When American forces broke through German resistance in the spring of 1945, U.S. Army commanders began to worry about rising reports of sexual violence. “Since the entry into Germany by the Seventh Army the number of cases of rape have increased greatly,” General Alexander Patch reported. “The situation is one in which it is believed emergency action is required.”Footnote ¹ Omar Bradley, commander of the largest group of armies on the continent, warned General Dwight D. Eisenhower that “certain conditions of looting, pillaging, wanton destruction, rape and other crimes” were widespread.Footnote ² By the time of his writing, in April 1945, some 500 reports of rape per week were flooding into the Judge Advocate General's office.Footnote ³

An after-action report would later confirm these concerns: “We were members of a conquering army and we came as conquerors. The rates of reported rapes sprang skyward.” This report acknowledged that many more rapes occurred than were reflected in general court-martial records, which listed 552 trials for Germany as a whole until the end of the war. The Judge Advocate said that not more than 25 percent of reported cases ever made it to trial.Footnote ⁴ The situation was “ripe for violent sex crimes,” the report concluded, and “the avalanche came.”Footnote ⁵

The history of Allied sexual violence in Nazi Germany is a troubled one. Numerous historians have documented the extensive sexual assaults that German women suffered at war's end; in popular memory, this history is associated above all with the Soviet “Rape of Berlin,” though French and American troops were also regularly accused of gendered violence.Footnote ⁶ After Germany's defeat in 1945, such stories of sexual violation would be transformed into a mythology of national violation that was effectively racialized and put toward neo-fascist ends.Footnote ⁷ This prospect was immediately discernible to black soldiers and journalists on the ground in Germany in the spring of 1945, who saw how the U.S. Army's commitment to Jim Crow segregation—including prohibitions on sex and fraternization across the color line—aligned with pre-existing German fears of black men to create a situation in which African American GIs could be disproportionately tried for and convicted of rape, even when their sexual encounters were consensual.Footnote ⁸

This was, after all, how the sexual color line had worked stateside, in the American South, where 80 percent of black GIs trained, as well as in Britain and France, where African American soldiers made up about 10 percent of total U.S. troop strength. White American commanders worried incessantly about sexual encounters between black men and white women as African American demands for civil rights grew louder. Children born from interracial relationships, they feared, would undermine white supremacy and the black/white racial ordering of the United States. For this reason, the army policed sexual crimes (including consensual acts across the color line deemed criminal by miscegenation laws in the United States or by military regulations in the European Theater) far more aggressively than other crimes. The weight of that power landed disproportionately on black soldiers, who were widely blamed for episodes of rape, and not infrequently sentenced to death on little or no evidence. In France, the extent of racial scapegoating was especially staggering, as black GIs accounted for 77 percent of rape convictions, and army authorities, in unison with local French mayors, denounced what they called the “black terror on the Bocage.”Footnote ⁹ Watching the same white supremacist dynamics endemic to the United States now playing out across the Atlantic, the NAACP complained that black soldiers were being “railroaded to prison,” while journalists involved in the Double V campaign described a process akin to legal lynching: as one correspondent for the Chicago Defender put it, “Death has become the penalty for crossing the color line.”Footnote ¹⁰

But when the army entered Germany, the picture grew more complicated. As reports of rape increased, the claims were more clearly tied to combat troops on the tip of the spear, not the supporting units at the rear, where most African American troops had been shunted into menial jobs. In other words, army commanders were faced with substantive evidence that those responsible for this latest spate of violence were overwhelmingly white.Footnote ¹¹

Nonetheless, U.S. military officials at first tried to assign primary blame for sexual crimes in Germany to black soldiers. Many of the cases that occurred during the invasion, ventured one report, were caused “by negro troops in convoys en route back from the front.”Footnote ¹² Common racist assumptions held by many white Americans and Europeans alike—that rape was something black men “couldn't help,” as one woman put it in a letter to the director of the NAACP—further enabled such scapegoating.Footnote ¹³ As one German woman explained to a court-martial, “It was best not to resist [black soldiers]; otherwise we would be killed. Everybody talked about that.”Footnote ¹⁴

While sexual violence by black men was portrayed as something inherent and uncontrollable, it was simultaneously rendered exceptional for white men, an aberration triggered by their exposure to war. This was the case for Clayton Austin, a white GI who perpetrated at least six assaults against three teenage girls in the midst of battle. The Staff Judge Advocate, the legal advisor for Austin's division, condemned Austin's “violent and lustful course of conduct” and referred him for psychiatric testing, concluding that he must have lost his mind. Even Austin's victims appealed for clemency for him, stating their belief that “this incident would never have occurred had he not been intoxicated, the blame for which can be put on the war.”Footnote ¹⁵ Watching these disparate narratives develop, the Chicago Defender decried such a “double standard of morals” by which white soldiers’ sexual violence was perceived as excusable and unremarkable, while black men's purported sexual aggression was treated as a deeper injury that warranted the harshest punishment. The true crime here, argued the leading black newspaper, was the extension of Jim Crow overseas and into “the field of sex.”Footnote ¹⁶

Nevertheless, the army's efforts to racialize sexual crimes in Germany ultimately proved less successful than they had been elsewhere, leading to an unexpectedly steep and sudden decline in prosecutions of black soldiers. As German women were called upon to testify in American courts, they emphasized their helplessness in the face of a conquering army, ultimately convincing Army legal officials that almost all sexual encounters between occupier and occupied could constitute rape.Footnote ¹⁷ During one trial, a woman challenged the prevailing assumption that only evidence of a physical struggle could substantiate a charge of rape by posing the question: “what does force mean?”Footnote ¹⁸ In another case, when Greta Schmitz was asked whether she “willfully consent[ed] to any of the acts of intercourse,” she responded bluntly: “That is a dumb question.” If she wanted sex, she said, she could have just “taken a German soldier.”Footnote ¹⁹ This, she insisted, was rape, and the court should not require physical evidence to prove it; structural conditions, the obvious vulnerability of German women to an invading army, should have been sufficient.

German women's testimony in American courts ultimately convinced army legal officials that an enemy soldier was frightening, no matter his race. As one judge advocate put it, “a man who enters a strange house, carrying a loaded rifle in one hand, is not justified in believing that he has accomplished a seduction on the other hand.”Footnote ²⁰ This kind of language was unheard of in military courts elsewhere in Europe; ironically, it had resonance in Germany only because German women were enemies, and were therefore justified in their belief that American weapons might be used against them. French and British women, as allies, were not entitled to hold the same fear when encountering white American soldiers. As legal officials began to take seriously German women's claims of rape against white men, they struggled to uphold the color line in ways they previously had. As a result, white soldiers received almost three times as many convictions for rape as they had in France.Footnote ²¹

Rather than facing the prospect of hundreds of white American soldiers imprisoned for assaulting German women, and fearing a public outcry back in the United States, the Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson pushed for universal clemency, warning that he did not want the War Department to be “flooded with demands for immediate reduction in sentences in cases where they cannot be defended.”Footnote ²² At the end of the hostilities, the Army Clemency Board revoked the death sentences of all soldiers convicted of rape in Germany and reduced the prison sentences of many more. Black soldiers benefitted from this policy even though it was not intended for them. From their perspective, the encounter between white American commanding officers and German, potentially Nazi, women revealed that the bonds of whiteness often transcended wartime enmity. Nonetheless, it was the objections of these same enemy women that worked to undermine the color line in wartime Europe, which, for a time at least, had cracked under the weight of too many countervailing assumptions.