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17 - Sexual Violence and Its Prosecution by Courts Martial of the Wehrmacht
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- By Birgit Beck
- Edited by Roger Chickering, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Stig Förster, Universität Bern, Switzerland, Bernd Greiner, Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung
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- Book:
- A World at Total War
- Published online:
- 05 January 2013
- Print publication:
- 20 December 2004, pp 317-332
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Summary
“Warfare with and against civilians is one of the hallmarks of total war,” writes Stig Förster. Despite continuing disagreements among historians over which wars can be characterized as “total,” there is consensus on the factors that define the concept. The primary markers seem to be the extent and intensity of warfare, the adoption of limitless war aims, the abolition of restraints posed by morality or law, and the systematic mobilization of all available economic, social, and political resources for the war effort. These features of total war entail the “calculated erasure of the bounds between combatant and noncombatant,” the transformation of civilians into principal victims of military violence. Although the losses during the global conflict from 1939 to 1945 cannot be calculated with any precision, civilian casualties far exceeded military losses. In the Soviet Union, two-thirds of all the losses were civilian.
Despite the importance of civilian casualties in total war, little research has been done on one of the problem's central aspects: gender-specific crimes, particularly sexual assaults on girls and women. Wartime rape has remained a taboo for historians. Susan Brownmiller's pioneering work on sexual crimes in wartime was first published in 1975, but her work has found few successors. It has taken the public outcry over the mass rapes of Bosnian women during the Yugoslavian civil war to renew scholarly interest in sexually related war crimes.
1 - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and World War II
- Edited by Richard Bessel, University of York, Dirk Schumann, German Historical Institute, Washington DC
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- Book:
- Life after Death
- Published online:
- 05 January 2013
- Print publication:
- 05 May 2003, pp 15-36
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Summary
How far can the pervasive violence of World War II, which affected not only combatants but also civilians, help explain the nature of European societies in the 1950s? The research presented in this book spans several countries and approaches this question from a variety of disciplines. The specific point that this chapter proposes to address is whether the understanding of the individual's reaction to life-threatening violence can contribute usefully to the body of research on the German society of the 1950s. This chapter raises questions and generates new hypotheses or tools for future empirical research. The crucial question remains whether it is at all admissible to use medical concepts to generate hypotheses for historical research.
World War II exposed many individuals to extreme and prolonged violence, and works of fiction as well as historical essays and books attempt to describe the way in which ordinary Germans experienced the war. Wolfgang Borchert's play Draussen vor der Tür captured the atmosphere of the early postwar years. When it was first broadcast on the radio on February 13, 1947, it elicited a tremendous response from listeners. The play describes the guilt, pain, nightmares, and finally suicide of a returned soldier confronted by various people, such as a former officer and the director of a cabaret, trying to forget the war and return to normality. Returning to “normality” was particularly important in the 1950s. Here, the most important question is what lies beneath the surface of this normality and necessitates maintaining it at all costs.