"When The Soldiers Came"
Book By Miriam Gebhardt
Book By Miriam Gebhardt
Today’s
generations everywhere cannot nor should they wear the guilt of heinous
crimes committed by their ancestors, but today’s generations everywhere
should and must expose those crimes and seek justice for the victims of
such crimes at least in ensuring that history reflects factual accounts
no matter how ugly those accounts are.
The
Western world in particular has since World War II lived a popular
imagination or perception that in post-war Germany the Allied forces
(British, American and French soldiers) were at best behaviour,
well-liked and well-meaning. A well regarded academic and historian in
Germany, Miriam Gebhardt, has now published a new book casting
profoundly disturbing doubt on the accepted version of the Allies' role
in German post-war history. Indeed, the image we have held about the
Allies in post-war Germany now stands in alarming contradiction with the
reality revealed in Gebhardt’s book.
On 2 March 2015, the DVA branch of Random House Germany published the book “When the Soldiers Came” (“Als die Soldaten kamen”) by Miriam Gebhardt. It represents a new look at the abusers and the victims of the post-WWII Germany, and Gebhardt says she aims simply to expose the horror of criminal actions of rape in that war and after it.
“The soldiers who defeated the Nazi German forces National Socialist at the end of World War II also brought new suffering to many women. Countless girls and women (and no few men as well) became the victims of sexual violence – all over the country. In contrast to a widely held belief, it was not just ‘the Russians’ who were the offenders, but also American, French and British soldiers.
On 2 March 2015, the DVA branch of Random House Germany published the book “When the Soldiers Came” (“Als die Soldaten kamen”) by Miriam Gebhardt. It represents a new look at the abusers and the victims of the post-WWII Germany, and Gebhardt says she aims simply to expose the horror of criminal actions of rape in that war and after it.
“The soldiers who defeated the Nazi German forces National Socialist at the end of World War II also brought new suffering to many women. Countless girls and women (and no few men as well) became the victims of sexual violence – all over the country. In contrast to a widely held belief, it was not just ‘the Russians’ who were the offenders, but also American, French and British soldiers.
Using
new source material, Miriam Gebhardt has outlined the extent of the
violence during the period of occupation at the end of the war – the
first historically founded treatment of this topic. She also
impressively describes how these women later again became victims – of
doctors who arbitrarily agreed to or turned down abortion; of social
workers who put pregnant women into homes. And last but not least of a
society that right down to the present day would prefer not to talk
about the mass crimes, that would rather just forget about the whole
business.”
“The assumption that Western Allied soldiers would not do such a thing turned out not to be true,” she said, to the broadcaster Deutsche Welle. “In the method and violence of rape there was no different between American GIs and the Red Army, as far as I can see.”
The
book claims Allied troops raped German women during the Second World
War by manipulating them with gifts of items they needed such as
chocolate, food, coffee, nylon stockings and cigarettes. Gebhardt
tracked down some victims and interviewed them about their ordeal at the
hands of British, American and French soldiers. Also, “the author
bases her claims in large part on reports kept by Bavarian priests in
the summer of 1945. The Archbishop of Munich and Freising had asked
Catholic clergy to keep records on the allied advance and the
Archdiocese published excerpts from its archive a few years ago,” writes Der Spiegel.
"The
reports led book author Gebhardt to compare the behaviour of the US
army with the violent excesses perpetrated by the Red Army in the
eastern half of the country, where brutality, gang rapes and incidents
of looting have dominated the public perception of the Soviet
occupation. Gebhardt, however, says that the rapes committed in Upper
Bavaria show that things weren't much different in postwar Germany's
south and west.
The
historian also believes that similar motives were at work. Just like
their Red Army counterparts, the US soldiers, she believes, were
horrified by the crimes committed by the Germans, embittered by their
pointless and deadly efforts to defend the country to the very end, and
furious at the relatively high degree of prosperity in the country.
…Even
if it isn't likely that the Americans committed 190,000 sexual crimes,
it remains true that for postwar victims of rape -- which was undeniably
a mass phenomenon at the end of World War II, there is ‘no culture of
memory, no public recognition, much less an apology’ from the
perpetrators, Gebhardt notes. And today, 70 years after the end of the
war, it unfortunately doesn't look as though that situation will soon
change”.
Gebhardt
begins her book with: “At the very least 860,000 women and girls - and
also men and young boys - were raped by the occupying Allied soldiers
and their helpers. It happened everywhere …” :
Gebhardt
said she arrived at that number of sexual 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.
As
a matter of interest, while Gebhardt claims 190,000 rapes committed by
American GIs the US criminology professor Robert Lilly (“Taken By
Force”), who examined rape cases prosecuted by American military courts,
arrived at a number of 11,000 serious sexual assaults committed in
Germany by November 1945.
Gebhardt’s 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, Robert 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.
“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.”
While
it has been said that comparatively the least number of rapes of German
women (Gebhardt claims that 45,000 women) were perpetrated within the
British administered parts of the post-war “German State” (including
Austria as it was regarded by Nazi Germany as a constituent part of
German state and so, Austria like Germany was divided into similar model
of Allied Forces occupation zones) one wonders whether similar motives
and mindsets that are believed to have fueled the widespread rapes
elsewhere in the German State actually contributed to the genocidal
peril when in May 1945 hundreds of thousands of Croats (unarmed
soldiers, civilian men, women and children) fleeing Tito’s communist
Yugoslavia with the promise of the Allies for protection as refugees
were forcefully sent back by the British to the communist Yugoslavia to
be murdered en masse either at Bleiburg in May 1945 or
thereafter by Tito’s communist operatives. Certainly a motive of
retribution does seem to have played a part in the victimising of many
innocent people in both cases. This sad thought enters my mind as I
begin mournfully to prepare for the 70th anniversary of those heinous
massacres of innocent Croatian lives at Bleiburg and elsewhere in the
aftermath of WWII. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)
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