothes and send you running naked for home.”
The main themes in all these declarations were extremely common in anti-fraternization propaganda, the aim of which was to establish a male versus female and soldier versus civilian polarity. As Michael John notes, all the old gender cliches were also evident: men were warriors and guardians, with a natural right of possession over their countrywomen; women were naive, compulsive and unreliable. Some men obviously felt that no one respected them for having played their time-honoured roles and done their duty. “We risked our lives for them for six years,” noted one soldier, “and now they run around with the Americans.” In addition, some of this discourse bore more than an echo of the “stab-in-the-back” myth that had motivated the counter-revolutionaries of 1919/20. With politics reduced to a fight for control of home and hearth, it was no longer Jews or “Reds” who merited blame. It was women who were now the scapegoats, not for causing defeat, but for alleged betrayal at a more primal level.
By the fall of 1945, the belligerency of repatriated POWs reportedly increased as more militant prisoners passed over in earlier releases finally got their freedom. By 1946, even some prisoners from “automatic arrest” categories were being discharged. A contemporary sociologist suggested that troops who had believed in victory to the last were those most affected by the capitulation and were the most likely to bear subsequent feelings of inferiority, a situation compounded by the fact that former Parteigenossen—now virtually unemployable—had become dependent on their girlfriends, their spouses, or their parents. This position, the reverse of society’s standard formula, was regarded as an embarrassment and was a source of further resentment. There is also some evidence (from the British zone) that before their release, POWs and “disarmed German troops” had been instructed by their officers to police the behavior of German women and to use hair clippings in order to enforce their will.
Hair cutting, incidentally, was a serious matter: getting victims to submit usually involved other forms of violence, and the shearers typically wielded their scissors and knives in such an aggressive fashion that considerable damage was done to women’s scalps. Unfortunately, the practice had a long and nasty history: since biblical times, women shorn of their hair had supposedly born a mark of shame because they had been deprived of something popularly regarded as a badge of femininity and sexuality. Traditionally, prostitutes had been depilated on prophylactic grounds, and the tactic was also related to age-old means for exposing and humiliating female adulterers. Certainly the custom had revived in countries neighbouring Germany as a punishment for women who had fraternized with the Germans themselves, while the latter had been present as occupiers, and it was probably from this recent precedent that the practice was familiar to many German and Austrian soldiers. In France, for instance, this type of punishment had been imposed at least as early as 1943, and it was an important part of the spontaneous explosion of popular rage that swept the country at the time of the liberation. Interestingly, there too it was a phenomenon associated with homecoming POWs: it must be considered more than a coincidence that at the same time that recently-released German and Austrian POWs were stalking their initial victims in the summer of 1945, newly repatriated French POWs and slave labourers were also involved in a recrudescence of hair-cutting outbreaks on the other side of the Rhine. It will not do, however, to blame only foreigners for inspiring German and Austrian men with a nefarious idea, since similar tactics had been used in 1919 to hinder Rhenish girls from associating with American troops, and the practice had also been employed more recently by Nazi vigilantes seeking to punish women on the home front who had fraternized with male foreign labourers.
By the late summer of 1945 posters were appearing on walls in cities and towns threatening hair cuttings for German and Austrian women who bore a preference for the company of American troops. In many areas, this propaganda campaign had begun to peter out by November 1945; the most that the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) office in Stuttgart could report in mid-December was “that the anti-fraternization poster campaign is continuing sporadically.” In some communities, this campaign never led to violence, but a U.S. Military Government study in October 1945 also noted that “in some instances this feeling of jealous resentment has gone … farther, resulting in head shaving of girls and attacks on soldiers, and in at least one fatal shooting.” An American intelligence summary from the fall of 1945 noted that “youths in certain areas have been gathering in the evenings for purposes of threatening American troops and the German women they have been escorting,” and another report two weeks later noted: “Several American soldiers have been badly beaten up by groups of civilians and walking at night with German female companions is a dangerous occupation.” Although American authorities were especially sensitive to injuries caused to U.S. soldiers by anti-fraternization attacks, most of the animus in the campaign was directed at German women rather than at occupation troops, and they suffered accordingly.
While there is no doubt that such threats and beatings deterred association with the Americans, some German and Austrian women rejected passivity and, in a prototypical expression of “girl power,” they swore to fraternize with even greater enthusiasm. Some ignored anti-fraternization leaflets or they posted their own placards, vindicating their actions in no uncertain terms. One of their most effective arguments was that Wehrmacht veterans—the people most involved in bullying them—had themselves fraternized with foreign women in the areas that Germany had recently occupied, particularly France and Scandanavia. As a result, they contended, the veterans were imposing a double standard. It was also galling for women to be brought to task morally by black marketeers whose pressure on fraternizers was sometimes motivated by their desire to extort cigarettes that women had derived from their relations with the Americans.
Women, however, by no means comprised a united front. A few young women actually belonged to the juvenile clubs and gangs that undertook haircutting as their vocation, and there is one recorded case in which a woman—a former Werewolf from Frankfurt—confessed direct participation in the snipping of her countrywomen’s hair. In another case, also from Frankfurt, an eighteen year old girl admitted witnessing several such attacks. There were also many women who sympathized with the anti-fraternization movement or who showed a distinct disinclination to be seen walking with Allied soldiers. Several young women were arrested for refusing to speak when asked for directions by American troops, or for spitting at soldiers manning checkpoints. Interestingly, these women were of the same age group as the fraternizers who had become the object of attacks and intimidation, suggesting that there was no sense of cohesion among young females. It is also notable that the reemerging women’s movement had little or nothing to say about anti-fraternization violence, presumably because some of its elderly and doughty cohort shared the nationalist, racist and bourgeois prejudices of German society at large. Indeed, the conservative, housewife-oriented wing of the movement had long opposed sexual license and its supposedly decadent results. Even the fraternizers, whom social ostracization had led to seek each other’s company, were divided amongst themselves: those who were monogamous were ready to condemn “girls who hopped from one guy to the next”; some females who worked in American offices were critical of fellow women who fostered a social relationship with the occupiers; and fraternizers were divided over the propriety of interracial dating.
Given the seriousness of the situation—a Military Government study in August 1945 noted that “the potential for immediate friction is probably greater in this sphere than in any other phase of the occupation”—American authorities began to undertake countermeasures. The U.S. Seventh Army started in September 1945 with a reform-oriented approach, directing subordinate units to step up the organization of sports and crafts activities for German youth, but the authorities soon opted for a harder tack. In addition to a general curfew that had been in place since the beginning of the occupation, more stringent, retaliatory curfews were imposed in localities affected by anti-fraternization violence: by early October 1945, Melsungen, Klein Umstadt, Spachbrucken, Heidenheim and Grebenstein were all being subjected to such restrictions. U.S. troops were advised to retain their sidearms during off-duty hours, and more mobile patrols were undertaken by American formations, the latter measure an absolute necessity owing to demobilization and the rapid shrinkage of the size of the American garrison. Most importantly, the German police were given back their weapons: this process began sporadically in August 1945, although by November less than 50 percent of personnel had as yet been affected. Around the turn of 1945/46, however, there was a general rearming of German police agencies, involving the distribution of 17,000 small arms, which brought the proportion of German police equipped with guns up to nearly seventy-five percent. Although German policemen did not generally regard fraternization with much sympathy, neither did they want to see society slide into chaos as a by-product of the fight against it. These factors, apparently working in conjunction, reduced civil unrest over the winter of 1945/46.
It is true that the level of violence in U.S.-occupied Germany and Austria surged again in the spring of 1946, especially after the cancellation of the zone-wide curfew in Germany on 30 March. Resentment of fraternization remained a big part of the problem, particularly in view of the fact that three U.S. soldiers were wholly or partially castrated by German assailants in 1946, but there were also other factors at play. Chief amongst these was a shocking deterioration of U.S. troop behavior and discipline, a problem that emerged in early 1946 and quickly reached crisis proportions. Unprovoked attacks upon German civilians, and a related wave of retaliatory violence aimed at U.S. soldiers, became the central issue of civil-military relations. Unfortunately, as German women became better acquainted with American men, some of this anomic violence was directed their way: during May and June 1946, there were five instances where young women were found dead in American barracks, and the problem of rape reappeared, in one case involving a fifteen year old girl assaulted in a cornfield.
It was only in the summer of 1946 that the organization of the U.S. Constabulary, the reimposition of a curfew upon American troops, and the increasing severity of punishments for breeches of conduct all began to have an ameliorative affect, and even then troop delinquency remained a serious problem in some parts of Bavaria as late as 1947. Seeking to restore discipline, American garrison commanders undertook a limited revival of the nonfraternization policy: regulations were introduced restricting public displays of affection by U.S. troops; females were banned from military sleeping quarters (in the wake of a major scandal at the U.S. Army compound in Frankfurt); and after having briefly permitted German women virtually free access to U.S. Army clubs, military authorities began subjecting women to a screening process and forced them to apply for entry to such establishments.
It also seems that during this same period, instances of fraternization began to decline, and that as a consequence anti-fraternization violence diminished, at least on a relative scale. Harold Zink argues that as time passed and overall social relations between Germans and Americans cooled, middle and upper-middle class German women became less willing to associate with American soldiers and bourgeois parents put pressure on their daughters to avoid such relationships. As early as the fall of 1946, few women from “socially acceptable classes” were registering for admission to U.S. Army clubs, mainly because they feared that expressing friendship in such an “official” form would draw severe reprimands. Demographic imbalances between the genders in Germany and Austria narrowed with the increasing return of POWs from France and the USSR, which made keeping the company of foreign men less desirable for German and Austrian women, and after 1947/48, as the first signs of economic recovery appeared, the material impetus behind some forms of fraternization became less important. Some out-and-out prostitutes gravitated toward the Munster Lager, the main POW release facility in the British zone, where in 1947 large numbers of repatriated German prisoners formerly held in Britain and Egypt arrived with all sorts of valuables.
Simultaneously, Americans too became less willing to maintain intimate contacts. Newly-arrived American recruits withdrew even further into their own network of posts and military communities (ie., “Little Americas”), and as the size of the garrison shrank, its impact on everyday life diminished. After 1946, American officers were increasingly permitted to bring their families to Germany and Austria, which negated the need (or opportunity) for social contact with German and Austrian women. By August 1947, there were already more than 5000 American women living in U.S. occupied-Germany. Finally, whatever relationships did still form across national boundaries seemed less offensive as time passed and wartime animosities faded. The Cold War, in particular, suggested a new sense of common purpose between former foes.
V.
When the anti-fraternization movement was in its heyday, circa 1945/46, there is no doubt that it emerged as a major factor in German and Austrian life. At first glance, a statistical rendering of the problem does not seem especially alarming. On the basis of figures compiled from available newspaper and intelligence reports, the rates of both attacks and arrests among relevant population groups and age cohorts were low:
Anti-fraternization Violence in the U.S. Occupation Zones of Germany and Austria, August 1945-July 1948: Number of women in the U.S. zones of Germany and Austria beaten or sheared: 90-100 Number of men arrested for anti-fraternization activity in the U.S. zones of Germany and Austria: 100-110 Number of women aged (1946) between 15 and 35 and living in the U.S. zones of Germany and Austria: 3,105,649 Number of men aged (1946) between 15 and 35 and living in the U.S. zones of Germany and Austria: 2,236,988 Rate of beatings or shearings for German and Austrian women aged (1946) between 15 and 35 and living in the U.S. zones of Germany and Austria: app. 3.2 per 100,000 Rate of anti-fraternization arrests for men aged (1946) between 15 and 35 and living in the U.S. zones of Germany and Austria: app. 4.5 per 100,000
There are several factors that should be considered, however, in evaluating these figures. First, the great majority of fraternizing women, the objects of abuse, were probably single or widowed; narrowing the parameters of the target group to account for this factor brings the rate of attacks up to about 5.3 per 100,000. Moreover, the figures cited are almost certainly incomplete—there are probably other reports of attacks and arrests laying buried in newspapers or military security summaries—and contemporary U.S. intelligence officers admitted that German police hardly ever passed on reports of sex-related melees. Even more importantly, it is likely that the huge majority of haircutting and beating incidents was never reported at all, especially since German officials were usually unsympathetic to the victims. The real rate of attacks was exponentially larger than that indicated by a quantifiable figure. Finally, we must also consider that the social impact of these assaults was magnified by the power of narrative and rumour, and that such elements reinforced the effect of verbal and written threats that were directed toward large numbers of German and Austrian women.
One of the worst aspects of the reaction against fraternization was its negative impact on family relationships. In some instances, anguished fathers and brothers assaulted American soldiers visiting their female relatives; in other cases, young women were made to feel that they were betraying family members killed at the front. In Salzburg, the daughter of a pensioned Austrian officer was whisked away to a remote country farm after she became pregnant. When heading off to her exile, her patrician father would not permit her to get into the car in front of the family home; she had to sneak to a nearby side street to await her ride. In Bremen, a German civilian, Albert Hartel, made derogatory remarks to his two step-daughters and struck a U.S. soldier, whereupon two Americans returned the fight. Hartel then complained to the U.S. Military Police that he had been beaten by American soldiers, although drawing the attention of the authorities backfired when it also came to light that Bartel owned a copy of Mein Kampf. He ended up in the custody of the German Criminal Police.
In other cases, the consequences of fraternizing literally wound up on the doorsteps of fraternizing women when their homes were marked with graffiti or attacked. In Bobenhausen one girl’s mother was physically abused by a gang of young Germans. In what was alleged to be an old German custom designating a “girl of bad character,” a house in Heidelberg was marked with a white line from the gate, with an arrow pointing directly at the front door. A woman living in the home was employed by an American family. A less subtle approach was for anti-fraternizers to dump garbage on the front porch of a woman consorting with American soldiers.
Some women found threatening letters posted at their front gates. One example, dropped off at a home in Wetzlar on 13 September 1946, will suffice in conveying some sense of the boorish vulgarity of its authors:
You are a very filthy creature. An American whore as you won’t be found so quickly again. Don’t flatter yourself by thinking you are pretty. When one looks at your rouged up mug, one thinks they are seeing a worn out cow. Your sunken eyes and the rings around them tell of many nights awake. First you had the Italians and now you whore around with the Americans. You should not wonder yourself if one of these days you should find your head shorn. The German boys hate you, and I as one of them would like to tear you to pieces. You miserable pig, I hope that you have VD.
This charming missive was signed “P.G. [Parteigenossen] known yet unknown,” and on the back were listed the names of five other women “[who] are also hated,” plus two additional women “who are not as big pigs.”
Certainly there was certainly no shortage of jealous and quarrelsome young men willing to “police” women—”We lads,” remembered one veteran, “were simply full of hate …” Moreover, most of these adolescents had gained rudimentary organizational know-how through their backgrounds in the Hitler Youth and the military. Aggressive and well-organized “scissor clubs” appeared in almost every town—the “Black Hand” in Kaufburen-Memmingen-Landsberg, the “Iron Front” in Wiesbaden, the “Christian Pathfinders” in Coburg, the “Great Unknown” in Karlsruhe, the “Sonnenrad Division” in Bremen—while cells of the infamous “Edelweiss Piraten” also appeared in every major community. In Linz, a mob of between 200 and 600 young men was operating by the autumn of 1945. Its members would assemble at the civic fair grounds where their leader, Josef Baresch, would move among clusters of men, providing instructions. This group circulated threatening flyers and sheared sixty women before Baresch died of consumption in December 1945; arrests by the authorities thereafter largely destroyed the band, although some elements remained active as late as 1947.
There is also little doubt that the bulk of German and Austrian opinion supported these opponents of fraternization. In the fall of 1945, occupation authorities in Germany reported (incorrectly) that most people were probably in favour of fraternization, a guess predicated on the assumption that some romance would help narrow the divide between Germans and their conquerors. Within months, however, studies of public opinion showed that most Germans supported anti-fraternization groups and cheered “heroic” actions, such as slapping soldiers and German women caught walking at night on lonely streets. Censorship intercepts suggested that the populace was nearly uniform in its contempt for German girls who associated with the Americans. “The attitude,” said a report in July 1946, “is that neither the food, clothing nor other fraternization advantages can outweigh the shame of wholesale collaboration.” In Austria, the situation was doubly complicated by the fact that the country was trying to rebuild its national identity, a task made more difficult by the local romantic and social involvements of foreign troops. One popular ditty from the period, recited to the tune—significantly—of the Austrian national anthem, implied that gratitude for liberation ought not to include women’s love, exchanged for chocolate with the liberators.
There is also no denying the heterogeneous political nature of the anti-fraternization consensus: even anti-fascists could join the chorus by claiming that women had already embarrassed themselves by supporting the National Socialists, particularly by mooning over Nazi war heroes like Adolf Galland, and that they were now compounding the error by selling themselves for material advantages. Despite their much-professed internationalism, communists and socialists often held anti-fraternization views, and in the case of the former, such attitudes dovetailed with their general anti-Americanism. One of the hair-cutters arrested in Linz admitted to being a communist, and in Upper Bavaria a local KPD leader was accused of assaulting a young woman engaged to an American soldier. Albert Rosshaupter, an SPD member of the Bavarian cabinet, went on record in November 1946 assailing fraternization, along with claiming that women in neighbouring Thuringia were “virtuous” only because Russian troops lacked chocolate, coffee or cigarettes to give them.
The social inhibitors to fraternization were powerful. Like 20th century Hester Prynnes, fraternizers became outcasts: friends melted away, German and Austrian males refused their company, and they were snubbed for service while shopping. The German language was enriched dubiously with the term “Schokoladensau” (chocolate sow), or its variants “Schokoladenhure” (chocolate whore) and “Schokoladenmadchen” (chocolate girl), suggesting that German and Austrian women were prostituting themselves for candy and that this was the only motive for associating with the Americans. One popular cabaret show in the late 1940s included a skit portraying the seamier side of fraternization. One song in the repertoire described “love, or some imitation of it, [which] had crawled like a rat, had slithered in hunger and desire from the moonlit stones [ie., rubble]”—”Johnny, wenn du’ne Kamel hast, bin ich bei Dir zu Gast.”
There were abundant signs of institutional opposition to fraternization as well: in Buchen, the Americans discovered in July 1946 that a youth club, which they themselves had helped to organize, was barring entry to girls associating with U.S. troops (or to boys dating girls who had fraternized with the Americans); in Landkreis Dillingen, a Catholic priest was caught expelling girls from church if they dated American soldiers; in Passau, the faculty of the local Oberschule reportedly engaged in a campaign of systematic discrimination against “fraternizing” girls; and in Neuhaus, German border police threatened women with having their heads shaved after the Americans eventually withdrew occupation forces. Austrian police were also suspected of sympathizing with hair-cutting gangs. In big cities like Berlin and Bremen, policewomen were tasked to deal with “the moral decay … of our female youth,” and to clear girls out of dance halls. In Gotthard, the Burgermeister was arrested and fined 400 Reichsmark after he had attempted to intimidate a woman whose home had been raided by a gang of twenty ex-members of the Hitler Youth. His only defence was that he feared a retaliatory curfew if the attack became public knowledge. Similarly, in the Austrian town of Waizenkirchen, the Burgermeister was found guilty of slandering American troops and encouraging the ostracization of fraternizing females.
The factors behind this near-unanimity of opinion are not hard to discern. First, there was a considerable racial ingredient in the animus against fraternization, which was apparent in German and Austrian reactions to the Black American troops who comprised a significant part of the occupation garrison. Such animosities had been evident during the post-World War One Rhineland occupation, when they had been directed mainly at French colonial forces, and the impact of twelve years of National Socialist indoctrination had further hardened Volkisch-racialist attitudes. In general, Germans had not been happy to see Black troops arrive; the more credulous amongst them believed that Black men had tails, and even more reasonable people had exaggerated fears about the supposedly inevitable sexual consequences of a Black presence. In the fall of 1945, a rumour swept the zone suggesting that the U.S. Army had organized a bureau to undercut the “purity” of the Volk by encouraging marriages between German women and Black soldiers!
Actually, the preferences of the U.S. Army lay in the opposite direction: based on its policy of internal segregation, the army had been doing its best since 1942 to bring Jim Crow to Britain and to European staging areas, even though many of these countries lacked their own colour bars. In particular, the army had issued unofficial regulations meant to inhibit contact between Black soldiers and local white women, which in turn resulted in bitter resentment amongst Black troops affected by these measures. Black soldiers complained in 1946, for instance, that the army was providing their units with inferior recreation clubs as a means of discouraging German and Austrian women from visiting these facilities. At a base near Munich, the unit commander refused to hire female support workers because he feared social contact between such prospective employees and his own Black troops. At Wertinger, near Stuttgart, Military Government officers organized a raid against women involved with Black soldiers on the pretense that the rate of venereal disease among local Black troops was unacceptably high; fifty-four women were arrested. This action led, in turn, to an ugly incident when Black soldiers, suspecting that local civilians had instigated the raid, attacked and beat up the town’s Burgermeister.
Worse yet, considerable violence had been flaring between Black and white American troops since 1942, particularly as American Southerners saw their rigorous codes of decorum transgressed by Black troops. With race relations in flux in a European environment, and with the army itself slowly edging toward desegregation, there is no doubt that such problems were compounded by the American presence as a garrison force in countries like Germany and Austria, with their own histories of racial paranoia. Indeed, it is ironic that the defeated and discredited ideology of the National Socialists resembled the implicit doctrine of white superiority inherent in the U.S. Army’s own patterns of organization and in the codes of conduct promoted by its officers. And there is in fact some evidence that German women occasionally encouraged even more tension among U.S. troops than might otherwise have arisen. In Stuttgart, for instance, German women were suspected of fomenting racial violence amongst American troops as an implicit means of discrediting the occupying power.
One troublespot was the Bremen Enclave, where a Black soldier was attacked and badly wounded while on a walk around a base perimeter, and where two light bombs were detonated in the unit grounds of a Black formation, probably with the intent of intimidating personnel seen in the company of German women. The worst single incident arose as a result of an internecine feud amongst U.S. troops. White Southerners of the U.S. 29th Division—a unit with a bad reputation for persecuting Blacks—caught two Black soldiers in a tavern while the latter were on the way to pick up their girlfriends; as a source of amusement, the Southerners fired at the feet of their victims to make them “dance.” In a swift reprisal, twenty-five heavily-armed Black troops showed up at the scene of this incident and raked the establishment with gunfire, allegedly killing several members of the 29th Division.
In Mannheim, the surviving remnant of an anti-Nazi, communist underground, codenamed “Lulu,” conducted operations against Black troops and their girlfriends, and a clique of young women, similar to the Stuttgart group, was busy inciting white and Black troops against each other. In a particularly outrageous incident on 24 July 1946, a Belgian refugee was stoned by a German crowd because his wife had been friendly toward Black troops. The Belgian had been conducting his wife home when a German began pelting him with stones, and the assailant was soon joined by others in this activity. Significantly, the story that made the rounds among German civilians was that two Black men had knocked down a pregnant German woman, and that the result had been a rock fight between German defenders and Black soldiers.
Trouble also broke out in several towns west of Wurzburg, where, noted an intelligence summary, “anti-Negro sentiment is said to have attained serious proportions.” A CIC report from 31 January 1946 observed:
In Veithochsheim, Thuengershein, and Karlstadt, there has been an especially intense flare-up of anti-Negro sentiment. German resentment at the presence of Negro troops throughout this area has been apparent, but it had never crystallized so overtly as during the last week. In Veithochsheim, for instance, six German girls have been sent to the hospital after being beaten by local youths and having their hair clipped for fraternization with Negro soldiers. In Karlstadt, a policeman remarked to a Counter Intelligence Corps agent that one girl had been jailed because she was suspected of bearing the child of a Negro soldier. At a company dance in Veithochsheim one German civilian, since arrested, was identified by soldiers and DPs [refugees] as having threatened girls escorted by Negro soldiers, and having listed their names. In the past week no fewer than four serious brawls between soldiers and civilians are reported by police. In one of these a Counter Intelligence Corps agent who attempted to intervene succeeded in rescuing the civilian only to be vituperated and threatened with a beating himself by the troops … Conversation among civilians in this area indicates that anti-Negroism has replaced anti-Semitism as an expression of German race superiority.
In such cases, the sympathy of U.S. occupation authorities did not lie with their own men. Convinced that there were too many Blacks in Germany and Austria, and that these troops were flouting set norms of conduct, they described resistance as “an all too possible reaction.”
Aside from racial concerns, other factors also lay behind the movement against nonfraternization. One widespread impression among Germans and Austrians was that fraternizing women were opening themselves up to ruthless exploitation, and that this would have a negative impact on the stability of society. There were deep concerns about the spread of prostitution: a Bremen police report in the spring of 1946 blamed this phenomenon on the impact of the occupation forces, along with the effects of economic hardship, and Bremen welfare authorities asked Military Government to help keep young women away from American soldiers. The police chief in Heidelberg said much the same thing, adding that “moral conditions are naturally lower than they were before the war.” The American authorities were generally unreceptive to such reproaches, although they did deign to launch an official investigation of conditions in Heidelberg. Concern over prostitution also reignited an old controversy about whether it was better to accept the reality of the sex trade and confine it to military barracks and bordellos—the option favoured by public health technocrats worried about the spread of venereal disease—or whether it was more effective to fight the problem on a moral basis, improving the upbringing of adolescents.
Interestingly, there was no parallel in Germany to the practice in Japan whereby local authorities actually pimped for occupation troops by establishing brothels called “Recreation and Amusement Centers.” In this case, the intent was to sacrifice young women on the margins of society as a breakwater in order to keep Americans away from middle class Japanese females, a strategy rationalized by rhetorically constructing “immoral” women as psychologically or biologically distinct, and thereby falling outside the parameters of the Japanese “race.” Obviously the women in these brothels were ostracized socially, but they were not the targets of intimidation and physical violence, or at least not until the system eventually collapsed under the pressure of rising venereal disease rates and the brothels were replaced by legions of unregulated and much-despised streetwalkers. There was nothing similar to state-sanctioned “Recreation and Amusement Centers” in U.S.-occupied Germany or Austria, perhaps because prostitution was not as institutionalized as in Japan, perhaps because the Nazi regime had experienced some success in integrating society, and the class basis that distinguished young proletarian and peasant women no longer meant as much as once had been the case. In the Third Reich, “outsiders” had been defined as Jews, gypsies or Mischlinge, most of whom had already been destroyed.
Another widespread assumption about fraternization was that U.S. troops would impregnate German and Austrian women and then leave for the United States, with no thought for providing support. Unfortunately, this was not an entirely unfounded fear: over 37,000 children fathered by American soldiers were born out of wedlock in the decade after 1945, most of whom wound up as wards of the German and Austrian welfare services. Many of these children were never adopted and remained in long-term public care, especially those of mixed-race parentage.
Yet another popular impression was that the modesty and unpretentiousness of European women—”the thankfulness and devotion with which they repay that little that they receive”—would spoil American soldiers, who were more accustomed to the supposedly brassy and self-involved women of their homeland. It is difficult to reconcile how, in the popular discourse, women berated in one breath as “Ami whores” could, in the next, represent the flower of German and Austrian womanhood, but one supposes that such resentments functioned at a primal level below the exercise of reason. This belief that German and Austrian women were too good for Americans comprised the underlying assumption behind one of the most popular rumours about the cause of the U.S. Army’s rapid, postwar demobilization. According to German and Austrian observers, women in the United States were obviously exerting political pressure in order to get American troops out of Central Europe before they became too attached to local females.
As for the Americans, they were sensitive about the anti-fraternization movement because they considered it a means of resistance and a form of political defiance. American security authorities in Austria felt this way, and so did the counter-intelligence service of the U.S. Seventh Army, the garrison force in the western half of the occupation zone in Germany. The anti-fraternization campaign, claimed the latter, was “similar to the situation which developed in so many other countries formerly occupied by the Germans—in other words, [it is] a form of expression of opposition to the occupying power.” Some intelligence officers also maintained that anti-fraternization attacks could “develop into opposition towards all Germans who collaborate in any way with Americans.” The U.S. Military Governor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was always ready to believe the worst of his German charges, sympathized with this school of thought, and he reported in October 1945 that anti-fraternization activity was only one step removed from organized resistance against the occupation forces.
There is a certain germ of truth in this interpretation: certainly, some anti-fraternization placards were posted by National Socialist fanatics and showed more than a trace of Nazi thinking, and there is no doubt that such elements tried hard to shift the movement toward more direct forms of opposition to Military Government. On the other hand, there are even stronger reasons for believing that, for most Germans and Austrians, the anti-fraternization cause was largely a gender issue, deriving mainly from male jealousy and anxieties about sexual control, although never entirely divorced from issues of race, class and economic power. This argument is best made through a comparison of German and Austrian anti-fraternization sentiments with similar attitudes that developed in other countries. Observers who believed in a correlation between anti-fraternization activity and full-blown underground resistance, like the counterintelligence staff officers of the Seventh Army, were quick to point to an important precedent: opposition to romantic relationships between Wehrmacht troops and local women had occurred in every European country that had developed a significant resistance movement. This they saw as evidence of a causal relationship. What they did not acknowledge was that such anti-fraternization impulses had also developed in almost every country used as a base by U.S. forces, even in nations that were friendly.
British intelligence officers in Austria were struck by the similarity between the hostility displayed by young Austrians and the bitter reaction of British men upon seeing “their” women squired around by American and Polish soldiers stationed in wartime Britain. Certainly, in the latter case, there was no question of a link between anti-fraternization activities and “anti-Allied resistance” or “political opposition,” although some British servicemen did consider romantic associations between British women and American soldiers “unpatriotic” and of dubious racial value. This suggests that anti-fraternization resentments could thrive independent of a political or ideological framework, and that such discontent did not necessarily point the way toward potential “underground resistance.”
An even more telling subject for comparison with Germany and Austria was the Netherlands, where American troops appeared in force during the fall of 1944 in the southeastern province of Limburg. The population of this region shared some of the racial preoccupations of their German neighbours, reinforced by the impact of recent Nazi occupation, and they also shared fears about a proliferation of illegitimate children mothered by supposedly lovelorn young women. As was the case in Britain, there was not much question of anti-fraternization actions contributing to the growth of a more general resistance organization, although all the characteristics of the German and Austrian movements were apparent: posters appeared promising that young women yielding “to the temptations of American chocolate and cigarettes” would have their hair sheared (as had happened to girls accused of fraternizing with now-departed Wehrmacht soldiers); and institutional support developed in the form of anti-fraternization sermons by Roman Catholic priests and belligerent editorials in local newspapers.
VI.
The fact that young men intimidated women in various countries is not an argument in favour of sociobiological determinism, as if bullying women is an act grounded in the natural order of things. Whether male aggressiveness is a universal attribute is an issue hotly debated, but even if it is, the counterclaim is that culture is predominant, in the sense that it liberates human behavior from biological determinants. In immediate post-Nazi Germany and Austria, however, cultural inhibitors were even more absent than in other societies, given the fact that young men had just been subjected to a steady propaganda diet glorifying violence, Aryanism, militarism, and a raw code of patriarchal “manliness.” Since female fraternizers had been subjected to corporal punishment in other areas of Europe, it is hardly a surprise that such things happened in Germany and Austria too, and that the applications of such punishments were commonplace, particularly in the American zones of occupation. In other words, if the nativist intimidation of women is intrinsic to conditions of foreign military conquest and occupation, then such abuses are likely to be doubly severe in countries with marked chauvinist traditions, especially in situations where women’s relations with self-sufficient occupation troops are the only means of preventing starvation and destitution.
It should also be noted that western culture in general has been characterized by a disturbingly widespread tendency to regard women as the vessels of sin, and in this case the sin was collaboration. In fact, J.P. Sartre gendered collaboration itself as an essentially feminine strategy, one of seduction rather than allegedly stout and forthright resistance. And there is no doubt that fraternizing women in American-occupied Germany and Austria became fixed in the public consciousness as the archetypes of collaboration, even though a great many Germans and Austrians were collaborating. In fact, a U.S. Military Government study noted in 1946 that women (and lower-echelon bureaucrats) were more resented by civilians in the occupation zones than were senior, elected officials. This is hardly a surprise, particularly if we keep in mind the position of women over the broad sweep of European history—constructed as inherently weak and unstable, they have been blamed in inordinate measure for such things as infanticide, witchcraft and “fornication.” Fraternization was only the latest in a long line of sins to which women are supposedly prone.