[Raymond]

German Fräuleins [Young Ladies] and American Soldiers on a Rollercoaster (1945)


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Four Cigarettes Good Pay For All Night

When Germany surrendered on 7 May 1945, an estimated four million fathers and elder brothers of the defeated male population remained in Russian captivity[I'd add that the corpses of recently fallen fathers, brothers, uncles and nephews hadn't even begun to rot] . This only increased the pressures on a sexually starved female population to yield to their conquerors in an 'unofficial polygamy' with the men of the occupying armies that was to send the post-war bastard population soaring – in 1945, one out of every five German births was estimated to be illegitimate!

That a large percentage of these children were fathered by Allied soldiers was an indication of the rapidity with which General Eisenhower's original 'non-fraternization' policy had broken down. The erosion had begun when Hitler's vaunted Westwal defence cracked in March 1945 and the 'liberation' of German women began – despite a US Army decree that contracting VD inside the German frontier would be taken as prima facie evidence of fraternization, entailing a $65 fine. Neither the policy nor the stiff penalty were effective. Officers and soldiers in every Allied army were soon fraternizing openly. As an American intelligence officer reported from Aachen, one of the first towns in the Third Reich to fall under Allied control, it was difficult for the average GI to regard the native women as hostile:

The essential kindness of the American soldier was in evidence. Soldiers helped German housewives with their chores, played with the children and through other small acts of friendship made living more tolerable through the creation of a friendly atmosphere. Conversation with some of those soldiers evoked such comments as, 'These Germans aren't bad people. We get along with them OK. All you've got to do is to treat them good and you have no trouble.'

Germany's female population did not resist the demands of the occupying soldiers. As one American report put it, 'Women were told that it was right and patriotic to bear children for any soldiers desiring the same.' They soon discovered that sex could be traded for food and cigarettes from the GIs, who found it easy to forgive the Germans, unlike their British comrades who had suffered the bombing of their homes by the Luftwaffe. The average GI could also identify with the cleanliness and domestic values espoused by the conquered but still house-proud womenfolk. 'Despite living in cellars and bombed buildings, the German civilians had kept clean,' one US Army intelligence officer noted. 'The girls, in particular, look out of place amid the debris. They wear bobby-sox and pigtails with gay coloured ribbons. They wear thin dresses, and they are fond of standing in the sun.'

Soaring VD rates were disturbing proof that 'getting-together' increased in the first weeks of peace. Now there was no longer any fighting, the sexual hunger of Allied troops feasted on that of German women separated from their husbands, many of whom had risked imprisonment in concentration camps to solicit the favours of Polish and Russian slave workers. Negro regiments were especially susceptible to fraternization. There were many white women who were eager to exorcise Hitler's racial myths in the most intimate manner.

'We cannot expect the GI to behave differently,' observed an American officer who urged the abandonment of the unworkable 'non-fraternization' policy', 'After all he is human. He wants companionship – he's lonely, and the Germans are pastmasters at getting around men who feel that way.' Physical and sexual hunger combined with a flourishing black market to make sex a commodity to be traded for the necessities of life. 'In this economic set-up, sex relations, which function like any other commodity, assume a very low value,' explained one US Army survey. 'Because of this situation, plus the fact that every American soldier is a relative millionaire by virtue of his access to PX rations, the average young man in the occupation army is afforded an unparalleled opportunity for sexual exposure.' In Berlin immediately after the end of the war, German girls considered 'four cigarettes good pay for all night. A can of corned beef means true love.' (pp. 343-345)
Upheaval

American war correspondent Julian Bach reported on what he called a 'vast social, ideological, and moral upheaval' that was taking place in the ruins of the Thousand Year Reich:

When a pack of king-size cigarettes brings $18.50 on the Berlin black market, then the economy is sick. When a buxom fraulein, taught by Hitler to loathe and despise all 'North American Apes', turns around and, for the sake of a handful of Hersheys, cuddles up to a GI whose name she does not know (and probably could not conveniently pronounce), then moral values are in travail.

So much fraternization was taking place in Germany during the spring and summer of 1945 that GIs jokingly compared it to prohibition. One staff sergeant in the 30th Infantry Division explained the difference between non-fraternization and prohibition: 'In the old days a guy could hide a bottle inside his coat for days at a time, but it is hard to keep a German girl quiet in there for more than a couple of hours.' A tank driver commented, 'Fraternization? Yeh, I suppose it's all right. Anyway I've been doing it right along. But every now and then I wake up in a cold sweat. I dream that we are at war again and the German bastards I'm fighting this time are my own!' (p. 345)

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Are women naturally amoral?

The fact is that morality - the ability to stand by principles when doing so makes one's life more difficult, or even puts that life in peril - is adaptive for men, and maladaptive for women......

........Loyalty is the same. Again, imagine you are a young cave man and you and your friends Og and Ug see a gang of cave men from a rival tribe on your territory. The three of you walk up to confront them. As you get close, Og notices that one of the other lads is much bigger and more muscular than any of you. Og might decide on the spot that casting his lot with this large stranger is his best course. He does, and you and Ug are killed by him and the other guys. Now maybe Og will get a chance to pass on his genes with the females of the rival tribe, but more likely they'll never really trust him and he'll never have enough status to get laid. He lives out a cave man lifespan, but his turncoat genes are unlikely to be passed on.

However, if Og sticks by you and Ug even when he sees how big and strong one of the enemies is, the three of you have a chance to prevail against the big stranger and his buddies. If you do, you've defended the territory and you live and you get nookie. Your loyalty to each other has survival value.........

......But what does loyalty mean to a female? Imagine for a moment that you are a primitive woman. You have recently been married to a nice young man from a friendly neighboring tribe. While the two of you are traveling back to your new husband's tribe, a tough guy from yet another tribe happens along. He looks you over, likes what he sees, and kills your husband without preamble. You're all primitive, so that's how it's done. He grabs you and takes you away on his horse. As you ride back to his camp, you weep for your dead husband.

But once you get to your new man's camp, you have a choice. You could be loyal to your dead husband and reject this new man. Most likely he'll rape you if you resist, but after that if he's not pleased with you he might kill you, or he might just not make your offspring his heirs, minimizing their chances of reproductive success. Or you could dry your tears, make the best of a bad job, and set about making your new man happy with you so that he will make the son you will give him his heir. (Heirs get more nookie.).............

[etc.]

sourcenote: written by a Lesbian Jewess