despite orders not to “fraternise” with German women.
Many of the women were widowed or separated from their interned husbands, and struggling to survive in the war-shattered country.
Most of the children grew up without knowing their father, or, like Baur-Timmerbrink, without even knowing he existed.
Like their mothers, they also faced whispered insults, marginalisation and discrimination.
Even today, the “occupation children” are “often heavily psychologically scarred”, according to a study of 146 of them launched in March 2013 by the universities of Leipzig and Greifswald.
“My mother was a ‘Tommy whore’,” said one participant, using Germany’s wartime term for British soldiers. “And me, they called me monkey.”
The fathers themselves were often unaware of the existence of the child. This was the case with Margot Jung, born in 1954 in then French-occupied Koblenz.
When she was seven, she overheard a conversation between her mother and grandmother mentioning “the Frenchman”.
Despite her suspicions, she didn’t dig deeper until 2002, when she resumed the search for her origins.
She contacted the Red Cross, French foreign ministry and other organisations, without success.
One day she decided to take her mother to the places where they lived at the time of her birth. Once there Jung told her she was looking for her French father.
The mother initially said nothing. But the next morning, Margot was amazed to find a note with her father’s address in France.
Jung learnt that her father, Jean, had died in 2001, but she did meet her half-sister, with whom she developed a family relationship.
“Today I feel no shame, I can speak freely about my father,” she says in the book.
Her own mother also seemed relieved, happy to learn more about the man she once loved.
Later the old lady even dared to show Jung a memento, a crumpled old pack of cigarettes that had belonged to her father, with seven cigarettes and a matchbox still inside, preserved like an icon for decades.
Baur-Timmerbrink now works for the organisation GItrace, which helps children search for fathers who were American GIs, and she has helped facilitate some 200 reunions.
But, she said, often the searches by the offspring, now aged in their 60s and 70s, lead nowhere and insisted that “we can’t promise anything”.
In many cases the fathers or their families decline contact, choosing to ignore rather than dig up the past.