Explaining Mass Rape in Post-War Germany

• In Event: Long-Term Social and Political Consequences of World War I and II

Abstract

Political scientists offer numerous explanations for sexual violence in conflict, emphasizing factors such as ethnic hatred, gender inequality, social cohesion, strategic motivations, opportunity structures and hypermasculinity. More often than not, these factors vary across time, conflicts or countries, but remain more or less constant within a single conflict. As a result, much less is known about why some places display higher intensity of sexual violence in a given conflict. In this paper, we utilize an original micro-level census, election and public health dataset and proxy the exposure to sexual assaults with data on abortions that occurred during the first five years of occupation. We argue, in line with historians, that localities with the largest increase in the abortion cases since the 1930s were most exposed to the crimes. We show that the occurrence of abortions positively correlates with venereal disease, official criminal statistics on sexual violence and suicide rate of women, which provides reassurance for the ability of our measure to capture the intensity of exposure to sexual violence. Using this measure, we first show that most sexual crimes during the occupation were committed in the Soviet zone by Red Army soldiers, although the occurrence of mass rapes was heavily regionalized and varied over time even within the Soviet zone. We then seek to uncover the roots of the substantial geographical variation in the intensity of sexual violence committed by Red Army soldiers in post-war Germany between 1945 and 1948 by exploring the role of economic factors, such as economic inequality and employment structure.

Authors

• Mona Morgan-Collins, King's College London

• Ulrike Gisela Theuerkauf, University of East Anglia

• Hanna Folsz, Stanford University