Ask Lemmy

No, that is Nazi propaganda that the US continued propagating through the cold war since it made the Soviets look bad. While there were definitely rapes that occurred, that happens with every occupying army, there was never any evidence of this being a policy or something tolerated by the officers. Any attempt to quantify this shows that American and British soldiers were more prolific in rapes of French women than Soviets anywhere on the Eastern Front, even though the usual refrain is just that the Soviets were better at covering it up than the US or UK, the lack of evidence is itself evidence. Also, most of the studies of this shows that having armed women combat fighters on the front and a more gender integrated military really cut down on the usual "boys will be boys" attitude of not addressing these things.

The other attempt to try to demonstrate this is the huge spike of recorded abortions in East Germany after the war, but if you think for a second about how Nazi Germany and West Germany outlawed abortions, but abortions became fully legal under East Germany, there might have been another explanation.