Thanks for the link to the dissertation. The same author, Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen, also wrote "Sexuality, Prostitution, and Rape: Soviet Women and German Soldiers during World War II".
Apparently, the Wehrmacht recorded some 4 million "sexual intercourse" between German troops and local women in the East, despite orders to the contrary. According to Gertjejanssen, there may have been a few genuine love affairs but the bulk were rapes or forced prostitution. Of course, to someone who believes that a woman who has a choice between working in a bordello (or as a private prostitute) and starving is doing so of her own free will, I suppose it wouldn't count as actual rape, to each his own...
The question of bordellos is also interesting. That the Wehrmacht ran them is well-known. The motivations are less so. The first concern was sanitary: "everyone knew" that those disgusting foreign women were all luscious and therefore clapped out. Bordellos allowed proper sanitation i.e. hygiene and medical monitoring. The Germans were institutionally terrified of disease.
The second concern was avoiding to create offsprings of mixed racial heritage.
The third concern was disciplinary: bordellos both allowed the authorities to retain control, and prevented locals from observing that here was young Hans in love with a pretty local girl, and didn't he look just like any other youngster? Fraternization was to be avoided.
That's why the Wehrmacht and SS established hundreds of army bordellos using coerced civilian women whereas in western countries e.g. in France they didn't run the bordellos directly, just provided conditions for them to operate under and reserved their use to their own troops. So in western occupied countries, the Wehrmacht was not officially aware of whatever consequences might follow for the women involved. Besides bordellos, there was authorized rape e.g. in the East, the Wehrmacht used to brand the bodies of captured partisan women - and other women as well - with the words "Whore for Hitler's troops" and to use them accordingly.
From another forum, I haven't verified the information myself but have found equivalent accounts elsewhere:
"According to the records of 12th Infantry division, in January 1942 alone 219 women were taken from the villages in the divisional area for confinement in a divisional brothel. 20 women were aged over 80 years of age and "died in transit", 195 women aged from 13 to 72 were repeatedly raped at the brothel. 4 women, all of whom were heavily pregnant, were confined in the local hospital until their children were born, whereupon the babies were killed by phenol injection in front of their mothers and the women sent to the brothel. This incident, one of hundreds like it, was documented by the British War Crimes Group in 1946 and case files sent to the Allied Control Commission for prosecution in 1948. These files passed to the FRG war crimes unit in 1949 and the cases were all discontinued.
Again according to BA records, between 1 December 1941 and 1 January 1942 18th Pz division burnt 48 villages in their divisional defensive zone, murdering 3215 men and boys and forcing 4015 women and children under 12 to live without food or shelter in temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius below freezing. 813 women were "temporarily attached to units", that being a usual euphemism for rape.
Uniquely in WW2, the Wehrmacht and SS institutionalised rape by setting up "brothels" in labour and concentration camps for which official travel warrants were issued - in other words they were an official holiday destination for off-duty soldiers. All this is fully documented.
On 9 June 1942, the village of Lidice was destroyed by the Germans in brutal and arbitrary reprisal for the killing of Heydrich. There was no connection whatsoever between the village and the killing of Heydrich. 172 men were killed on the spot, along with 82 women. The remaining 195 women were sent to a Ravensbruck concentration camp where they were placed in the Waffen SS brothel. After a month of multiple rape and torture, 42 women had died. Of the remainder, 7 went to the gas chamber and 3 vanished without trace, probably killed and their deaths unrecorded. 4 heavily pregnant women from the village were held in the camp hospital until after the birth, whereupon their babies were killed before their eyes, and then sent to Treblinka for gassing. 90 children of Lidice were separated from their parents and sent to the SS paedophile brothel at Gneisenau, from which none emerged alive. Another 42 very young children were taken to a German hospital in Prague and measured by Nazi racial specialists to see if they could be regarded as Aryan. 22 were accepted as Aryan and sent to Germany for forcible adoption. The other 20, all under 6, went to Treblinka where, in a pitiful ceremony, they were shepherded together into the gas chamber while one of the SS guards sang romantic lullabies. Posters vividly recording the fate of all the people of Lidice were displayed across Bohemia and Moravia, and a Nazi national newspaper boasted of the action in a headline article of 11 June 1942. "
For other references, see Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg 1946; testimony of Jan. 31, 1946, Vol. 6:404ff; Vol. 7:456f. Also Hilberg 1961:126ff; Brownmiller 1978:55ff.
About the discipline and trials, the following is extracted from the Nuremberg trials at (bold type is mine):
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tg ... 6-10.shtml
Q. Since numerous documents dealing with crimes committed allegedly by members of the Waffen SS were submitted to the last witness, it is necessary for me to ask you this: Did the Waffen SS commit crimes against the civilian population in the occupied territories and. at the front, and were these crimes committed systematically and in violation of international agreements, in violation of the penal law existing in the countries concerned, and in violation of the general principles of penal law of all civilised nations?
A. No, there can be no question of that. It is clear that on the part of the Waffen SS, violations of International Law took place in individual cases, just as they took place on the other side also. But all these are individual occurrences and not systematic. All these individual acts were prosecuted under the legal system of the SS and the police in the most severe manner. In the head office "SS Courts" there existed a department which guaranteed and carried out an overall supervision of the entire legal system. Having knowledge of this department I can testify in this courtroom that in such individual cases the courts in every theatre of war and during the entire duration of the war passed sentences for murder, looting, manslaughter, assault and rape, ill-treatment and also for killing prisoners of war, and in trying such cases, the race or nationality of the person concerned had no influence whatever.
All these were individual and not systematic acts, and this is confirmed by the criminality statistics of the head office "SS Courts." The absolutely strict administration of the law kept criminality below the normal level: it varied between 0.8 per cent. at the beginning and 3 per cent. at the end of the war.
Q. But by order of Hitler, dated 13th May, 1941, a document which was submitted here, the prosecution of such crimes was prohibited, was it not? Is that not a contradiction of your testimony regarding the prosecution of such cases?
A. No, it is not a contradiction, because
that order of Hitler, though declaring the prosecution of such cases not compulsory, nevertheless left the decision of whether or not the case should be tried to the discretion of the appointing authority.