Historian accuses Allied troops of mass rape in Germany

A well-regarded German academic challenges the established view that Soviet troops were responsible for the vast majority of rape cases in occupied Germany. Photo / Thinkstock

Hundreds of thousands of German women were raped by British, American and French soldiers after the end of the Second World War, a German historian has claimed.

In a new book, Professor Miriam Gerhardt, a well-regarded German academic, challenges the established view that Soviet troops were responsible for the vast majority of rape cases in occupied Germany.

"The assumption that Western Allied soldiers would not do such a thing turned out not to be true," she told the broadcaster Deutsche Welle. "In the method and violence of rape there was no difference between American GIs and the Red Army, as far as I can see."

Prof Gerhardt drew on detailed accounts kept by Bavarian Roman Catholic priests on individual cases for her book, When the Soldiers Came.

"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 drunk Americans," wrote one of the priests, Fr Andreas Weingand, in July 1945. Prof Gerhardt said she had also studied the records of illegitimate "war children" born to German mothers and Allied fathers, and assumed that there had been 100 rapes for each birth, coming up with a figure of 190,000 rapes by American soldiers alone.

Antony Beevor, the author of The Second World War, described Prof Gerhardt's methodology as "ludicrous".

"It's almost impossible to come up with figures, but I think to say there were hundreds of thousands is a great exaggeration," he said.

"If she's doing it on the basis of illegitimate children that's ludicrous. There was a huge amount of voluntary sex. There were vast numbers of cases of genuine fraternisation. Many young women were hanging around outside the gates of American camps."

The most notorious instances of rape by Western Allied forces were by French troops during the sacking of Stuttgart.

Of the Allies, British troops appear to have been responsible for the fewest rapes.

"Not because of any morality or respect for woman, but because the NCOs wouldn't allow the soldiers to go off on their own," Prof Beevor said.

He added that Soviet archives had confirmed that around two million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers, although Prof Gerdhardt put the figure at 500,000.