Raping of German Women by Russian, American and British Soldiers at the End of WW II
In Taken by Force , J. Robert Lilly estimates the number of rapes committed by U.S. servicemen in Germany to be 11,000. [52] 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. [53] In 2015, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that German historian Miriam Gebhardt "believes that members of the US military raped as many as 190,000 German women by the time West Germany regained sovereignty in 1955, with most of the assaults taking place in the months immediately following the US invasion of Nazi Germany. The author bases her claims in large part on reports kept by Bavarian priests in the summer of 1945." he majority of the assaults were committed in the Soviet occupation zone; estimates of the numbers of German women raped by Soviet soldiers have ranged up to 2 million. [7] [8] [9] [10] According to historian William Hitchcock , in ...