Historian and criminologist Dr Thomas Kehoe will give a seminar at UNE tomorrow on crime by American soldiers in occupied Germany after World War II.
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There were far more rapes and assaults than previously thought, and the impact of crimes previously excused as the unavoidable or expected behaviour of soldiers – such as looting – have been reinterpreted, given the revelations of greater violence.
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This reinterpretation has been helped by discovery that the US military was aware at the time of the trouble caused by its soldiers.
In this seminar Dr Kehoe will show that the US military not only knew about soldier crime during the post-war occupation of Germany, but it anticipated high rates of crime, reflecting such foresight in its doctrine for Military Government.
This foresight reflected important lessons from the occupation of the German Rhineland after World War I (1918-1923) 25 years earlier, which suffered from high levels of disorder and violence by soldiers.
Not only has the first occupation of Germany received little scholarly attention, crime by American soldiers there illuminates its salience to later US strategies for occupation.
Dr Kehoe argues that this connection forces a re-evaluation of the origins of the US military’s approach to Military Government.
Thomas Kehoe is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UNE. He completed his postgraduate degrees at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on crime and social control during US military government in Germany. He published on soldier crime and social control in post-World War Two Germany in major international journals, and has a book on this topic forthcoming this year with Ohio University Press.
The seminar is at the Oorala lecture theatre, Oorala centre, from 9.30am to 10.30am, followed by morning tea in the Humanities tea room. All are welcome.
