A ludicrous methodology

The Herald reports:

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

In a new book, Professor 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.” …

Prof 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.

Hard to imagine a more dodgy calculation. Assume every birth is the result of a rape, and that for every birth there were 100 further rapes.

Antony Beevor, the author of The Second World War, described Prof 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 fraternisation. Many young women were hanging around outside the gates of American camps.”

I note the historian has published her claims in a book, not a peer reviewed journal.