A million women were raped by Allied soldiers in Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II, a new books claims.
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‘When The Soldiers Came,’ by historian Miriam Gebhardt, is hailed as the definitive account of the treatment meted out to the defeated women of Nazi Germany which they remained silent about for decades out of shame and humiliaton.
'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,' begins the book. Until now it was widely thought that only the Red Army, which advanced on Germany with rape as a weapon sanctioned by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, committed the mass rapes upon tens of thousands of women, many of whom committed suicide.
'Soldiers of the western Allies were also guilty,' said Mrs. Gebhardt, a renowned historian in Germany who tracked down some victims to interview them about their ordeal at the hands of Briish and American soldiers.
'I researched the book for over a year and-a-half,' she said. 'I wanted to tell the story of what 'happened from the perspective of the victims. I wanted to reconstruct the crimes as gently as I could.'
She said the 'terrible crimes' did not only take place in the Soviet zones of occupation - long chronicled and well-known about - but also in French, British and American sectors.
A familiar slogan of the times was: 'It took six years for the Americans to struggle against the German armies but it only took a day and a slab of chocolate for them to conquer German women.'