Making Sense of a Rape Photograph: Se.xual Violence as Social Performance on the Eastern Front, 1939-1944

Making Sense of a Rape Photograph: Se.xual Violence as Social Performance on the Eastern Front, 1939-1944

This article begins with a disturbing image that has a no-less unsettling provenance. It shows a group of fifteen young German soldiers standing in a semicircle, carousing and laughing as one of their comrades emulates a sex act with an unidentified woman who may or may not be dead. The laughter of his comrades suggests approval for the actions of the man on the ground. Although it is not clear if the photograph depicts an act of actual rape, its aftermath, or mere mimicry, what is certain is that the depicted scene ascribes the woman only one function: she is an object of amusement that mediates coercion and asymmetric power relations

It is very possible that this picture was taken before or after the soldiers raped the woman. However, irrespective of whether any penetration actually occurred, the men imitated a rape scene showcasing the woman’s body as a sexualized object of ridicule and subjugation. Sexual subordination cannot be defined solely in terms of physical assault; it is also (or even largely) carried out through seemingly more pedestrian social practices such as rape talk or rape gestures. The casualness with which the photograph(er) puts oppressive misogyny and sexism on display is disturbing. What makes the scene even more offensive to contemporary viewers is that we find ourselves drawn into the logic of the male harassers and the comedic antics. Why are these men laughing? More precisely, what is so funny about this rape scene, whether real or imagined? Precisely because nothing is obvious about this picture, the explicit—and elusive—image raises fundamental epistemological questions: What does the photograph communicate to the viewer? What remains silent and unseen? How can one grasp the overarching cultural, social, and political meanings of this image? And finally, what does it tell us about the connections between gender, sexuality, and war?

Romanian historian Adrian Cioflanca discovered this photo in the National Archives of Romania, and it carried no caption or indication of the specific context in which it was taken. The photograph is part of a larger corpus of sixty reprinted—not original—photographs. They are named after their collector, Karoly Francisc-Iosif, who, it appears, was a member of the Tudor Vladimirescu Division, which was formed in the summer of 1944 after the Soviet invasion of Romania and which fought alongside the Red Army. During the final stages of World War II, Francisc-Iosif traveled widely across Eastern Europe, which gave him the unique opportunity to gather photographic evidence of German crimes. However, he is unlikely to have been the photographer, because his collection constitutes a very eclectic mix of atrocity images. Certain photographs seem to have been taken with the clear purpose of documenting mass crimes, such as images of crematoria, concentration camp inmates, and boxes of Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide used in the gas chambers. These bear an odd resemblance to the photos taken by the Red Army at the liberation of the Majdanek and Auschwitz camps. Yet other photographs have a more private, voyeuristic perspective, depicting public executions, mass graves, and images taken from the perspective of the German occupiers, like the rape scenario I have described. It is thus very likely that Francisc-Iosif seized some of these private photographs from German soldiers who had been captured by the Red Army. It is also possible that he simply found them among the objects left behind during the Wehrmacht’s hasty retreat.

The Eastern European style of the rustic wooden house looming in the background suggests that the photograph was taken in the countryside or in a rural town somewhere in the Nazi-occupied Eastern territories. The image’s chronological provenance could lie anywhere between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, now considered the prelude to the war of extermination, and the Red Army’s westward push in the summer of 1944, which ultimately led to the liberation of the Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, and Nazi-occupied Eastern Poland. Only one thing is certain about this image: the fifteen young men wear the typical Wehrmacht cap, boots, and trousers, indicating that a Wehrmacht soldier took the picture. Because none of the soldiers appear in full regalia, it is impossible to definitively discern their individual ranks. However, based on the kneeling soldiers’ armband insignias, we can assume that the men were part of the lower-ranking service personnel of the general army (Heer). By capturing a particular moment of soldiers’ sociability, this photographic artifact exudes a certain degree of immediacy and veracity. Yet this does not make the picture easy to read or interpret. Indeed, the photograph raises a serious heuristic question: Does the fact that we know so little about its production, consumption, and circulation make it a less credible historical source?

Historians of the early modern period have long challenged the assumption that a source’s value can be determined only through an analysis of its factuality. Natalie Zemon Davis, most prominently, tracked popular violence and religious massacres in the sixteenth century by drawing attention to self-presentation, storytelling, and ritual action. The history of violence, in Davis’s understanding, not only asks for social framing but also cries out for cultural interpretations. In a similar vein, historians working on the history of colonialism have argued that source collections in the official—and unofficial—archives not only are constructed but also must be understood as the product of historically specific subjectivities and emotional states. Only by reflecting upon the intrinsic incoherencies of the content, form, and context of their archival material can historians grasp what historical anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler terms “hidden transcripts,” the many hidden stories within a source’s streamlined narrative. More recently, a historian of sexuality of colonial India, Anjali Arondekar, has pushed Stoler’s argument even further by insisting that colonial archives must be read through the lens of sexuality studies and by convincingly arguing that uncovering the traces of attitudes toward sexuality and other taboo-charged topics in the historical sources will force scholars to rethink their methodologies.

The history of sexual violence in Nazi-occupied Europe has faced similar challenges. Based on a very heterogeneous yet fragmentary corpus of sources, Regina Mühlhäuser has compellingly demonstrated the variety of motives for sexual violence and how differently it was understood by individual Wehrmacht soldiers. The perpetration of sexual violence was enabled when military authorities created a structural setting of licentiousness that allowed it. Historians’ access to archival evidence for these acts on the Eastern Front is certainly less than ideal. While running the gamut of military activity, from policy statements to medical reports, official documentation often fails to adequately illustrate the social practices and mentalities toward sexuality and violence as they played out on the ground. There are even fewer first-person accounts from victims of sexual assaults. Perpetrators’ narratives, too, are quite hard to find. In fact, detailed descriptions of sexual assaults rarely exist outside of the courtroom, particularly in the context of the Eastern Front, where rapes were rarely prosecuted. In general, the paucity of documentary evidence for sexual violence presents particular challenges for its historical investigation. This explains why most studies rely overwhelmingly on eyewitness testimonies.

However, it is not the fragmentary nature of the archival record that poses the biggest problems but rather historians’ tendency to insist that only “hard facts,” “proof,” and “veracity” can be considered the ultimate evidentiary criteria to validate source material. Despite a critical archival consciousness and increasing openness of historians of Nazism and the Holocaust to the various turns—cultural, linguistic, and visual—that have transformed historical methodology and the history of sexuality, the discipline still struggles to free itself from what Arondekar has called the positivist “extractive” logic of the archive as a “site of endless promise.” My aim here is not to discredit methodological approaches that concentrate on empirical data—after all, we are dealing with mass violence and genocide. Rather, I am suggesting a complementary close reading of empirical sources, a reading that, rather than peeling away these sources’ uncertain and subjective elements, instead directly engages with their ambiguous and contradictory meanings.

With its obvious limitations and lack of concrete provenance, the photograph I have described is an excellent case in point. Photographs insist on interpretation; a single image always contains multiple meanings “beyond the immediate control and consciousness of its creator.” As a material trace of a staged moment of lived wartime reality by combatants, what I will call the “rape-joke” photograph casts a very subjective light on history. This photographic evidence requires attention to what historian Jennifer Evans has called “shifting subjectivities,” or the way in which a photograph conjures the subjectively perceived social realities and fluctuating constructions of selfhood. I build upon Evans’s claim that it is not the “reality” or the “documentary value” the photo gestures toward that is important but rather what the viewers see in it.

Today’s readers might first notice the striking violence and horror of the image. However, one must consider that contemporary ways of seeing and points of reference are framed by much more recent conceptualizations of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes. Once we engage with the gaze of the photographer, it becomes clear that the depicted scene follows a completely different logic: despite its indisputably violent content, the photograph manages to convey the impression of fun, even as the camera captures a rape joke in a fiercely colonial context.

I will begin with an exploration of the arrangement of this image. After decoding the social practices, individual agencies, and gendered group dynamics within the violent moment depicted in the photograph, I then widen the analytical lens and situate the source within the broader historical and geographical context of the Nazi occupation of the East and its embedded culture of rape. However, the relative impunity toward sexual violence by German military authorities alone does not explain the staging of this rape-joke image. Therefore, in the third section of this article, I will readjust my lens to the larger cultural and social practices of colonial and wartime amateur photography. Snapshots reflect how soldiers perceived themselves in relation not only to the local population of a foreign country but also to existing photographic conventions. As a self-portrayed group photo, the rape image can thus be read both as a trophy photograph and what Silvan Niedermeier calls a “colonial selfie,” giving us yet another insight into the soldiers’ mindset and the meaning they were making of war.