In a recent book, “When The Soldiers Came: The rape of German women at the end of WWII ” (Random House, March 2, 2015) Miriam Gebhardt, a German feminist claims that American soldiers raped 190,000 German women during the occupation of Europe after WWII (1945-1955).
The book is being trumpeted in the mainstream press, from The Daily Telegraph to Der Spiegel and The Daily Mail , and also in the alternative media.
In the process, the 190,000 becomes “hundreds of thousands,” then, “a quarter of a million,” (adding rapes by British soldiers) and then (perhaps by adding other post 1945 occupation estimates) “nearly a million” on the Internet.
However, even the author’s central claim of 190,000 rapes by American soldiers is arrived at by extrapolation from much lower figures in the record, as Der Spiegel reports:
“The total is not the result of deep research in archives across the country. Rather, it is an extrapolation. Gebhardt makes the assumption that 5 percent of the “war children” born to unmarried women in West Germany and West Berlin by the mid-1950s were the product of rape. That makes for a total of 1,900 children of American fathers. Gebhardt further assumes that on average, there
are 100 incidents of rape for each birth. The result she arrives at is thus 190,000 victims.Such a total, though, hardly seems plausible. Were the number really that high, it is almost certain that there would be more reports on rape in the files of hospitals or health authorities, or that there would be more eyewitness reports. Gebhardt is unable to present such evidence in sufficient quantity.
Another estimate, stemming from US criminology professor Robert Lilly, who examined rape cases prosecuted by American military courts, arrived at a number of 11,000 serious sexual assaults committed by November, 1945 — a disgusting number in its own right.”
More scholarly research suggests that Gebhardt’s extrapolations are more true of the Red Army, whose post-war rape of German women is a far better known story.
In July 2009, reviewing the American premiere of “A Woman In Berlin,” a film about the mass rape of German women after the liberation/conquest of Berlin after WW II, an NPR review cites a figure of “2 million” rapes as having been established by historians through hospital records, but then writes that the vast majority were committed by Soviet soldiers. Several hundred rapes, confirmed by court-martial and other records, were committed by Allied soldiers.
In Elisabeth Jean Wood’s “Sexual violence during war: toward an understanding of variation,” (in “Order, Conflict, and Violence,” Shapiro, Kalyvas, and Masoud eds, Cambridge U. Press, 2008), she cites Norman Naimark, “The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1946-1949“ (Belknap Press, 1995) and Anthony Beevor, “The Fall of Berlin 1945” (Viking, 2002) for estimates of the number of rapes committed by Soviet troops in Berlin alone in 1945, and says the “best estimates” were made by staff at two hospitals in Berlin alone who put the number at between 95,000 and 130,000 (Beevor, 2002, 410).
In The Guardian in May 2002, Beevor describes the situation outside Berlin thus:
“The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.”
But those are rapes by the Red Army, not by the allies, and that is an established historical narrative, supported by multiple credible authors.
In May 2014, Deanna Spingola, a well-known anti-Zionist “conspiracy” researcher in the alternative media, published a 794 page book on the Allied rape of women in WW II, “The Ruling Elite: Death, Destruction, and Domination“(Spingola, Trafford, 2014).
Spingola’s book only claims 14,000 rapes were inflicted by Allied soldiers, a much more sober account than the mainstream version, suggesting, as usual, that the mainstream purveys paranoia, conspiracy, and libel at least as often as the “conspiracy” community….and usually with much less warrant.
Spingola bases the 14,000 claim on hospital and court records, citing Giles MacDonogh, 2007, and Jeffrey Burds, 2009.
I looked up both books.
“After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation,” MacDonogh, Basic Books, 2007, is the work of a former Financial Times food journalist.
According to this review, MacDonogh’s book covers such horrors as the starvation and/killing/unnecessary deaths of some 3 million Germans in the post-war occupation, the slaughter of some 250,000 Sudetan Germans by Czechs, which I’ve blogged about earlier, and the mass rape of German women.
He writes that the mass rape of German women was largely the work of the Soviet army, although there were several thousands of rapes perpetrated by Allied soldiers, including the American and French. MacDonogh claims that the British were less culpable in this area, preferring to barter for sex.
Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Research (a scholarly Holocaust revisionist site), reviewing MacDonogh, says this about the rapes:
“Although most of the millions of German girls and women who were ravished by Allied soldiers were raped by Red Army troops, Soviet soldiers were not the only perpetrators. During the French occupation of Stuttgart, a large city in southwest Germany, police records show that 1,198 women and eight men were raped, mostly by French troops from Morocco in north Africa, although the prelate of the Lutheran Evangelical church estimated the number at 5,000. “
Spingola’s other source is Jeffrey Burds, “Sexual Violence in Europe in WWII, 1939-1945” (Politics & Society, 2009).
I couldn’t find the 14,000 number cited by Spingola until I looked at another book from the same year, “Taken By Force: Rape and American GIs In Europe In WWII,“ (Palgrave Macmillan: August, 2007) by J. Robert Lilley, an internationally known criminologist and sociologist, which gives the 14,000 number as the count for all Allied rape victims in France, Belgium, and Germany. Note that Lilley is one of Gebhardt’s sources, from which she extrapolated her 195,000 figure.
In any case, a year before Spingola and two years before Gebhardt, the Allied rape story had already been covered in an academic book.
In “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI,” (U. of Chicago Press, May, 2013) Professor Mary Louise Roberts of Wisconsin University described how GIs raped French women after WWII, again citing the figure of 14,000 for the number of women raped by GIs in Western Europe.
That would include West Germany, but not East Germany, of course, since East Germany was taken over by the Russians, not the Allies.
The book was reviewed by the New York Times. The reviewer describes why an earlier account of GI rape in 2003 by Robert Lilley had had a hard time getting published outside academia – it appeared to show the disproportionate prosecution of rapes committed by black GIs and it was written during the Iraq war.
Another figure for rape in the European theater, 17000, also comes from Lilley, with the explanation that the difference between this figure and the figures in the JAG (Judge Advocate General) record reflects that branch being overwhelmed by cases.
But Gebhardt’s thesis should not entirely be dismissed because of her failure to present convincing evidence.
Her larger argument carries weight. Calling sexual interactions between occupying soldiers and impoverished women in an occupied country “voluntary” is surely a euphemism, as this harrowing account of the interaction between American GIs and Japanese women in occupied Japan argues:
“Immediately after the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the Japanese Ministry of the Interior made plans to protect Japanese women in its middle and upper classes from American troops. Fear of an American army out of control led them to quickly establish the first “comfort women” stations for use by US troops.7 By the end of 1945, the Japanese Ministry of Home Affairs had organized the Recreation Amusement Association (R.A.A.), a chain of houses of prostitution with 20,000 women who serviced occupation forces throughout Japan.8 (Many more women known as panpan turned to prostitution in the struggle to survive in the midst of the postwar devastation.) Burritt Sabin of the Japan Times reported in 2002 that just days before the R.A.A. was to open, hundreds of American soldiers broke into two of their facilities and raped all the women.9 The situation prompted MacArthur and Eichelberger, the two top military men of the U.S. occupation forces, to make “rape by Marines” their very first topic of discussion.10 Yuki Tanaka notes that 1300 rapes were reported in Kanagawa prefecture alone between August 30 and September 10, 1945, indicative of the pervasiveness of the phenomenon in the early occupation.11
Historian Takemae Eiji reports that
. . . US troops comported themselves like conquerors, especially in the early weeks and months of occupation. Misbehavior ranged from black-marketeering, petty theft, reckless driving and disorderly conduct to vandalism, assault arson, murder and rape. . . . In Yokohama, Chiba and elsewhere, soldiers and sailors broke the law with impunity, and incidents of robbery, rape and occasionally murder were widely reported in the press. 12Two weeks into the occupation, the Japanese press began to report on rapes and looting.13 MacArthur responded by promptly censoring all media. Monica Braw, whose research revealed that even mention of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and particularly the effects of the bomb on civilians, were censored, maintains that pervasive censorship continued throughout the occupation years. “It [censorship] covered all means of communications and set up rules that were so general as to cover everything. It did not specify subjects prohibited, did not state punishment for violations, although it was clear that there were such punishments, and prohibited all discussion even about the existence of the censorship itself.”14
Censorship was not limited to the Japanese press. MacArthur threw prominent American journalists such as Gordon Walker, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, and Frank Hawley of the New York Times out of Japan for disobeying his orders. Even internal military reports were censored.15
Five months after the occupation began, one in four American soldiers had contracted VD.16 The supply of penicillin back in the U.S. was low.17 When MacArthur responded by making both prostitution and fraternization illegal,18 the number of reported rapes soared, showing that prostitution and the easy availability of women had suppressed incidents of rape.”