Estimated 190000 German Women Raped by US Soldiers After WWII
US rape of german women 1945 - A US Professor estimates the number of rapes committed by U.S. servicemen in Germany to be 11,000. As in the case of the American occupation of France after the D-Day invasion, many of the American rapes in Germany in 1945 were gang rapes committed by armed soldiers at gunpoint. A recent number given by a German historian gives the number of victims as high as 190,000 women.
Robert Lilly estimates the number of rapes committed by U.S. servicemen in Germany to be 11,040. However, extensive research by German historian Miriam Gebhardt suggests a number as high as 190,000 (or roughly 5% of the estimated post-war births in Germany) due to rape by American soldiers.
As Allied troops entered and occupied German territory during the later stages of World War II, mass rapes of women took place both in connection with combat operations and during the subsequent occupation of Germany. Scholars agree that the vast majority of the rapes were committed by Soviet occupation troops. The wartime rapes were followed by decades of silent
According to historian Antony Beevor, whose books were banned in 2015 from some Russian schools and colleges, NKVD (Soviet secret police) files have revealed that the leadership knew what was happening, but did little to stop it. It was often rear echelon units who committed the rapes. According to professor Oleg Rzheshevsky, "4,148 Red Army officers and many privates were punished for committing atrocities". The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million
It has been frequently repeated that the wartime rapes were surrounded by decades of silence or, until relatively recently, ignored by academics, with the prevailing attitude being that the Germans were the perpetrators of war crimes, Soviet writings speaking only of Russian liberators and German guilt and Western historians focusing on specific elements of the Holocaust.
In postwar Germany, especially in West Germany, the wartime rape stories became an essential part of political discourse and that the rape of German women, along with the expulsion of Germans from the East and the Allied occupation, had been universalized in an attempt to situate the German population on the whole as victims. However, it has been argued that it was not a "universal" story of women being raped by men but of German women being abused and violated by an army, which fought Nazi Germany and liberated death camps Continue reading
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