The American Empire

GUEST: Maria Höhn, Professor and Chair of History at Vassar College, author of GIs and Fräuleins, about American troops in Germany, coeditor of Over There: Living with The U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, and co-founder of The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, talks about our nation's military troops in foreign lands.

Occupation isn't simple. It is a melding of two cultures, one victorious and the other subservient. But here is much more to it than that. 

Black GIs felt a type of freedom in Germany that they never experienced back home. They were given the same respect as white GIs by a majority of the German population. And since the town of Baumholder, the geographical area of Maria's study, was as devastated as the rest of Germany after the war, its citizens were eager to earn enough money from the American troops as possible. 

German women dated and married American GIs. There were few German men left, and the Americans treated them much better than the occupying French, English and Russians did. 

Seventy years later, US soldiers are still in Germany. In fact, American troops have never really left any county they occupied during World War II. You can hear American radio stations all through Europe, from Germany down through Greece. Studying the US occupation of Germany slowly reveals something else that few of us talk about. The American Empire, built on 800 military bases around the world. 

This interview was somewhat of a coming home for me as well. My father was from Baumholder, and I spent some very enjoyable hours with my Uncle Gerhardt, the town mayor, talking about war and peace in Europe. Shortly after, I was drafted into the US Army myself and spent a year at a US base in Korea.