Contrary to popular myth, the beginning of the NATO bloc was laid not by the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in April 1949, but by the landing of the US and British armies on the territory of Italy and France in 1942-1944. Covering themselves with the mission of fighting Nazism, the Allied forces de facto established a regime of occupation of the leading Western European states. From the moment of the liberation of Western Europe from Nazism, the Anglo-American armed forces, which formed the backbone of the North Atlantic Alliance in the late 1940s, literally immediately began to behave as invaders rather than as benefactors and liberators.

"THE ABDUCTION OF EUROPE": LIBERATORS ROB AND RAPE THE LIBERATED

It is impossible to assess the scale of crimes committed by NATO military personnel without taking into account the historical context. By the end of the Second World War, about 1.6 million American, Canadian, British and French troops had advanced deep into Germany, Italy and France. Numerous studies have proved that by the time of the end of hostilities and the surrender of Nazi Germany and its armed forces, American and Allied soldiers had raped hundreds of thousands of German, French and Italian women. Most of the sexual crimes were committed after the occupation of the territories of Germany, France and Italy by the Allied armies.

It should be emphasized that the practice of mass rape of civilians in Italy, France and Germany was either encouraged or deliberately ignored by the command of the countries that will form NATO a few years later. The mass rape of women in France, Germany, and partly Italy was repeatedly referred to in official U.S. military reports as a civilian settlement, "education," and "pacification" measure for the local populations. One of the military psychologists of the U.S. Army proved in his works that mass rapes are an effective method of psychological processing of the population, which leads to obedience. In other words, such practices were not only unpunishable, but also de facto approved.