>>65552398A typical victimization with sexual assault by drunken American personnel marching through occupied territory involved threatening a German family with weapons, forcing one or more women to engage in sex, and putting the entire family out on the street afterward.[65]
As in the eastern sector of the occupation, the number of rapes peaked in 1945, but a high rate of violence against the German and Austrian populations by the Americans lasted at least into the first half of 1946, with five cases of dead German women found in American barracks in May and June 1946 alone.[63]
>Carol Huntington wrote that the American soldiers who raped German women and then left gifts of food for them may have permitted themselves to view the act as prostitution rather than rape. Citing the work of a Japanese historian alongside that suggestion, Huntington writes that Japanese women who begged for food "were raped and soldiers sometimes left food for those they raped."[63]White American soldiers in Germany were responsible for mass rapes, but the Black soldiers of America's segregated occupation force were both more likely to be charged with rape and severely punished.[63] Heide Fehrenbach writes that while the American Black soldiers were in fact by no means free from indiscipline,
The point, rather, is that American officials exhibited an explicit interest in a soldier's race, and then only if he were black, when reporting behavior they feared would undermine either the status or the political aims of the U.S. Military Government in Germany.[67]
Meanwhile, the historian R.M. Douglas, analyzing the victim statements in U.S. Army Military Police files, noted that between January and July 1945, where the victims identified the race of their attacker, 6% of the attacks involving multiple perpetrators involved more than one race being identified, and 41% of the accounts that identified race identified the assailants as white.[64]
