User:Stor stark7/Sandbox/US crimes during the occupation of Germany

At first the War Crimes Group was thought of as being directly concerned only with acts against US troops and US nationals. The great majority of the crimes, presumably, were those the Germans had committed on occupied territory, and they would eventually be the concerns of the restored governments. What had been and would be going on in Germany was not yet actually seen, and the overdone World War I atrocity propaganda had left an enduring legacy of skepticism on the subject.

Consequently, the true criminality of the Nazi regime, for all that had been said about it, was an enormous shock and surprise when it was uncovered in the last two months of the war and the doubts evaporated. Combat Photographers recorded countless atrocity scenes in still and motion pictures, but no war crimes personnel were there to document the crimes. Unfortunately, having evidence of the crimes on film was a far cry from being able to identify and convict the criminals.

In magnitude the German crimes vastly overshadowed crimes committed in Germany by US troops, but they did not completely obscure them. Looting was so widespread as to be regarded as a soldierly sport. The USFET General Board cautioned that its study of war crimes issued in the spring of 1946 should not be construed to imply "that conduct among American troops was always beyond reproach." Aside from looting, the board was aware of "substantial charges" of mistreatment of prisoners of war, including one general court-martial proceeding against Americans accused of murdering prisoners of war. In the latter instance, the evidence had been held insufficient to sustain a conviction without, in the board's opinion, leaving any assurance that the accused were innocent.54 Of the crimes committed by US troops, the best-though by no means most accurately-documented was rape, and it showed a "spiral increase" in the closing months of the war. Between July 1942 and October 1945, 904 rape cases were charged in the European theater, 552 of them in Germany.

REF:CHAPTER XIII]