Allies raped 1 Million Germans

[Melech 9,900]

A German historian estimates in a new book that French, British and American soldiers raped 860,000 Germans at and after the end of the Second World War, including 190,000 s-xual assaults by American soldiers.

Professor Miriam Gebhardt's book When the Soldiers Came, published this week, includes interviews with victims, stories of the children of rape and research that she conducted over the course of a year and a half into birth records in Allied-occupied West Germany and West Berlin.

“Now, 70 years after the war, it's long past the time when one could be suspected of dealing with German victimhood,†Gebhardt, an author and lecturer at the University of Konstanz, told The Local.

“There is no longer the question that one might want to relativize the responsibility of the Germans for the Second World War and the Holocaust.â€

Gebhardt said she arrived at that number of s-xual assaults by estimating that of the so-called ‘war-children’ born to unmarried German women by the 1950s, five percent were products of rape.

She also estimates that for each birth, there were 100 rapes, including of men and boys.

Gebhardt’s numbers are higher than previous estimates. A well-received 2003 book by American professor of criminology J. Robert Lilly, Taken by Force, estimated that American soldiers committed around 11,000 rapes in Germany.

While an article published by Der Spiegel on Monday raised questions about whether Gebhardt’s figures accurately reflected the incidence of s-xual assault in post-war Germany, Lilly told The Local that her estimates were certainly reasonable.

“Gebhardt’s numbers are plausible, but her work is not a definitive account,†said Lilly in an interview with The Local, explaining that no exact number could ever be known because of a lack of records.

“It is confirmation of research that I have done and it adds to this ongoing discussion of what happens in the underbelly of war - What goes on that we haven’t talked about.â€

Much of the discussion of s-xual assaults against Germans has focused on the Soviet troops in east Germany, who are estimated to have committed between one to two million rapes during the time.

Gebhardt said she wanted to challenge the assumption that it was only the Red Army that was responsible for such acts.

“Goebbels warned that the Red Army would rampage through Germany, would rape German women and commit atrocities against civilians... People hoped that they would be occupied by Western troops and not the Soviets,†she said.

“But the course of events was the same. Both sides plundered valuables and mementoes, and soldiers often committed gang rapes against women.â€

Gebhardt’s research also included records from Bavarian priests recording the Allied advance in 1945, including one description that reads “the saddest event during the advance were three rapes, one on a married woman, one on a single woman and one on a spotless girl of 16-and-a-half. They were committed by heavily drunken Americans."

The book paints a much darker picture than what is often seen in cinema and literature of the Allied troops who liberated Germans from the Nazi regime and thus could take time for people to fully absorb, Lilly said.

“It will be resisted to some extent. There are American scholars who will not like it because they may think it will make the war crimes committed by the Germans less bad,†Lilly said.

“I don’t think it will minimize what the Germans did at all. It will add another dimension to what war is like and it will not diminish that the Allies won.â€

That chimes with Gebhardt's attitude to her work, which she says aims simply to expose the horror of such actions in war.

"War actions that led to the defeat of Germany, the defeat of the Nazi regime, are a different question than the rapes, which were more personal and served no military purpose," Gebhardt said. "Rapes can't decide a war. 

The rapes "lasted for years, not just at the moment of the conquest," she added.

"They weren't just part of the violence that took place in the last weeks and days of the war, but continued for years."

Tom Barfield contributed reporting.

Source : The Local

 

Thoughts? 

 

[Azor Ahai 18,861]

Wow war sucks for every side who would have thought

[Paco 3,040]

war is awful, we already knew it

[Luiz 4,253]

i've heard german troops did the same thing to russia and a lot of the russian soldiers saw it as revenge for german atrocities during the war

 

the spoils of war 

[SleepingSun 1,353]

There is never a winner in war.

[Melech 9,900]

i've heard german troops did the same thing to russia and a lot of the russian soldiers saw it as revenge for german atrocities during the war

 

the spoils of war 

​Two wrong things don't make one right 

[Luiz 4,253]

​Two wrong things don't make one right 

well no sh*t simon 

[Alii 2,039]

There is never a winner in war.

 

[craig 680]

Gebhardt said she arrived at that number of s-xual assaults by estimating that of the so-called ‘war-children’ born to unmarried German women by the 1950s, five percent were products of rape.

That's a weak argument. Lots of women were drawn to foreign soldiers who were young, fit, and (importantly) had more money than local men. My mother's partner was a young Englishmen in WWII, and he says the English guys hated American soldiers because they had more money and would get all the local girls.

Lets not forget that American soldier in America and German solders in Germany will commit a certain number of rapes, without it being a hostile act against an enemy.  That "baseline number" needs to be subtracted when estimating war motivated rape.

[craig 680]

French women accused of sleeping with German soldier had their heads shaved after liberation:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/05/women-victims-d-day-landings-second-world-war

Many victims were young mothers, whose husbands were in German prisoner-of-war camps. During the war, they often had no means of support, and their only hope of obtaining food for themselves and their children was to accept a liaison with a German soldier. As the German writer Ernst Jünger observed from the luxury of the Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris, "food is power".

Jealousy masqueraded as moral outrage, because people envied the food and entertainment these women had received as a result of their conduct. When Arletty, the great actor and star of the film Les Enfants du Paradis, died in 1992, she received admiring obituaries that did not mention the rumour that she had her head shaved at the liberation. These obituaries even passed over her controversial love affair with a Luftwaffe officer. But letters to some newspapers revealed a lingering bitterness nearly 50 years later. It was not the fact that Arletty had slept with the enemy which angered them, but the way she had eaten well in the Hôtel Ritz while the rest of France was hungry.

After the humiliation of a public head-shaving, the tondues - the shorn women - were often paraded through the streets on the back of a lorry, occasionally to the sound of a drum as if it were a tumbril and France was reliving the revolution of 1789. Some were daubed with tar, some stripped half naked, some marked with swastikas in paint or lipstick.

[Goosey 3,017]

I knew this would be a Simon thread  come on Miriam Gebhardt, don't play the victim here. I've also seen some people complain about Dresden.

Also I disagree with this historian.