The Stuttgart Incident: Sexual Violence and the Uses of History

Abstract

At the height of World War II in Europe, as the Allies advanced on Germany, the U.S. military was disturbed by reports that a mass rape had taken place in the city of Stuttgart. U.S. journalists on the ground reported that a thousand German women and girls had been herded into an underground tunnel and kept there for several days while they were sexually assaulted.1 The journalists blamed African troops, though they were uncertain about the ethnic and national origin of the soldiers in question: they implicated Senegalese, Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian men alike. According to some reports, later taken up by U.S. senators, the soldiers were wearing U.S. Army uniforms and the local population mistook them for African Americans.2 The soldiers were from the French First Army, but since September 1944 had been fighting under U.S. command.3 The “Stuttgart Incident,” as this event became known, threatened...