Letters: Miriam Gebhardt takes a close look at the rape of German women by all four victorious powers at the end of the war. She claims members of the US military alone raped as many as 190,000 German women.
Could one of the reasons why so many Russians are offended by the way historians like Antony Beevor (Denial of mass rapes just a Soviet propaganda myth, 6 August) portray the crimes committed against women by Red Army soldiers in Germany at the end of the second world war be the failure of western historians to write about the similar crimes committed by the US French and British armies of occupation?
In her recent book When the Soldiers Came the German historian Miriam Gebhardt takes a close look at the rape of German women by all four victorious powers at the end of the war. She claims members of the US military alone raped as many as 190,000 German women by the time West Germany gained sovereignty in 1955 with most of these sexual assaults taking place in the months following the defeat of the Nazis.
(cont..)