David Raub Snyder. Sex Crimes Under the Wehrmacht. Lincoln, NE. London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 298 S. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-4332-3.

Reviewed by Sonja Levsen (Department of History, University of Freiburg)
Published on H-German (February, 2008)

The debate of whether military justice in the Wehrmacht was decent, harsh but just, and essentially free from National Socialist ideology or "an institution which endorsed key aspects of Nazi ideology" that contributed to the Nazi war of conquest and extermination through its draconian punishments for deserters has shaped the historiography of the Wehrmachtsjustiz since the 1960s.[1] It was sparked when former air force judge Otto Schweling was commissioned by the Munich Institute for Contemporary History to prepare a study on the military justice system in the Third Reich. Upon completion, the Institute refused to publish Schweling's manuscript because of its strongly apologetic character and methodological weaknesses. After Schweling's death, professor of law and former influential military jurist Erich Schwinge reworked and published the manuscript, which not surprisingly presented the Wehrmacht's military system as honorable and decent and its rulings as mild.[2] This image of a Wehrmachtsjustiz that had maintained its integrity and remained politically neutral was significantly challenged in 1987 by Manfred Messerschmidt and Fritz Wüllner, who showed that Schweling and Schwinge had systematically downplayed Wehrmacht justice's involvement with the Nazi regime and that the number of death penalties handed down by Wehrmacht tribunals was much higher than admitted. Since then, a few more studies have appeared on this subject, the latest being Messerschmidt's excellent overview.[3]

David Raub Snyder places his book in the context of these debates. The title is misleading; the book is not about sex crimes but about the Wehrmacht's prosecution and punishment of them. Although it is legitimate to choose a rather general title, the book's narrow focus in this case is disappointing. Snyder is not interested in and does not discuss questions such as the extent and nature of sexual crimes committed by German soldiers in the Second World War; he does not write either about the offenders or the victims, nor about the role, nature and reasons of sexual violence in war; he focuses exclusively on the trials. Under "sex crimes" he subsumes all violations of Nazi legislation regarding sexual behavior, including sexual violence such as rape--both of German and non-German women--but also consensual homosexual acts and intercourse between Germans and Jews, the latter punishable under the Nuremberg Laws as "racial defilement." Taking the Nazi definition of "sex crime" a s the basis for a study without reflecting on this methodological choice is problematic in itself. Moreover, the analysis of these vastly different offenses within just 130 pages makes a thorough treatment of each topic impossible.

Snyder aims to "restore balance to the historiography of Wehrmachtsjustiz" (p. 17) by focusing on previously neglected trials of sex offenders. While he sees his book as a contribution to the history of sexuality in the Third Reich as well, the central thread of his argument is the extent to which the sex trials offer evidence of ideologically based verdicts in different courts of the Wehrmacht. His main findings are that the judgments in the Wehrmacht's trials of sex offenders reflected in "vastly different sentencing practices," which he attributes "largely to the different attitudes of the Gerichtsherren" (p. 233). The role of the latter was, Snyder argues, more important than the literature so far has revealed. The Wehrmacht's court system, as might have been expected, tended to bring its "human materiel"--a term that Snyder uses without quotation marks--to the forefront. Snyder argues that it "sacrificed the needs of the Volksgemeinschaft in favor of the needs of the Wehrgemeinschaft" (p. 232)--a somewhat questionable binary dilemma, as these concepts were closely intertwined.[4] Snyder tries to distinguish between "German militarism and nationalism" on the one hand and "fascism" on the other as strands in the decision-making processes of Wehrmacht jurists without explaining why he considers this more than problematic distinction a helpful analytical tool. Although the author makes quite clear that he does not wish to deny the Wehrmacht's inhumane way of dealing with offenders, although he repeatedly stresses the brutality of its justice system and his tone is never apologetic, he continually tries to show that Wehrmacht trials were not guided by National Socialist principles, but, supposedly in opposition to these, by the perceived needs of the Wehrgemeinschaft.

The first chapter relates the historiography of Wehrmachtsjustiz and seeks to show in which way the study could add to or even redress debates about it. Unfortunately, both points are presented in a questionable way. Regarding existing literature, Snyder ignores a range of more recent studies on the topic and tends to present the debate as if the book by Schweling and Schwinge (which Snyder irritatingly quotes as Schwinge) and the first book by Messerschmidt and Wüllner were the only significant contributions to the topic. While Messerschmidt's 2005 book probably appeared only after Snyder's study went into print, Snyder ignores a range of important articles published by Messerschmidt since the late 1990s. Even more important, in 2004 Birgit Beck published a comprehensive, deeply researched study on sexual violence under the Wehrmacht, partly based on the same sources as Snyder's and precluding some of his findings, albeit placing the topic in a much wider context.[5] Snyder was unlucky that this book appeared shortly before his went to press, but even so, such a central competing study should be mentioned in the introduction rather than only in a few footnotes. Against this background, Snyder's generalizing judgments about the deficiencies of existing literature on Wehrmachtsjustiz fail to convince.

How might a focus on sex crimes redress the debates about Wehrmachtsjustiz? Snyder questions the assumption in many studies that the focus on punishments handed down to deserters and disobedient soldiers is the best perspective from which to assess the character of Wehrmacht justice. While the wish to avoid "another 1918" at all costs is generally acknowledged as an important driving force behind the draconian punishment of deserters, Snyder pushes this point even further by maintaining that this policy would also have been adopted, even had "some other right-wing political faction" come to power in the 1930s that was not inherently National Socialist (p. 23). Whether "fascist" or "Nazi" ideology influenced the Wehrmacht's justice system--Snyder uses the terms interchangeably--can thus better be tested by using another group of offenses, such as sex crimes. Both in this hypothesis and in his subsequent argument, Snyder reveals a naive concept of "Nazi ideology," categorizing only those arguments and judgments as "fascist" or even as "ideological" that show a concern for the racial purity of the Volksgemeinschaft.

In the following chapters, Snyder introduces the reader to the development of the Military Administration of Justice between 1933 and 1939, the functioning of the Wehrmacht's justice system at war, and the Wehrmacht's penal and parole system. In contrast to part of the literature, he stresses the role of the Gerichtsherren as "decisive figures at the level of the individual case" (p. 51) and discusses both the judicial and the penal process in detail.

Part 2 of the book contains the analysis of the documents, based on a sample of approximately four hundred sex offense case files both from the former "Eastern Collection" of case files (cataloged by offense and thus providing easy access) and from two additional divisions that were, according to Snyder, "typical front-line formations" (p. 100). Chapter 5 explains the selection and representative nature of these case files; methodological reflections on the use and interpretation of military justice case files as a source are restricted to a few sentences that somewhat controversially decide that case files should "be accepted as the courts' honest interpretation of the evidence" (p. 102). Snyder then proceeds to analyze the documents, devoting a chapter each to different forms of offenses: "Homosexuality and Violations of Paragraph 175," "Sexual Assault," "Child Molestation and Incest," "Racial Defilement," and "Bestiality." Each chapter contains a general introduction to the topic, a detailed discussion of a few selected case files, and a conclusion based on these files.

Chapter 6 is concerned with trials of homosexuals following Paragraph 175, which provided the basis for trials for "sodomy" in Imperial Germany and was considerably modified in 1935 to include all "indecent activities." Snyder states that, while punishments could be severe, the majority of offenders was reintegrated into the troops, even after 1943, when the Wehrmacht, following pressure from Adolf Hitler, introduced the category of "incorrigible homosexuals" who, according to the guidelines, had to be turned over the Gestapo. The Wehrmacht's relative reluctance to transfer offenders to the Gestapo--although it did so in a number of cases--shows its desire to channel as many offenders as possible back to the fronts. Snyder demonstrates that jurisdiction in homosexuality cases was marked by diverse decisions and that similar offenses resulted "in vastly different punishments" (p. 123). As with other kinds of sexual offenders, "usability" in the forces often was the guiding principle of judges and Gerichtsherren in homosexuality cases and the courts "were less concerned with the intimate contact itself than the effect it might have on the military apparatus" (p. 130). In contrast to civilian courts, the Wehrmacht turned few homosexuals over to concentration camps and instead reintegrated them. While some of Snyder's facts are interesting, questionable judgments and interpretations abound. Conclusions such as "[a]lthough punishments could indeed be severe, this was a Prussian tradition, not necessarily a Nazi one" (p. 130) again reveal a questionable notion of what a "Nazi tradition" or "Nazi judicial practice" might be, and in this case also an obvious misjudgment. "Severe" punishments in the Wehrmacht's trials could mean--as Snyder describes himself--penal servitude in the Emsland camps with their more than harsh living conditions, or frontline parole in field penal battalions with equally harsh conditions, both hardly Prussian traditions.

Chapter 7 discusses "Sexual Assault," focusing on rapes of women on the Eastern Front, in France and Italy, and of German women in Germany. Following his general line of argument, Snyder finds in these trials "very little ... ideologically based jurisprudence," and concludes that military interests guided the courts' decisions also in rape trials. "Ideology" again is reduced to the concept of racial purity, and even disparaging remarks by judges regarding the allegedly different nature of a woman's honor in Russia do not count as "ideology" for Snyder.

Contrary to what might have been expected and to what some scholars have suggested, servicemen often received "very severe punishments" (p. 134) for assaults against eastern European women. While Snyder's book emphasizes this fact more than Beck's does, he similarly concludes that the high variability of judgments was related to the decisive role of the perceived needs of the Wehrmacht, both in the imminent situation and in long-term perspective. Yet, while Beck discusses in detail the situations on the different fronts, Snyder's analysis of his case files remains insignificantly contextualized. A case in point is the Barbarossa Decree of 1941, after which--as Beck shows based on a wide range of sources and secondary literature--few cases of sex offenses on the Eastern Front were brought to trial at all. If sexual violence was punished, it often happened without a trial--for example, by giving the accused soldier a few days of arrest. These offenses were only prosecuted in very special cases that were regarded as severely damaging Wehrmacht interests. Snyder fails to address the consequences of the Barbarossa Decree in an adequate way, however, and refrains from taking into account any sources other than the military case files. His findings may refute the idea that sexual crimes were generally tolerated on the Eastern Front, but the small number of cases brought to trial cannot prove much regarding the general attitudes of the Wehrmacht regarding sexual crimes in the East. His discussion of sexual violence against German women displays similar problems. On the basis of only a "handful" of rape cases from the court of the Wehrmacht Commander in Berlin, Snyder wonders why rapists of "Aryan" women--Snyder uses quotation marks for this term from time to time, but not consistently--were considered less despicable than deserters by the courts. Given the woman's high status in Nazi ideology, he would have expected that assaults against German women "would have truly outraged a fanatic judge" (p. 167). Snyder's argument again points towards a too superficial understanding of National Socialism that does not give enough consideration to its complexity, its contradictions, and to the place of war and the military in its ideology.

Readers interested in the Wehrmacht's military justice system in general should consult Messerschmidt's latest study; readers interested in sexual violence in the Wehrmacht should read Beck's book. Snyder offers some additional material but when he treads on new ground, he does not interpret and contextualize his material in a convincing way.

Notes

[1]. A good overview of this debate is given by Stephen R. Welch, "Harsh but Just'? German Military Justice in the Second World War: A Comparative Study of the Court Martialling of German and US Deserters," German History 17 (1999): 369-399; quotation on 370.

[2]. Otto Peter Schweling, Die deutsche Militärjustiz in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Erich Schwinge (Marburg: Elwert, 1977).

[3]. Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtsjustiz, 1933-1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2005).

[4]. See Manfred Messerschmidt, "The Wehrmacht and the Volksgemeinschaft," Journal of Contemporary History 18 (1983): 719-744.

[5]. Birgit Beck, Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt. Sexualverbrechen vor deutschen Militärgerichten, 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004).

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Citation: Sonja Levsen. Review of Raub Snyder, David, Sex Crimes Under the Wehrmacht. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14234

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