Historian accuses Allies of mass rape in Germany

© FP, Getty Images File , London Daily Telegraph

Allied troops are shown entering the city of Mainz, Germany, on March 30, 1945. A German historian claims hundreds of thousands of German women were raped by British, U.S. and French soldiers.

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

In a new book, 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."

Gerhardt drew on detailed accounts kept by Bavarian Roman Catholic priests on individual cases for her book,

"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, Father Andreas Weingand, in July 1945. 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 described 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 fraternization. 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 women, but because the NCOs wouldn't allow the soldiers to go off on their own," Beevor said.

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