The 'Big Rape': Sex and Sexual Violence, War, and Occupation in Post-World War II Memory and Imagination

The defeated Reich that the victors encountered in the spring of 1945 wore a predominantly female face. German men had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, leaving women to clean the ruins, scrounge for material survival, and serve the occupiers, often as sexual partners and victims. After years of remarkable inattention since the 1950s, and provoked in part by the sexual violence associated with the conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Red Army rapes became the subject of vigorous schoalrly and feminist debates on German women's role in the Third Reich.