ABSTRACT
It is heart-rending, but not surprising, to hear of mass rapes committed in Bosnian villages recently overrun by Serbian fighters. Sexual sadism arises with astonishing rapidity in ground warfare, when the penis becomes justified as a weapon in a logistical reality of unarmed noncombatants, encircled and trapped. Rape of a doubly dehumanized object—as woman, as enemy—carries its own terrible logic. During World War II, when the Germans were on the march again, atrocious rapes were committed on the bodies of Russian and Jewish women in the occupied villages and cities while still more women were dragged off to forcible brothels, or to death. When the tide reversed and the Soviet Army began advancing into German territory on the road to Berlin, it was the turn of German women to experience the use of their bodies as an extracurricular battlefield.
