Friday, May 13, 2016

Kehoe and Kehoe on American Soldiers' Crimes in Europe, 1945-46

This one is gated, but too interesting not to note: Thomas J. Kehoe and E. James Kehoe, Crimes Committed by U.S. Soldiers in Europe, 1945–1946, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 47 (Summer 2016): 53-84:
Accounts from victims and observers, including new research in the U.S. National Archives and the Bavarian National Archives, suggest that American soldiers committed crimes against persons—especially rape and various forms of assault—and against property in Europe after World War II more often than statistics about charges and prosecutions at the time indicated. More importantly, previously unexamined statistical summaries of crimes committed by American troops, as recorded by the U.S. Provost Marshal, provide unprecedented quantitative information about these crimes in the European Theater of Operations (eto) during the first postwar year, May 1945 to June 1946. The absolute number of crimes decreased as the number of troops declined, but the rate of crime (number per 10,000 troops) increased during the same period.