#Allies Raped 1 Million #German #Women #WWII

New Study: Allies Raped Nearly 1 Million German Women During and After WWII

Robert Barsocchini

Germany’s The Local reports:

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. 

Gebhardt’s total of nearly 1 million rapes by the US, Britain, and France, includes some 190,000 rapes committed by American soldiers.

American professor of criminology J. Robert Lilly, who previously studied the issue, has said that Gebhardt’s findings are “plausible”, but “no exact number could ever be known because of a lack of records”. 

Lilly continued: 

“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.” 

(History professor Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz has noted that World War 2 is part of the USA’s state-origin myth that perpetuates a useful self-image of righteousness and benevolence, similar to the dubiousness of the Iranian state now using its actions against ISIS to support a like self-conception.) 

Lilly’s assessment, Local added, “chimes with Gebhardt’s attitude to her work, which she says aims simply to expose the horror of such actions in war.” 

The rapes “lasted for years, not just at the moment of the conquest,” Gebhardt found.