Posted: Mon 11 Jul 2005 17:26 Post subject: Problems Mixies Have/Had, Except they're GERMAN AND AMERICN
Interesting to note that, though here both are now part of the dominant caste like they are the same thing, then and there, children were shunned on both sides of the ocean for being mixies. Also, the "non fraternization" act was analogous to the laws against intermarriage in the U.S.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Occupation Children
Sleeping With the Enemy
As US troops crossed into Germany, General Eisenhower gave his men strict orders to stay away from the locals. But thousands struck up relations with German women, and many of them fathered children they never knew.
The official reason for the fraternization ban introduced in September 1944 was to punish German civilians, while maintaining the authority of the occupying forces and protecting them from the insidious force of Nazi propaganda.
In fact, it served another, more delicate purpose. After landing in Italy in 1943, the Allied armies had been badly weakened by the rapid spread of venereal disease brought about by the soldiers' contact with prostitutes.
American GIs were warned against encounters with local women. But it was to no avail -- in the chaos of the postwar years, GIs and German girls both needed each other.
Corned beef and cigarettes
In 1945, Christa Ronke was 16 years old and working at an officers' mess hall in southwestern Berlin. "The GIs had an eye for the girls!" she said. "At first they saw us all as Nazis, but they soon relaxed. And they seemed so well-off, so good-looking and casual -- and they stood for the whole American way of life. They were hard to resist!"
After six years of a war which had left their own men either dead or physically and psychologically traumatized, the US servicemen were an irresistible draw for Germany's lonely, starving women.
The men could get them corned beef and cigarettes -- and show them a good time. "They had chocolate and silk stockings," said Ronke. "There were no German men left, but then suddenly there were all these young Americans to go out dancing with. They weren't like the Russians, who were so scrawny and poor -- compared, to them, even we Germans had a lot. It was the girls with American boyfriends who were envied."
sleepers and traitors
"But the men coming back from the war hated it," explained Ronke. To them, the German women were fraternizing with the enemy -- exchanging sex for material gain. Punishments could be harsh -- some women were publicly denounced as sleepers and traitors, others had their heads shaved, while some were even set on fire. But it was a fact of life in the immediate aftermath of the war. "American soldiers together with German women was a common sight," said Ronke. "They were crazy times."
Three out of four GIs had sexual encounters overseas, and by late 1945, one in five German babies was born out of wedlock. By 1955, up to 67,700 illegitimate children had been fathered by US soldiers -- some 5,000 of whom were Afro-American.
The "occupation children" were a thorn in the side of Adenauer's Germany -- especially the high percentage of mixed-race children, many of whom were sent to the US for adoption in the ensuing years. Not least, they were a huge financial burden on the country. US soldiers were exempt from having to pay child support unless they acknowledged paternity, and taxpayers had to bear the costs of the nation's illegitimate children of GI fathers.
Life was hard both for both the children and their abandoned mothers. Their lovers had made promises -- marriage, a new life in the States -- that were cruelly broken. Many belatedly found out their boyfriends had wives back home. Ostracized by society, these women and their children became the pariahs of postwar Germany.
A happy end for some
Some were luckier. After US Congress lifted the fraternization ban and passed the War Brides Act in December 1945, GIs were free to marry their German sweethearts. And they did, in their droves.
In 1949, some 13,000 marriages between German women and US servicemen took place. Between 1946 and 1949, approximately 20,000 German women immigrated to the States. The first batch of European war brides set sail for America aboard the "Argentina," a steamship specially fitted out with nurseries. It marked the start of the largest single influx of mothers and infants into the US in two centuries.
But domestic bliss it wasn't. Maria M. was 16 when she met her GI husband in Munich. After a long courtship, she immigrated to the US in 1948, But she never felt at home in Ohio. Her husband had no family, and she was left to fend for herself while he went to work everyday. The locals were far from welcoming. “They considered me the devil, I was known as the 'Nazi girl'," she said. "I was isolated, nobody talked to me. It was like solitary confinement."
Gina R., felt equally lonely in the States. When she left Germany in 1950, she couldn’t believe how little her new American family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, talked to one another. "They just sat in front of the television all the time!" she said. "I was never happy in the States because I felt so homesick, so after two years my husband and I moved back here."
The allies' human legacy
Perhaps the real victims were the thousands of illegitimate children born in those years. To this day, there exists no binding legal agreement between the US and Germany concerning the occupation children, even though American fathers theoretically owe the German mothers of their children child support worth millions.
Franz Anthoefer, born in 1951, grew up in an orphanage.
"In Germany in the 1950s, if you were an unwed mother, the state usually took custody of your child," he explained. His father, an American stationed in Rastadt, had wanted to marry his mother. "But as soon as a serviceman got a woman pregnant, he would be transferred, and the army would refuse to pass on any information," he said. "If you kept asking, they would maintain they no longer had any records."
As a teenager, Anthoefer was determined to locate his father. "The American authorities deliberately gave me misleading information," he said. "They just gave me the runaround." In 1971, he got a visa to visit the US and finally tracked him down. But it was too late. He discovered his father, the mayor of a small town in West Virginia, had died just weeks previously.
After collecting enough evidence to convince the German courts this man was indeed his father, Germany recognized the paternity claim, although the US didn't. Twenty years later, Anthoefer went to court and got permission to have his father's body exhumed for DNA testing. He had to wait three years for the result, and in the meantime, he was arrested as an illegal immigrant and deported. Today, he is still barred entry to the States, which means he cannot pursue his quest to prove his parentage.
"If I can prove I am my father's son, then I am an American citizen," he said. "It's the only connection I have to my father -- the inheritance of his nationality. I belong to nowhere, and all I want is American citizenship. That's all I want."
Karl-Heinz Kamann feels the same. Born in 1945, he grew up with his mother and her husband, after his GI father was transferred to Japan. He never understood why the neighborhood children jeered at him for being a "Yank" -- or why even his own family made him feel guilty, all the while "enjoying the food and presents they received from the American soldier" who'd stayed in touch with his mother.
Even so, he never met his father, and it was only after a recent cancer scare that he began thinking about the circumstances of his birth. "I just want to know what my roots are," he said.
GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany by Maria Hohn
To the postwar German churches, the great moral issue was not what the German government and military had done to millions of innocent people in World War II; the "moral" issue was the sexual freedom enjoyed by German women who chose to sleep with American soldiers.
German elites wanted a good relationship with the United States, so plans were dropped to label every German woman who slept with an American a "prostitute." Besides, too many respectable German families acquired American sons-in-law. Germans couldn't help but notice that "Negro" soldiers were despised by their fellow Americans, so women who slept with "black" Americans were the only ones labeled prostitutes.
Interesting fact: One German judge released a mulatto Fräulein who was accused of prostitution for sleeping with a "black" American soldier. He reasoned that, since she wasn't good enough to marry a white man, she was only engaged in some innocent "husband hunting."
'
FAQ
Search
Register
Log in
