At the height of the Korean War, the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) sent an international study commission to investigate the effects of the UN military occupation in North Korea. Twenty-one women from seventeen countries as far-flung as East and West Germany, China, Canada and Algeria put their names to a report accusing the US military of war crimes and ‘atrocities’ against Korean civilians, especially women and children. Established in Paris in 1945, the WIDF was originally a heterogeneous coalition of anti-fascist and progressive women that became increasingly Stalinised during the early Cold War. Its report on Korea was translated into more than twenty languages and submitted to the United Nations.Footnote 1 US State Department officials were so concerned about the effects of ‘communist propaganda’ on impressionable female audiences that they encouraged a group of American women's organisations affiliated with the Women United for United Nations group to issue a counter-statement denouncing the Soviet peace offensive on Memorial Day 1951.Footnote 2 As a result of the Korea campaign, the WIDF was stripped of its consultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council in 1954 and was not readmitted until 1967.
In this article, I explore the WIDF journey to North Korea as a case study illuminating an important but neglected chapter in the history of feminist internationalism after 1945. Histories of women's international organisations have largely neglected the Women's International Democratic Federation and its national affiliates, the majority of which were mass associations for women linked to ruling communist parties in Eastern Europe and the Third World. This is partly due to the assumption – itself rooted in Cold War politics – that WIDF rhetoric about ‘women's rights’ was simply communist propaganda.Footnote 3 But the forgotten story of the WIDF mission to Korea also highlights the relative marginalisation of communist internationalism in the recent wave of scholarship on internationalism and international organisations. International non-governmental organisations such as the WIDF, along with other Soviet-sponsored movements such as the World Peace Council or the World Congress of Youth, have received far less attention than Western philanthropic, charitable or advocacy groups. By contrast, this article contributes to an emerging body of scholarship that investigates the history of Soviet and communist internationalism as a set of policies, practices and lived experiences that shaped international politics during the Cold War – including the post-war legal order of human rights and humanitarianism – as well as the lives of millions of citizens in the socialist countries and the Third World.Footnote 4
The broader context for understanding the WIDF journey to Korea, therefore, is the politicisation of ‘universal’ human rights, humanitarian aid and development after 1945. Following the Cold War division between East and West and the wars of decolonisation, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann writes, ‘liberal-democratic, socialist and postcolonial human rights norms competed in the international arena, and yet each claimed for itself moral universalism’.Footnote 5 The ‘Third World’ emerged as a site of contestation in which the socialist countries – as well as the West – sought to gain external recognition as well as legitimacy at home by extending their influence through humanitarian aid, technical assistance and propaganda. As Young-Sun Hong has argued in a path-breaking study of humanitarianism in East and West Germany during the Cold War, the Korean War was thus a ‘proving ground for a system of post-war global governance’ nominally led by the United Nations but in reality shaped by the United States, whose influence at the United Nations was magnified following the Soviet boycott of 1949.Footnote 6 International law was invoked in the Korea report through appeals for the prosecution of American troops for war crimes according to the 1943 Moscow Declaration – the basis for post-war trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg – and claims about brutal acts of sexual violence, rape and torture of Korean women and children, which were deployed to support the WIDF appeal for a peaceful settlement of the conflict and self-determination for the Korean people.
This article explores the WIDF Korea mission as a particularly rich case study for exploring how the shifting relationship between communist internationalism, human rights and feminism played out in the Third World during the early Cold War. The first section explores the history of the WIDF between 1945 and the early 1950s, while the second analyses the Korea campaign itself, focusing on the composition of the international study commission and its engagement with international law, above all the concepts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The third and final section explores the fallout of the Korea campaign in Cold War Germany through a study of the trial of the West German delegate, Lilly Wächter, a middle-aged housewife who was prosecuted by the US Court of the Allied High Commission after returning to the Federal Republic. Sparking protests and solidarity campaigns in East and West Germany, this trial exemplified conflicting approaches to international law in the occupied zones – on the one hand the determination of the Allied powers to protect the democratic rights of West Germans against communism, and on the other, the attempts of left-wing radical lawyers to use ‘political trials’ as an instrument of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism. A striking element of the trial was the attention lavished by the prosecution on the horrific images of sexual violence, torture and rape used by Wächter in her speeches about Korea. Overall, this article sets out to ask if the WIDF appropriation of maternalist language and images of gendered violence can be located in a longer tradition of feminist internationalism to which left-wing women's movements in the Second and Third Worlds also made a significant contribution.
Communist Internationalism to Human Rights: The WIDF after 1945
After the Second World War, the Women's International Democratic Federation emerged as a serious rival to long-established women's organisations such as the International Council of Women, which had existed since the late nineteenth century.Footnote 7 Founded in November 1945 at a congress in Paris organised by the Union of French Women (Union des Femmes Françaises; UFF), the mass women's organisation created by the French Communist Party a year earlier, the WIDF was initially a heterogeneous organisation that attracted interest from a wide range of anti-fascist and progressive women's organisations.Footnote 8 Its statutes called for a common struggle against fascism, for the rights of women and children and world peace.Footnote 9 A second WIDF Congress was held in Budapest in December 1948, followed by further congresses in Copenhagen (1953), Vienna (1958) and Moscow (1963). In 1947, the WIDF was granted Consultative Status B at the United Nations Economic and Social Committee, as a result of which the organisation gained access to UN committees such as the Commission on the Status of Women. Bureaucratic structures were also set up to coordinate the work of the Federation, including a Council, Executive Committee and a Secretariat, which handled organisational matters and propaganda.Footnote 10 By 1951, the WIDF was claiming to speak in the name of 91 million women around the world.Footnote 11
With the onset of the Cold War, the WIDF became closely associated with the Soviet-supported peace campaigns launched after the Soviet leadership abandoned Great Power collaboration with the wartime alliance in 1947. In Paris the WIDF shared offices with the International Liaison Committee of Intellectuals for Peace, and many WIDF women also held positions in organisations such as the World Peace Council. The peace offensive drew massive support within the USSR from a population recovering from the enormous losses of the war against Germany; abroad, the Soviet Union cast itself as the moral patron and protector of oppressed peoples in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe.Footnote 12 The struggle of the socialist world against the Atlantic Pact was boosted by the first Soviet atomic bomb test and the creation of a communist regime in China. The Soviet struggle for peace was not based on pacifist ideals about the absence of war; this was, instead, a muscular vision of peace that legitimated the use of force in order to secure social justice and self-determination, above all in campaigns for national liberation.
With the creation of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia during the late 1940s, the centre of gravity of the WIDF shifted towards the East. In 1949 a damning report by the US House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) dismissed the WIDF as a Soviet front organisation, forcing the US affiliate of the WIDF to close down. But a recent wave of scholarship seeking to recover the history of the WIDF from Cold War politics has argued that the Federation was not, however, simply dominated by the (mostly male) leadership of national communist parties. Francisca de Haan, the leading scholar of the WIDF, has reinterpreted the Federation as a ‘progressive, left-feminist, international umbrella organization, with an emphasis on peace, women's rights, anti-colonialism and anti-racism’.Footnote 13 Research into the social history of WIDF member organisations in Yugoslavia or Bulgaria has led Kristen Ghodsee, Chiara Bonfiglioli and others to argue that mass women's organisations in socialist Eastern Europe pursued a feminist agenda within the structures of the socialist state.Footnote 14 Such arguments are not uncontroversial, and scholars such as Nanette Funk have argued that national women's organisations in the Eastern Bloc remained tightly circumscribed by political pressure from ruling communist parties.Footnote 15
Although Moscow and East Berlin – the location of the WIDF Secretariat from early 1951 – undoubtedly exercised a growing influence over the Federation, it is crucial to remember that the WIDF emerged from local circumstances at the grass roots of the communist and wider labour, radical and anticolonial movements after 1945. This was also true of other international non-governmental organisations that became known as communist ‘front’ organisations during the Cold War, such as the International Federation of Democratic Lawyers, the World Peace Council and the World Congress of Youth. The first generation of WIDF women belonged to a cohort of intellectuals, artists and activists who had been politicised by the rise of fascism and events such as the Spanish Civil War, as well as their participation in anticolonial and antiracist movements during the interwar years.Footnote 16 Many had subsequently experienced exile and incarceration during the Occupation. The reductive category of ‘communist women’ thus does not do justice to the individual experiences of WIDF activists, whose biographies and social, cultural and moral commitments transcended their participation in the Third International. The French communists who played a leading role in the creation of the WIDF, for example, were embedded in these older internationalist networks. Eugénie Cotton, a scientist, and Jeanette Vermeersch, the wife of PCF leader Maurice Thorez, became the first WIDF president and vice-president, while Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a photographer who grew up in the elite communist circles of interwar Paris and was then deported to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück during the Occupation, was elected Secretary-General in 1946.Footnote 17
The politicisation of ‘peace’ and ‘anti-fascism’ in the early Cold War further sharpened the divide between the WIDF and organisations for Catholic or Social Democratic women. This had ramifications for the wider networks of international women's organisations, particularly the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the earliest pacifist organisation for women, whose association with radical socialism exposed its members to suspicion as ‘communists’.Footnote 18 In the Eastern Bloc such campaigns resulted in the liquidation of ‘bourgeois’ women's associations, though the socialist regimes appropriated their rhetoric in favour of women's emancipation. After the February 1948 seizure of power by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, for example, communist women's committees appropriated the equality campaigns of the non-partisan national women's organisation re-established after 1945.Footnote 19 In Italy communist and Catholic women initially cooperated on campaigns for women's legal emancipation, but such cooperation was soon overshadowed by larger political conflicts.Footnote 20 Massive support for communist peace campaigns pushed Catholics to confront the ‘ideology of peace’, such as disarmament, nuclear fears, non-violence in international politics and collaboration between the blocs.Footnote 21 Thus, local struggles over women's rights and women's loyalties were part of the much broader reconfiguration of communist and Christian (especially Catholic) visions of human rights and international politics in Europe.Footnote 22
The experience of belonging to these anti-fascist, communist and anti-imperialist networks thus shaped the way in which WIDF women engaged with the post-war legal order of human rights and humanitarianism, especially until the death of Stalin in 1953. As Francine Hirsch has shown in her study of the Soviets at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945–1946, the ideology of anti-fascism shaped Soviet perceptions of the post-war order, including the use of international law.Footnote 23 It enabled the Soviet prosecutor Andrei Vyshinskii to make a connection between the Moscow Trials of the 1930s – at which Bukharin and others had been convicted on trumped-up charges as Trotskyites funded by the Hitler regime with the aim of establishing a fascist dictatorship in Russia – and the prosecution of Nazi war criminals under international law.Footnote 24 A similar trajectory can be traced in the biography of WIDF secretary-general, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, who was herself a survivor of the camps, and who acted as a witness at the trial of major Nazi war criminals at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in January 1946 about her experiences in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. Her testimony was also used in other trials, including that of Fritz Suhren, the former camp commander of Ravensbrück, which was held in the French-occupied town of Rastatt in February 1950.Footnote 25 At the same time, however, Vaillant-Couturier became an outspoken defendant of Stalinism as a member of the communist National Federation of Deportees, Internees, Resistors and Patriots (Fédération Nationale des Déportés, Internés, Résistants et Patriotes), and one of the French deportees who angrily rejected David Rousset's appeal to condemn the Soviet gulag in 1949, arguing that the Soviet penal system bore no resemblance to the Nazi system of concentration camps.Footnote 26
The influence of Stalinism also shaped WIDF support for anti-colonial movements in the Third World, as wars of decolonisation threatened British and French imperial power in Africa and Asia. Unlike long-established organisations such as the International Council of Women, the WIDF immediately adopted an outspoken anti-imperialist stance.Footnote 27 The communist internationalism espoused by the WIDF in the early Cold War was premised on the existence of nations linked by working-class solidarity across borders and on supporting revolutionary struggle if necessary to achieve national liberation from colonial or capitalist oppression. During its first years of operation, the WIDF sent fact-finding missions to Latin America and southeast Asia with the aim of researching women's lives and making contacts with local women's organisations.Footnote 28 In 1946, a WIDF fact-finding delegation travelled to Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Uruguay. In February and March 1948, another WIDF delegation travelled to India, Malaya and Burma with the aim of assessing women's living conditions under British colonial rule. According to Elisabeth Armstrong, this delegation also planned to visit Vietnam and Indonesia but its members were denied visas by the French and Dutch governments. With the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Asia emerged as a new focus for communist internationalism. These aspirations were put to the test by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950.
Reporting Atrocities: Gender, Violence and International Law in the Korean War
In the last two weeks of May 1951, the WIDF sent an international study commission to investigate crimes committed against civilians in the autumn and winter of 1950, during the military occupation of North Korea by the United Nations Command, under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur and the US Eighth Army. The Korean War was the first armed conflict carried out under the auspices of the United Nations and was initially described by Western and allied nations as a ‘police action’ aimed at containing perceived Soviet aggression.Footnote 29 After North Korean troops invaded the South in June 1950, the United States lobbied the UN Security Council for approval to form a multinational UN Command under US authority, which landed at Incheon on the Korean peninsula in July and invaded the North. In November 1950, Chinese troops surrounded UN forces and forced them to retreat. The United States failed to get an immediate consensus at the United Nations on a resolution condemning Chinese aggression, which threw doubt on the moral case for war as well as the usefulness of the United Nations as a vehicle for legitimating US foreign policy amongst the American public.Footnote 30 By the time the WIDF delegation arrived, the conflict had subsided to a bloody stalemate around the thirty-eighth parallel, but Korea was in the grip of a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions, flooded by millions of refugees displaced by the destruction of their homes and livelihoods.
The mission was the result of an appeal to the WIDF from the North Korean Women's League after the outbreak of the war. Internal correspondence suggests that the WIDF Council proposed sending a mission to Korea at a meeting in Berlin in February 1951.Footnote 31 The WIDF secretariat had relocated to East Berlin in early 1951, having been forced to leave its original headquarters in Paris. Perhaps to a greater extent than in any other European state, the Korean War had a particular resonance in the two Germanys, exemplified in slogans such as ‘Korea is a Warning!’ and ‘Germany No Second Korea!’. In West Germany the war was used to justify rearmament, while in the East the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; SED) elite saw it as an opportunity to stabilise the regime and build support for German unification by insisting on Western aggression and manipulating widespread popular fears among the East German population that a divided Germany could indeed become a European Korea. As Young-sun Hong has shown, the WIDF campaign was only one of numerous expressions of solidarity with North Korea among citizens of East Germany and other socialist countries. The East German Korea Aid Committee, established in September 1950, collected millions of marks, and also sponsored documentary films, slide shows and exhibitions about the war.Footnote 32 WIDF contacts with North Korean women were thus partly influenced by the foreign policy of their respective states, but also by perceptions of a shared experience of war, the horrors of aerial bombardment and the mass mobilisation of societies in the service of building socialism.
The international commission that travelled to Korea was described by the WIDF as being ‘composed of delegates from every continent: Africa, America, Asia and Europe, women of all worldviews and beliefs’.Footnote 33 Its members were part of a cohort of left-wing intellectuals, artists and activists who received their political education in the interwar years. All had a background in socialist or communist politics, peace activism, resistance work during the Occupation or anti-colonial activism; their biographies demonstrated their dual commitments to national liberation and communist internationalism. Over half were from Europe; other delegates came from Canada, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Argentina, Tunisia and Algeria. The leader of the mission was Nora Rodd, a communist from Canada; the secretary was Trees (Teresa) Sunito Heyligers, a Dutch lawyer married to a leading activist in the Indonesian nationalist movement in the Netherlands. Other members included Eva Priester, a historian and member of the Austrian Communist Party who spent the war in exile in London, and Abassia Fodil, a political activist and labour organis er in Oran, who was one of the few Muslim members of the communist Union of Algerian Women (she was later assassinated in Oran by the French right-wing paramilitary Organisation of the Secret Army [Organisation de l'Armée Secrète; OAS]).Footnote 34
Although the WIDF delegation were part of a generation of communist intellectuals in Europe who turned to Asia in a spirit of escapism during the early Cold War, seeking an alternative projection screen for their vision of socialism, the meaning of the Korea mission was also conditioned by their personal experiences of political repression in Nazi Germany or colonial rule.Footnote 35 The East German delegate, Hilde Cahn-Loner, had been imprisoned in Ravensbrück, as had WIDF secretary-general, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier. Lilly Wächter, the West German representative, had lost many family members in the camps. The appeal of Asia may have been further intensified for those WIDF women who found their pre-war internationalist biographies had become a political liability during Stalinism, particularly former émigrés to the West who faced persecution or discrimination on fabricated charges of ‘cosmopolitanism,’ ‘Zionism’ or espionage after returning to East Germany or other socialist states. This was particularly the case for Hilde Cahn-Loner, listed as the representative of the German Democratic Republic, who was born in Berlin but had lost her German nationality in 1930 after marrying a Pole; during the 1930s she had served with her Polish husband in the Jewish brigades in Spain, but the Polish consulate in Spain removed her passport after the couple separated. Imprisoned with the Interbrigades in France, Cahn used the passport of a French woman from Alsace and continued to claim French identity while imprisoned in both Ravensbrück and a labour division in the Sudetengau. In March 1947, back in Berlin, Cahn-Loner became the secretary of the Berlin VVN, taking a strong position against Jewish survivors who wanted to establish a separate organisation for victims of the Nuremberg racial laws.Footnote 36
The WIDF delegation travelled only to regions held by Chinese and Korean People's Army (KPA) troops following the winter offensive against the United Nations Command. According to Monica Felton, the British delegate, the group flew to Shenyang in northern China and then travelled by train to Korea at night to avoid bomb attacks by US aircraft.Footnote 37 They visited Sinŭiju on the Chinese border before travelling to the capital, Pyongyang. Both cities had been heavily bombed. The German delegates Lilly Wächter and Hilde Cahn travelled north with the Chinese and Dutch women to the cities of Kaechˈŏn, Hŭichˈŏn, Kanggye and Manpˈo Kaechon, Huichon, Kanggye and Manpo on the Yalu River. Others headed west to the port city of Wonsan. As well as describing the devastation of North Korean cities as a result of aerial bombardment, the report referred to massacres allegedly carried out by American ground troops. Particularly significant is the report on the massacre of civilians at Sinch’ŏn, which had taken place between October and December 1950. The report claimed that some 24,000 people had been killed here by American troops, describing a mass execution of three hundred women and children in a shelter apparently still covered by ‘flecks of blood’. There was no mention of involvement of South Korean forces or anti-communist youth in North Korea in the report on the Sinch’ŏn Massacre, which subsequently became one of the most important memorial sites commemorating the war in North Korea.
The WIDF mission to North Korea drew on a longer tradition of women's peace activism, and especially the practice of using maternalist language to legitimate women's ‘independent’ role as observers in conflict and occupation zones. After the First World War, the radical pacifist Women's International League for Peace and Freedom had sent delegations to the French-occupied zones in Germany and most famously to Haiti, where an inter-racial WILPF team led by Emily Greene Balch had studied the effects of the US military occupation in 1926.Footnote 38 The carefully neutral and technical language of Balch's report on occupied Haiti was rather different from the militant tone of the WIDF publication, Korea: We Accuse. Thus, while the WIDF drew on the association between motherhood and peace, this rhetoric was inseparable from the language of fraternal solidarity between socialist nations. The report was addressed to ‘mothers and women in the United States, Great Britain, and other states that had sent troops to Korea’ in the name of the 91 million women that the WIDF claimed to represent. Calling for the immediate cessation of fighting and negotiations for a peace treaty, the report also appealed for support for WIDF solidarity campaigns to assist Korean women and children. On 21 June 1951 the WIDF Executive Committee wrote to the UN Secretary General, calling for an immediate cessation of bombardments of Korean towns and villages, withdrawal of troops, and for ‘those who are responsible for the crimes against the Korean People, and in particular Generals MacArthur and Ridgeway, be tried as ‘war criminals’ according to the definition of the Allied Declaration of 1943.Footnote 39
Visually, the report drew a clear distinction between the foreign study commission and the Korean women. Photographs of members of the commission inspecting re-opened graves showed the WIDF delegation wearing trousers, military jackets and peaked caps, while most of the Korean women were pictured in hanbok, the traditional Korean dress, often posed as mothers, or with clasped hands and expressions of grief. This also reflected the gendered imagery of the North Korean revolution itself, which as Suzy Kim writes, sought to reconfigure the traditional roles of wife and mother as ‘new’.Footnote 40 In the light of recent scholarship on the social history of the North Korean revolution, which emphasises that the creation of the communist state in North Korea also entailed a fundamental transformation of the heterogeneous world of early Korean socialists and communists, these carefully constructed images of ‘traditional’ Korean women point to the replacement of interwar ideas about women's rights and sexual emancipation with a far more conservative gender regime in the early Cold War.Footnote 41
Violence against women and children, narrated in graphic and intentionally shocking detail, was a central theme of the report. Female witnesses were also cited as proof of the atrocities. In a village near Pyongyang, for example, the report claimed that thirty-seven corpses were visible in a mass grave, including ‘the secretary of the local women's organisation, who had been carted around the neighbourhood naked and then killed by a red-hot iron that was inserted into her vagina. Her young son was buried alive’.Footnote 42 Graphic descriptions of rape and torture of women and children were of course nothing new in wartime propaganda, but, in this particular context, the intention was to evoke memories of occupation and war amongst female audiences in Europe and Asia (the report was translated into Korean and Chinese as well as English, German, Russian and Spanish). This reflected policy in East Germany, where the SED leadership deliberately attempted to link atrocities in Korea with German memories of the Second World War, as stated in a Central Committee directive to ‘highlight the cruelties [Grausamkeiten] inflicted on women and children’ during the Korea campaign.Footnote 43
Although international humanitarian law had condemned wartime rape since the early twentieth century, as Elizabeth Heineman reminds us, with some exceptions at the Allied war crimes trials following the Second World War, it was only in the 1990s that international organisations, from courts to the United Nations, took action against conflict-based sexual violence as a violation of human rights and a crime of war.Footnote 44 Memories of sexual violence during the Second World War in Europe and Asia and as a consequence of the liberation, notably the mass rapes of German women by the Red Army, have been a familiar part of these post-Cold War debates about rape as a crime against humanity.Footnote 45 However, throughout the Cold War, the WIDF pursued an alternative strategy of publicising violence against women as a propaganda tool in the struggle for national liberation and working-class revolution. Sexual equality became a central goal for the newly established revolutionary regimes in Asia, and the WIDF actively fostered links between women's organisations across the communist world.Footnote 46
In this sense, the WIDF report on Korea points to an alternative interpretation of communist women's engagement with international law during the early Cold War, which differs from the more familiar narratives of containment culture that followed the well-known accusations of ‘brain-washing’ of American troops in Chinese prisoner of war camps.Footnote 47 Similar images of sexual violence and torture reappeared in WIDF publications and petitions connected to other national liberation conflicts during the 1950s. For instance, Meredith Terretta has suggested that WIDF support inspired women in the anti-colonial, nationalist Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (Union des populations du Cameroon; UPC) to establish a Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women (UDEFEC) in the early 1950s, linking Cameroonian women with an expanding global struggle against imperialism. After the French banned the UPC and its associated organisations in 1955, the WIDF provided support to exiled Cameroonian women in Nigeria, China and Czechoslovakia. WIDF petitions to the UN Trusteeship Council during the violent French campaigns against the Cameroonian nationalist movement, for instance, accused the French of inflicting torture on female prisoners, as well as of raping the wives of political prisoners and resistance fighters (maquisards).Footnote 48 Similar rhetorical strategies were employed in WIDF campaigns against the war in Vietnam and in support of female political prisoners under the Pinochet regime in Chile during the 1970s.
Staging Anti-Fascism in the Courtroom: The Trial of Lilly Wächter
Images of sexual violence, rape and torture also played a central role in politicising official and popular responses to the Korea mission in the key Cold War battleground in Europe: occupied Germany. The final part of this article explores the controversial trial of Lilly Wächter, the West German delegate on the Korea mission, who was prosecuted by the US Court of the Allied High Commission after returning to the Federal Republic. The British delegate, Monica Felton, also suffered reprisals: she was removed from her position as a leading town planner in June 1951.Footnote 49 However, the trial of Lilly Wächter had particular resonance in the context of post-war Germany. After returning to Rastatt, a small town in Baden-Württemberg, Lilly Wächter gave public speeches about her experiences in Korea to women's organisations, peace groups and Soviet friendship societies. She was arrested after speaking in Heidelberg and Ludwigsburg in August 1951 on the grounds that her claims about American atrocities in Korea constituted a violation of Allied Control Council Law No. 14 ‘protecting the interests of the occupation in Germany’. In the trial and subsequent appeal, which took place in early 1952, the prosecution focused heavily on Wächter's use of violent sexual imagery in her speeches, including her claims that ‘women who did not submit to the Americans were raped by red-hot iron bars [or]. . . had their breasts cut off; an American soldier tore away a suckling infant from its mother's arms, threw it on the ground where other American soldiers trampled on it until the body was like porridge; the Americans crucified a young girl of 11 or 12 years of age; the American soldiers buried alive a chained woman’.Footnote 50
As a middle-aged woman who described herself as a housewife, a survivor of Nazi persecution, and a Social Democrat – rather than a Communist – Lilly Wächter was the ideal subject for solidarity campaigns in East Germany, which depicted her as a victim of imperialist aggression by the West. When her case went to the US Court of Appeals in 1952, Wächter was defended by two prominent left-wing attorneys associated with the International Federation of Democratic Lawyers, the British barrister Denis Nowell Pritt and the star East German attorney, Friedrich Karl Kaul. The trial of Lilly Wächter illustrates conflicting approaches to international law in East and West during the early Cold War, but her case also demonstrates how a biographical approach to WIDF activists helps to reinterpret the Federation as a network shaped by ideals of feminist internationalism. While the US occupation authorities saw the case as a means of protecting the human rights of West Germans from the threat of communism, the left-wing lawyers defending Wächter drew on the inter-war tradition of using political trials as a propaganda tool in the struggle against fascism.Footnote 51 At the same time, the fact that images of sexual violence against Korean women were perceived by both sides to be such powerful weapons of propaganda reiterates a familiar story about the gendered dynamics of struggles over national sovereignty in conflict and post-conflict zones.Footnote 52 Furthermore, the fragmentary sources that allow us to hear Wächter's own voice serve as a reminder that the political, emotional and moral attachments of individual activists – as well as the interests of states and parties – shaped the work of the WIDF.
The Wächter trial took place in the last years of the Allied occupation of Germany, a legal context described by the US Court of Appeals as a ‘twilight zone between Military Government occupation, pure and simple, and occupation by sufferance, we find ourselves charged with responsibilities far and beyond those of an occupier by force of arms alone’.Footnote 53 In its final opinion on the case the court admitted the difficulty of applying judicial precedents regarding the definition of ‘seditious utterances’ at a moment when the use of law by the Allied powers had ‘gradually shifted from measures designed to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from Germany, to measures designed to protect ourselves, including Germany, from the menace of the East’.Footnote 54 Fears about the effects of reports about the rape and torture of women and children in a climate of anti-communism were shaped by the perception of Allied military officials, humanitarian relief workers and national politicians that women were particularly vulnerable to the emotional appeal of communist peace campaigns.
After the communist-dominated Democratic Women's League of Germany (DFD) was established in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, with branch committees in the Western zones, the US and British military governments responded by setting up programmes to train German women for democratic citizenship. When the division of Germany was formalised after the creation of two German states, fears about the effect of communism and anti-communism on apparently impressionable German women only increased. In West Germany, the 1951 trial of the Catholic pacifist Klara Maria Fassbinder, who founded the West German Women's Peace Movement to protest against rearmament and atomic weapons, was symptomatic of this shift.Footnote 55 The Federal Ministry for Intra-German Relations (Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen), a new ministry in the Federal Republic established specifically to deal with relations between the two German states, swiftly created a special unit for Women's Affairs. Led by Maria Hampel, a refugee from East Germany, this unit financed a network of West German women's organisations with roots in the pre-war ‘bourgeois’ women's movement as a bulwark against the spread of communism in the Federal Republic.Footnote 56
Lilly Wächter was a middle-aged woman of Jewish descent, born in 1899 in Karlsruhe. Many of her family apparently died in the Terezín ghetto in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while she seems to have survived the war in hiding in Rastatt. Although we know relatively little about her life, Wächter's voice survives in fragmentary records such as an angry letter she sent to the Department for Reparations (Wiedergutmachung) in Freiburg after her application for compensation as a victim of racial persecution was rejected in 1946: ‘I have found out that you are a socialist, which struck me, because I was convinced that you were a Nazi, if only because of how you phrased the rejection. . .. The way that sentence was written hurt me. After all, we are supposed to be becoming democrats!’Footnote 57 As a Social Democrat who had joined the DFD (West) and already participated in a French-German exchange to promote friendship between the women of both nations, Wächter was viewed by the WIDF as an ideal type of German womanhood to represent such a peace campaign. Gerda Weber, then head of the DFD in the Federal Republic, remembered Wächter in her memoirs as ‘the solid, somewhat homely 51-year old wife of an accounting clerk, a member of the Social Democratic Party, from which she was later excluded on account of her work with the DFD; she was politically informed and interested, gave the impression of being a bit naïve, but appeared to have a good feeling for people. In other words, she was the delegate that we needed.’Footnote 58
The DFD archives contain a number of Wächter's private letters to her contacts in the DFD and WIFD headquarters in East Berlin during this period; not intended for publication, these handwritten letters can be read as evidence of Wächter's desire to express her moral and emotional engagement with the WIDF peace campaigns, with a strong element of self-sacrifice. Already in early August, Lilly Wächter described the police harassment that she faced, writing in a letter to Hilde Cahn: ‘if I kill myself, it won't change anything any more. Every day this stinking heat, 36 degrees in the shade, overcrowded trains, nerves stretched to breaking point and short nights. I can tell you that I arrived yesterday with massively swollen legs, like an elephant's. I wish I had your health, dear Hilde, then it would be easier for me. I can be grateful to the SPD [Social Democratic Party] for this whole mess; they were the ones who smeared me in the press as an SED agent.’Footnote 59 While awaiting her trial, Wächter wrote to the WIDF secretariat begging to know if the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations had already spoken about the Korea report, ‘and if so, what was the UN response? – I haven't heard about any protests for a long time.’Footnote 60 Explaining that the police had confiscated her notebook with the addresses of the other Korea delegates, Wächter asked for news of the other women: ‘otherwise I would have been in touch with Eva Priester to hear if she had been able to make her speeches without hindrance. Can I find this out from you?’Footnote 61
Rhetorical appeals to female solidarity were also apparent in a letter that Lilly Wächter wrote to the DFD chairwoman Elli Schmidt after the Stuttgart trial, thanking her for the telegrams of support and exclaiming: ‘right now I would like nothing better to sit with you all in the Haus der Frau, and to speak to you from my heart, which would really relieve me’.Footnote 62 The letter expressed ‘my deeply felt joy, inspired in these last days by the personal and warm words from hundreds of women and men. Truly, I have been able to feel that I do not stand alone, and this obliges me even more deeply, to do more to ensure that unity and peace are secured in our land!’ These letters expressed familiar sentiments of disappointment about the failure of anti-fascism, and an embattled sense of identification with the moral vision of the East at a moment when the Federal Republic was using legal measures to suppress communism in West Germany. The lawyer Marcel Frenkel, apparently a key figure lobbying East Berlin to provide legal assistance for Wächter, had already been suspended from his position at the Department for Restitution (Wiedergutmachung) in North-Rhine-Westphalia due to his association with the ‘communist’ peace movement.Footnote 63
Two prominent attorneys agreed to defend Lilly Wächter in the Court of Appeal in early 1952. One was Friedrich Karl Kaul, one of the few East German lawyers also accredited to work in the West, who later became known as the ‘star attorney’ of East Germany.Footnote 64 The other was Denis Nowell Pritt, a British barrister who was a member and later President of the International Federation of Democratic Lawyers, with a long history of involvement in what he later termed ‘political trials’.Footnote 65 In 1933 Pritt had presided over the International Legal Commission of Inquiry set up to stage a ‘mock’ Reichstag Fire trial in London, masterminded by the communist publicist Willi Münzenberg.Footnote 66 Pritt had travelled with his wife Molly to the Soviet Union during the 1930s and had been an apologist for the Moscow Trials, which he saw firsthand.Footnote 67 He was also active in interwar international communist organisations masterminded by Münzenberg, such as the League Against Imperialism. Only a few months after defending Wächter at the US military court in Frankfurt, Pritt travelled to Kenya to defend Jomo Kenyatta (who had also been a League against Imperialism member) and five others accused of complicity with Mau Mau against the British government in the remote northern town of Kapenguria.Footnote 68 Along with a team of African, Indian and West Indian lawyers, Pritt struggled unsuccessfully to defend Kenyatta in a trial staged to justify the imposition of Emergency rule in Kenya. Records in Pritt's private papers demonstrate that he viewed the case of Lilly Wächter as a ‘political trial’ on a par with that of Kenyatta or his defence of peace activists in the Federal Republic.Footnote 69
During the trial, the emotionally destabilising impact of the sexual violence that Wächter described in her public speeches was repeatedly emphasised by the prosecution. The first witness for the prosecution at the appeal trial was a recently liberated prisoner of war, who explained that he had attended the meeting in Heidelberg ‘out of curiosity because I was interested in the happenings in Korea. I returned from (Russian) war captivity merely in 1949.’ Asked whether he returned with ‘any injuries or damages to your health’ he replied, ‘Yes, but that has nothing to do with this trial. . .. I want to know why I should have returned from Russian captivity and be embittered, because then my bitterness against the Americans would be greater as they turned me over to the Russians on the 30 of May 1945 in Austria. DC: I will skip that point. Another question. . ..’Footnote 70 Another witness dwelt on Wächter's description of ‘the woman that was alleged to have been buried alive; about those people who had been 14 days in jail, and where subsequently this girl was alleged to have been crucified, who was about 11 or 12 years old; and then about another rough and bad example, where this woman who had been beaten, was alleged, that red-hot irons had been inserted in her vagina; about the other case, which was repeated again and again and which caused great reaction among the audience, namely, that women's breasts were cut off’.Footnote 71
A crucial part of the appeal, both in the courtroom and for the accompanying publicity, was the question of whether Lilly Wächter had ‘spoken the truth’. The authenticity of her testimony became central to the East German press campaign around her trial. Friedrich Kaul wrote a book about the case titled I Spoke the Truth.Footnote 72 A typical article asked ‘Who is the prosecutor and who is the accused in this trial? A simple housewife, who has spoken the truth about Korea. . ..’Footnote 73 By contrast, the US Court of Appeal claimed the ‘truth or falsity’ of Wächter's statements was irrelevant in comparison to the effect of her words on ‘the minds and emotions of those in the audience who were uneducated and subject to emotional disturbances.’ In other words, ‘the truth is not a defense, at common law, to a charge of seditious utterances’. As proof that Wächter's words ‘actually exhorted her listeners to hostility against the American soldiers in Germany’, the court cited a witness to her Ludwigsburg speech who claimed that ‘during Mrs. Wächter's recitation, a member of the audience shouted out, “yes, that is right, that is the way it is also done here in Ludwigsburg. They also molest women and girls.”’
The focus on the psychological effects of Wächter's speeches was rather undermined by one of the witnesses claiming that her audience had laughed at these wild claims, especially when Wächter suggested that a woman who had been chained up and buried alive then managed to free herself. Based on the testimony of an expert witness, a medical doctor and ‘student of mass psychology’, the court found that Waechter's failure to incite hostility was ‘rather a tribute to the intelligent portions of the audience. . .. For we have the testimony of those other witnesses who believed everything she said even though she appeared to be reading from a script which had been prepared for her’. Indeed, the court concluded that ‘the only reason the appellant failed, or to the extent that she failed, was due to her exaggeration as she read from her prepared script. A more artful presentation of less horrendous tales might have produced the intended results arousing the more intelligent people’.Footnote 74
In response, Pritt countered that sedition implied incitement to a specific act, and that the charge of ‘criminal libel’ seemed more appropriate – under which (according to British and American law) truth was a defence. Finally Pritt won the case, and Lilly Wächter was cleared. Both Wächter's defence lawyers had long experience with ‘political trials’, and this was clearly how they viewed their mission in this case. During the Weimar Republic, the Communist Party of Germany had invested heavily in legal aid – disbursed through Red Aid – to assist individuals accused of political crimes in the German courts. Ideologically committed lawyers saw the courtroom as a ‘revolutionary stage’, and their defence of victims of ‘political justice’ as a means of creating ‘meaning and identity that was intuitive, emotive, interactive and powerful’.Footnote 75 The legacy of this approach to the law was evident in Pritt's defence and persisted in legal battles over the democratic rights of citizens in the two Germanys throughout the Cold War. After the Communist Party was banned in the Federal Republic in 1956, Friedrich Kaul represented West German communists in court with a keen appreciation of the irony of defending their constitutional rights in a political system he despised’.Footnote 76 In later years Kaul was present at numerous high-profile international trials, such as that of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, and as civil counsel in the 1963–65 Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which he used as an opportunity to denounce the insufficient denazification of West Germany’.Footnote 77 Lilly Wächter, meanwhile, remained active in the West German DFD for a few years and then apparently disappeared from politics. In her most recent incarnation, she is remembered in an exhibition at the renovated Jewish museum in Rastatt as a Jew and a peace activist.Footnote 78
Conclusion
By the end of the war in July 1953, the Korean peninsula lay in ruins. Yet North Korea swiftly became the site of the most ambitious multilateral development project ever undertaken by the socialist countries during the Cold War, involving cooperation between China, the Soviet Union and East European states such as the German Democratic Republic on a scale that would never be repeated after the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s.Footnote 79 International development, humanitarian relief and technical assistance programmes in North Korea and Vietnam represented one of the many ways in which socialist internationalism became a part of everyday life in the socialist bloc throughout the 1950s and 1960s, along with international congresses for students, women or workers, sporting events such as the annual cyclists' Peace Race, student exchanges and scholarships for African, Asian and Latin American students at Soviet and East European universities or bilateral agreements on contract labour between socialist countries in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. By the 1960s the socialist bloc was intimately linked by the circulation of ideas, people and goods to the postcolonial world, as well as to left-wing movements in Western Europe and in the United States, even though ethnic, racial and gendered hierarchies between the nations of the socialist world were never entirely eradicated in practice.Footnote 80
For the WIDF, however, the Korea campaign marked a decisive break between the heterogeneous organisation established in 1945 and the ideological conformity imposed on members during the 1950s. Stripped of consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Committee in 1954, and operating in a climate of international anti-communism, the WIDF secretariat sought new ways of continuing its campaigns for peace and women's rights.Footnote 81 Deploying maternalist rhetoric and encouraging cooperation with female pacifists such as the West German Klara Maria Fassbinder or the British a World Congress of Mothers in Lausanne in 1955, which gave rise to a Permanent International Committee of Mothers. However, internal splits in the WIDF leadership emerged in the aftermath of 1956, when the Berlin secretariat focused entirely on neo-colonialist aggression in Egypt after the Suez crisis and refused to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary. This was a position that was strongly rejected by Western WIDF women such as the British socialist Dora Russell and the Swedish social democrat Andrea Andreen.Footnote 82 Nonetheless, WIDF women continued to work in a grey zone of internationalist activity between the mass women's organisations of the socialist bloc and the Third World, small left-wing and pacifist women's organisations in the West and the emerging social movements for peace and disarmament such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in Britain or West Germany.
Seen in a longer historical perspective, the WIDF mission to Korea foregrounds the neglected role of communist women in the social history of women's engagement with international law during the twentieth century. Although WIDF women would not have defined themselves as feminists – seeing this term as a bourgeois term that obscured the capitalist oppression of women – the rhetoric of solidarity between women and mothers played an important mobilising function in WIDF campaigns for world peace and national liberation throughout the Cold War. In the late 1960s the federation was active in global campaigns against the war in Vietnam, as well as helping to publicise the torture of female political prisoners in Chile under Pinochet.Footnote 83
The history of the WIDF thus forms a bridge between Old and New Left forms of radical politics, which re-emerged during the 1960s in the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the New Left, the anti-nuclear movements and struggles for gay and lesbian liberation. The international people's or citizens' tribunals of this period, such as the International War Crimes Tribunal organised by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to investigate American crimes in Vietnam, or the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women held in Brussels in 1976, could be seen to draw on the longer tradition of staging ‘political trials’ that was examined in the case of Lilly Wächter.Footnote 84 Women's engagement with international communism around questions of peace, human rights and humanitarianism in the ‘internationalist moment’ of the late 1940s, which emerged from the mission of national reconstruction in Europe and Asia after the Second World War, would thus contribute to a far-reaching critique of the norms and practices of Western, liberal internationalism in the later Cold War.
