Читать книгу The Art of Occupation - Thomas J. Kehoe - Страница 11

1 Crime and Control in American Military Thought

Mother and daughter, Friedel and Marianne Souvigier appeared before an American military tribunal on 27 September 1944, charged with disobeying a military government (MG) order, an unspecified but likely minor breach of the peace. They were residents of rural district Aachen (Landkreis Aachen), which surrounded the city, and they may have been the first Germans formally prosecuted by American occupiers on German territory. American forces had crossed the German-Belgian border just one week earlier, and the city of Aachen remained under German control. Despite its proximity to the front, the trial was a proper affair. Personal details for each woman including their residences and ages (Friedel was fifty and Marianne seventeen) were recorded in the military court register along with the names of the other participants. The officer acting as judge was Captain Kurt L. Walitschek and the women’s defense counsel was Dr. Philip Bohne.¹

Attendance of a defense lawyer was a privilege not mandated by the MG Legal Code for frontline trials, and it was rarely employed thereafter. His presence complemented the trappings of formality around the court proceedings and highlighted the importance the Americans placed on martial law. By contrast, Walitschek’s decisions illuminate the tension between appearance and pragmatism in American military occupation. Bohne represented the six defendants prosecuted that day and lost every case. Friedel and Marianne were convicted and received harsh sentences, six months in prison for Friedel and a fine of 2,000 reichsmarks (RM) or two hundred days in prison for Marianne. These sentences were later reduced to thirty days’ and fifty days’ imprisonment. Like every American officer overseeing occupation, Walitschek grappled with whether martial law was about justice or about control for the sake of military expediency. It was traditionally determined to be the latter.²

Actions, Orders, and Guidelines

Nuremberg and Augsburg fell in quick succession to the US Seventh Army in the second half of April 1945. The Americans encountered stiff resistance at Nuremberg, finding that the Germans, despite being heavily outnumbered, were “fanatical” defenders who forced the Americans to fight “room to room” through the city for five days.³ The Americans turned toward Augsburg following Nuremberg’s capture, expecting another ferocious fight for the bridges over the River Lech en route to Munich. Instead, a hastily formed “Freedom Party” comprising many of Augsburg’s leaders organized its surrender, and Americans entering early on 28 April were astounded to see that “white flags were hanging from the windows.”⁴

Military government officers (MGOs) arrived in each city shortly after its capture. They faced vastly different conditions. Nuremberg remained a combat zone filled with thousands of Germans and non-German displaced persons (DPs) when Major Clarence E. Hamilton established MG headquarters on 20 April. Sustained bombing and fighting had reduced the city to its bones, and the “occasional sniper” still stalked the streets.⁵ Augsburg, by contrast, was bombed once during the war. Its people were surely traumatized, but their surrender meant that Colonel Joseph C. Joublanc could better count on their compliance.⁶ Despite the different circumstances, Hamilton and Joublanc followed standing orders for establishing military rule. Martial law replaced German law and was supplemented by the special MG legal code enunciated in Section 2M of the Military Government Handbook, Germany. Curfews and travel restrictions were imposed, and weaponry, wireless transmitters, and carrier pigeons were confiscated. Criminal offenders of all types from petty thieves to partisans who attacked the Allied forces would be tried before military tribunals. But asserting control was the most pressing issue in these earliest hours of the occupation, and restoring order was the first step.⁷

According to Hamilton, crime was initially his “most difficult problem.”⁸ The Americans tended to immediately free the Nazis’ foreign forced laborers, giving them the freedom to celebrate but also to drink, riot, and seek revenge against Germans.⁹ In Nuremberg, thousands of these newly created “DPs” were “on the loose … looting,” and reports of disorder flooded in from around the city.¹⁰ Hamilton turned to the German police to calm the situation. On 21 April, he placed a captured police captain in charge of 150 officers. Though stripped of their uniforms, they retained many of their powers, and Hamilton charged them with distributing MG proclamations and assisting in crowd control. He noted in his diary that the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) would eventually screen these police for Nazi affiliations, but until then, preventing “general disorganization” was more pressing than denazification.¹¹ He then reopened a local prison to house arrested persons. When rioting continued, he ordered the detention of all non-German DPs. A military tribunal was established three days later to begin trying the hundreds of people arrested.¹²

Joublanc in Augsburg also prioritized control, despite the city’s surrender. He also turned to German bureaucrats and police to effect the new regime. Most bureaucrats and administrators in the city were part of the Freedom Party that had surrendered before the mayor and Nazi Gauleiter committed suicide rather than be captured by the Americans.¹³ The Germans were still surprised by the power Joublanc granted to a new city leadership after a perfunctory selection process. The colonel questioned candidates for mere minutes before appointing them to key positions.¹⁴ Josef Mayr, the new regional magistrate (Oberbürgermeister) he appointed, later expressed astonishment that only ten American officers were left to supervise a mostly German government.¹⁵

Hamilton’s and Joublanc’s actions reflected the US military’s guiding principles that were articulated in handbooks and training. Both pursued social order, which was the fundamental objective for military government. But there were also differences in their approaches. Hamilton established MG courts almost immediately.¹⁶ For reasons that are unclear, courts were not established in Augsburg until 11 June, though its surrender may have mitigated the rioting and looting that necessitated immediate trials.¹⁷ These variations reflected a pattern of small, compounding differences between MG regions that was often most apparent in policing and criminal justice. For instance, MGOs recruited and uniformed German police at different rates. Sentences for the same offense also varied wildly. Across different regions (city and rural), the average punishment for violating curfews ranged between nineteen and seventy-one days’ imprisonment.¹⁸

These variations came from the wide-ranging discretion afforded to MGOs in the districts. It was exemplified in the MG Legal Code by two catchalls—Sections 21 and 43—that allowed officers to prosecute as a criminal offense virtually any behavior deemed “disobedience” or an “act to the prejudice of the good order.” Throughout the occupation, MGOs applied them to everything from public drunkenness and offensive language to murder. The ceding of such latitude and power to frontline officers at the rank of lieutenant, captain, and occasionally major was contentious and drew criticism from within and outside the military. Members of the military’s legal division objected most vociferously. In September 1945 for instance, legal officer for MG in Bruchsal, Baden-Württemberg, First Lieutenant William G. East wrote a memorandum to the detachment commander complaining about other MGOs’ regular deviations from what he saw as proper legal procedures. These included ignoring sentencing guidelines and voiding arrests without proper hearings or record.¹⁹ He was not alone. In 1947, chief of MG courts in Bavaria Eli E. Nobleman recommended that all defendants convicted of illegally possessing a firearm be imprisoned for approximately five years.²⁰ Even at the beginning of the occupation, such recommendations had rarely been followed. In 1945, the average sentence handed down by MG courts in Bremen was 234 days’ imprisonment; it was a mere 41 days in Augsburg.²¹ Such variations led Nobleman to lament that across the board, MG’s approach to criminal justice was at best “haphazard.”²²

These criticisms had little impact on MGOs’ consequentialist approach to military rule. But such flexible attitudes to law enforcement, sentencing, and the use of Germans in government were seemingly at odds with the Allies’ long-held aim to destroy Nazism. American and British command expected tenacious Nazi resistance during the occupation. As late as April 1945, the chief of staff for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF)—the overarching command structure on the western front—British Lieutenant-General Frederick E. Morgan was sufficiently confident that Germans would continue fighting after defeat of their regular army. He reminded commanders that draconian anti-reprisal measures were permitted,²³ including “forced evacuation” and “destruction” of resistant areas “by bombing, artillery fire, or burning.”²⁴ The need for such violence seemed to necessitate a repressive occupation. It was a vision of MG that SHAEF supreme commander, American general Dwight Eisenhower, appeared to suggest when characterizing MG as the answer to Nazi insurgency.²⁵ Strict martial law would allow “resistance to … be ruthlessly stamped out,” he announced on the eve of the Western Allies’ invasion of Germany in September 1944.²⁶

But as powerful as fears of German resistance were within Allied command, most MGOs on the ground approached occupation like Hamilton and Joublanc did, relying on cooperative Germans.²⁷ The structure of MG meant that it could not be about domination. Small MG detachments (labeled so because they were groups of officers “detached” from a larger unit) comprising between five and twenty officers and an equal number of enlisted men were responsible for each city and rural district captured by the Allies.²⁸ Consequently, Germans were expected to offer more than deference to martial law; they were to provide material assistance to MG.²⁹ Thus at its very heart, there was a conflict in the American military’s approach to occupation during World War II between fear of Nazism and the expectation that MGOs could rely on helpful Germans.

The Long History of American Military Government

The conflict was not so apparent in late 1941 when, following the United States’ entrance into the war, the military began training officers for foreign occupation. The US Army’s Provost Marshal’s Office (PMO) established the first Military Government Training School in May 1942 at the Charlottesville campus of the University of Virginia. The academic setting was chosen to impart the challenging and august nature of this endeavor.³⁰ The army felt that such training could not be formulaic learning by rote; MGOs had to understand the complex military science of occupation and acquire the critical skills necessary to adapt to unforeseen conditions. Academics from Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities developed the six-month curriculum and imbued it with the intellectual rigor they believed military governance required.³¹ On completion, each man graduated with a diploma from the University of Virginia.³² In turn, students were carefully selected for their academic abilities, most coming from civilian white-collar professions.³³

The instructors were career officers, uniformed professionals, and academics. Among them were Major General David P. Barrows, an anthropologist and former president of the University of California; Joseph P. Harris, later of the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies; and career officer Major General Thomas H. Green, who became judge advocate general in 1945.³⁴ Many of the teachers had served in previous foreign interventions. Prior experience shaped their thinking, and they brought a range of views on issues from the phases of MG operations to salient historical precedents and the viability of American colonialism.³⁵ Some even plumbed antiquity and reached to ancient Greece and Rome for examples their students should follow.³⁶

These differing viewpoints reflected a consensus within the military that the conduct of military occupation and foreign governance was complex. There was no set formula for a perfect operation. Instead, it required deftness and creativity in officers’ thinking, which was reflected in the differing views of the school’s faculty. Barrows, for instance, questioned the prevailing view that military government was apolitical, existing purely during open warfare. He thought that the attempt to separate the strategic aims guiding a particular military occupation from a nation’s political intentions created an acontextual approach that denied the obvious: war was an instrument of international politics. The military, in his view, should acknowledge the political implications of its actions, though he noted that such thinking was outside the mainstream, writing, “At any rate, and however this question of definition may be decided, in this country we know very well what military government is, not so much from attempts at its legal definition as from its actual exercise.”³⁷ Such debate about even the fundamental philosophy of MG highlighted for students the importance of critically thinking through all aspects of military occupation. And to that end, the curriculum at Charlottesville was wide-ranging in its coverage of governance, from security, criminal justice, and repression of insurgency to economic management and cultivation of morale.³⁸

Underlying any debate was a consensus around the core principles of American military occupation, critical thinking being the primary one. The collegiate atmosphere at Charlottesville was meant to push trainees to assess problems for themselves. To that end, many assignments forced students to analyze past cases, which led to some creative interpretations. Trainee MGO Lieutenant Colonel James A. O’Brien argued that the American approach to occupying Mexico during the Mexican-American War (1846–48) originated with the British occupation of Castine, Maine, during the War of 1812.³⁹ This event, O’Brien thought, “must have been clearly in the minds of [General Winfield] Scott and his legal advisors.” He provided no evidence for Scott’s knowledge of the Castine incident, let alone how it may have influenced his use of military tribunals to control lawlessness in Mexico, so it is unclear how well O’Brien performed on the assignment. But his attempt to determine the philosophical origins of American MG highlights the kind of thinking that graduating officers were meant to possess.⁴⁰

The instructors also agreed that American MG was to be limited. MG complemented combat operations and existed only so long as fighting continued.⁴¹ Social control was vital in this interpretation because, as Barrows argued, “anarchy and demoralization” in occupied areas could undermine the front.⁴² Social control was exercised through law, and “military government” was, in essence, martial law; it abrogated civilian law and was then adjudicated by MG through military tribunals (called provost courts).⁴³ But law cannot exist separately from the society it governs. The Charlottesville instructors recognized that MG, once in place, was responsible for the people it occupied. Brigadier General C. W. Wickersham, an instructor at Charlottesville, summarized the complementary nature of martial law and general governance in a speech to the American Bar Association: “The military occupation of enemy territory suspends the operation of the enemy’s civil government. It is then necessary for the occupying power to exercise the functions of government and maintain public order.” But to do so, “[MG] must deal with public works and utilities, the financial affairs … public health and sanitation, education, public safety, legal matters, communications, public welfare, economics and public relations.” In this view, preventing disorder required clear legal boundaries and methods of enforcement as well as restoration of a society that provided for the general welfare.⁴⁴

Wickersham’s account of MG sounds all encompassing, but the instructors—and the military more broadly—also valued minimal intervention. An occupation confined to the period of hostility could not replace existing political and societal structures. MGOs would control criminal justice, including policing and the trial process, yet indirectly monitor locally administered government. Social control through enforcement of military law and retention of existing societal structures reflected the American interpretation of what Geoffrey Best calls the “arch-occupier” model of occupation, which had been popular in Europe during the nineteenth century. European military thinking at that time believed military government to be predicated on an implicit contract with occupied people in which they are treated humanely and their society remains largely unaffected while they, in turn, agree to abide by military rule.⁴⁵ First head of the Charlottesville School Colonel Jesse I. Miller summed up the approach in US military thought as a military regime that “integrates the local laws, institutions, customs, psychology and economics of the occupied area and a superimposed military control with a minimum of change in the former and a maximum of control by the latter.” Reduced to its core elements, Miller’s “minimum change … maximum control” was essentially a maxim for US MG.⁴⁶

The points of agreement at Charlottesville reflected principles for MG in the Judge Advocate General’s 1940 Basic Field Manual: Military Government (FM 27-5).⁴⁷ “Military government is executed by force,” wrote the authors of FM 27-5. Therefore, “it is incumbent upon those who administer it to be strictly guided by … justice, honor, and humanity.” Failure to do so could affect the social cohesion of occupied territory and MG control in turn because “a military occupation marked by harshness, injustice, or oppression leaves lasting resentment.” By contrast, “just, considerate, and mild treatment … will convert enemies into friends.”⁴⁸ Although the terminology “winning hearts and minds” had not entered the military zeitgeist in 1940, this idea infused the approach described in the manual.⁴⁹

FM 27-5 grew most directly from interwar interest in the military science of occupation after the apparent success of US MG in the German Rhineland after World War I. Germans appeared to have cooperated with the Americans, and US forces relied heavily on them. There were problems in the American-controlled Rhineland, to be sure, but they did not approach the looting, rioting, and racial tensions that characterized the British, Belgian, and French areas.⁵⁰ Although continuing from 1918 to 1923, the US military’s experience in the Rhineland led to the publication of two influential studies in 1920. The first was colloquially known as the Hunt report after its author Colonel Irvin L. Hunt, adviser to the occupying Third Army in the Rhineland and later the officer in charge of civil affairs of the American Forces in Germany, its successor. The second was by another staff officer, Colonel Harry Alexander Smith. The antecedents to later US military thinking about MG reside in these documents. Smith partially credited the building of positive relationships with Germans to the selection of officers with “zeal and vision,” those “more likely to create than follow precedents.” Hunt emphasized the military governor’s independence from regular command.⁵¹

Hunt and Smith acknowledged that the American approach to MG in the Rhineland at least partially reflected a long history of foreign excursions that began with General Winfield Scott’s occupation of Mexico during the Mexican-American War (1846–48).⁵² Later writers like Nobleman—a civilian lawyer before entering the army in 1942 who, after leaving Bavaria, returned to New York and wrote his doctoral thesis on the American occupation of Germany—found the origins for American MG even earlier in the country’s military history.⁵³ He noted briefly that the equation between “military government” and “martial law,” which was adjudicated through military tribunals, was evident during the First Seminole War (1817–18).⁵⁴ But for Hunt, Smith, and many of the instructors at Charlottesville, the occupation of Mexico was the historical archetype to aspire toward. Scott had faced a mammoth challenge. The entire US deployment to Mexico was just thirty thousand soldiers, and Scott’s occupation force never exceeded ten thousand.⁵⁵ He asserted control by imposing strict martial law while also leaving other Mexican institutions and government intact.⁵⁶

Scholar Francis Lieber codified the ideal form of arch-occupation in a series of lectures at Columbia University, where he was a professor, just prior to the Civil War. A former Prussian soldier who was wounded at Waterloo, Lieber was particularly concerned with the potential for draftee Union armies to brutalize occupied people and create local hostility, which could undermine battlefield victories. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln promulgated Lieber’s ideas as General Orders 100—commonly known as the Lieber Code—which created rules for Union soldiers occupying Confederate territory. Minimal intervention, including respect for local populations and existing institutions, was central to the Lieber Code, and although Union forces did not always adhere to it perfectly, it nonetheless provided a framework for conciliatory occupation that extended into the post–Civil War Reconstruction of the South.⁵⁷

Hunt did not universally praise the American occupation of the Rhineland. His recommendation against using regular soldiers for MG was perhaps his most important contribution. He noted that “tactical” soldiers are not trained in civil affairs. They retain a potential combat role, hindering their ability to build collaborative relationships with occupied peoples. For him, the lack of officers trained in governance was a major failing of US MG in the Rhineland, and he suggested copying the British and French colonial styles of indirect administration by specialist officers.⁵⁸ The genesis of the Charlottesville school partly lies in the military’s adoption of Hunt’s suggestions. FM 27-5 also clearly differentiated between the security provided by tactical troops and the administration of military government, which was the purview of MGOs.⁵⁹

In keeping with the importance placed on MGOs, FM 27-5 elevated officer discretion. According to the writers, “military government must be flexible. It must suit the people, the country, the time, and the strategical and tactical situation.” Officers had to be “capable of change without undue inconvenience.”⁶⁰ This flexibility was the conceptual keel for the minimalist American approach to MG. It revealed a recognition that occupation is unpredictable. Conditions would vary from region to region—as Hamilton and Joublanc found in Nuremberg and Augsburg—let alone from nation to nation. The mission was therefore distilled to enforcing order. An MGO’s instruments were martial law and respectful use of existing people and institutions. But beyond these core elements, the only thing linking different instances of MG was a pragmatic recognition that the outcomes legitimized the methods.

Thought in Practice: The Axis Threat and Military Government in Hawaii

The bombing of Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941 accelerated preparations for foreign occupation already underway in the War Department. The attack also meant putting MG into practice. That Sunday afternoon, as smoke and debris filled the air, Territorial Governor of Hawaii Joseph B. Poindexter declared martial law using powers in the 1900 Hawaiian Organic Act, which had created the territory. Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, head of the US Army’s Hawaii Department, became military governor.⁶¹ Martial law, Poindexter announced, would apply to “all persons … whether residents … or not, whether citizens of the United States or not.”⁶²

Short’s tenure as military governor was brief. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall recalled him to Washington on 17 December to answer for the Japanese surprise, demoting him in the process.⁶³ Lieutenant General Delos C. Emmons replaced him and Thomas H. Green—later a guest instructor at Charlottesville—became Emmons’s executive officer.⁶⁴ At Charlottesville, Green used Hawaii as a living example of MG in the courses he delivered, providing insight into the thinking that guided the operation.⁶⁵ Following the Pearl Harbor attacks, military command in Hawaii had believed that Japanese invasion was imminent and that Japanese subversives on the islands posed a real threat. These together were rationales for martial law and convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to authorize it.⁶⁶

MG in Hawaii continued until late 1944. The Supreme Court ruled in February 1946 that subjecting Americans to martial law was unconstitutional.⁶⁷ During the war, however, Hawaii was an important touchstone for the conduct of MG, modeling principles for trainee MGOs. These principles were apparent in Hawaii, where the stated aim was ensuring that the territory’s resources and people were mobilized for defense, which included evacuating women and children and “building fortifications and airfields.”⁶⁸ But strict enforcement of martial law was MG’s first priority, both to enforce civilian compliance and to identify possible pro-Japanese subversion. The army moved quickly once martial law was declared, following the doctrine in FM 27-5. Civilian government offices and courts were closed, and the press was censored. Military law replaced civilian law and was adjudicated through military tribunals. Habeas corpus was suspended.⁶⁹ The army also adhered to the manual’s intellectual spirit and imposed additional limits on civil liberties. Blackouts were established and curfews announced; all residents were required to register with MG and thereafter carry identification cards.⁷⁰ Strict controls were placed over the economy. Green explained to students at Charlottesville that it was necessary to bind workers to their jobs and fix wage scales in order to prevent labor problems. But economic restrictions extended to closing bars and restricting the “sale of all merchandise,” which effectively shut down the local economy. Violations of any restrictions led to military prosecution, and the punishments were harsh.⁷¹

But as Green later explained to students at Charlottesville, enforcing order was only part of military governance. He listed nine other issues concerning MG in Hawaii that the trainee officers should also consider in their own operations, including “food problems; control of communications; racial problems; and housing shortages.” Good governance meant attending to the full suite of people’s needs.⁷² Hawaiian MG was also astonishingly small, “consisting of three officers and four enlisted men,” so the broader concerns of government were handled through existing administrative structures, which demonstrated, Green argued, the feasibility of the minimalist American approach to occupation.⁷³

MG in Hawaii imposed the most far-reaching restrictions on civil liberties ever taken on US soil. In Green’s view, the territory’s “polygot [sic] population” justified this action. Whites were a minority constituting just one-quarter (104,000) of the islands’ 420,000 people. The rest were Hawaiian and Asian, and 159,000 (38 percent) were Japanese by birth or descent.⁷⁴ That nonwhites outnumbered whites three to one was an uncomfortable reality in racist, 1940s America in which Jim Crow remained law in the South and the US military was segregated. Officers in Hawaii instinctively rejected the idea of interracial harmony, instead regarding racial diversity as such a threat to peace that preventing “riots” and “racial conflict” came before “espionage and sabotage” in Green’s list of priorities after law and order.⁷⁵

Fear of subversives among Hawaiian Japanese extended from a radicalized worldview. On 8 December 1941, Major General Short announced a special policy regarding alien Japanese aged fourteen and above. He “enjoined [them] to preserve the peace towards the United States and to refrain from crime against the public safety … and … from actual hostility or giving information, aid, or comfort to enemies of the United States.” Assumed to be innately guilty, alien Japanese were considered potential enemies and restricted from possessing firearms, weapons “or similar implements” of other kinds, shortwave radios, transmitting sets, or signal devices. It was also illegal for them to change their residence, travel outside the islands, or write or say anything against the United States, its military, or its government. But suspicion even resided in conciliatory actions, such as the instruction that Japanese Americans be treated with “such friendliness as may be compatible with loyalty and allegiance.” This order allowed non-Japanese US citizens to subjectively evaluate “loyalty and allegiance.”⁷⁶ Similar logic led to mass internment of Japanese inside the continental United States, though such steps were impractical in Hawaii.⁷⁷ The size of the Japanese population made them critical to the labor force and the economy. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox still advocated removing all Japanese to the outer islands, but Emmons argued that most were loyal Americans and prevented the plan’s implementation. In total, the number of Japanese interned on Hawaii never exceeded two thousand.⁷⁸

Emmons’s resistance highlighted the extent of MGOs’ discretion, which Green noted led often to “unusual business.” For instance, when MG was imposed, bars were closed, and alcohol banned to prevent disorder, MGOs encouraged the sale of candy in their place. This approach failed to prevent soldiers or civilians from drinking, and within a few months the prohibitions were rescinded.⁷⁹ Law enforcement relaxed. Sentences initially imposed by MG were harsh, but the severity eased with the lack of general resistance to martial law.⁸⁰

New Expectations, Old Behaviors

Military and civilian leaders in the United States and Britain regarded World War II as different from preceding conflicts, even World War I. The Axis powers had seemingly made warfare more brutal. They openly engaged in mass killing and dislocation of undesirable groups and advocated “total war,” legitimizing attacks against civilians, who were now considered extensions of a state’s war power. It is worth noting that the Allies also engaged in total war, bombing major German and Japanese cities relentlessly, which caused mass death, physical devastation, and internal displacement. But the Allies saw these bombings as reciprocal actions in a war started by their opponents. For occupation planners, the militaristic ideologies underpinning Nazism and Japanese Imperialism, ideologies that drove this new type of war, required Germans and Japanese to resist the Allies to the bitter end.⁸¹

Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s agreement at Casablanca in January 1943 to seek unconditional Axis surrender expanded potential occupations to the entireties of Germany, Japan, and Italy, as well as large swathes of intervening territory. More officers than could be trained at Charlottesville were needed for these massive operations, necessitating establishment of Civil Affairs Training Schools (CATS) throughout the United States and Britain.⁸² These schools shortened the Charlottesville curriculum to between one and two months, and they became more didactic, but the core principles remained essentially the same.⁸³

FM 27-5 was updated in 1943 to address the unique challenges of occupying areas formerly controlled by the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Where the 1940 version expected an acquiescent occupied population and largely intact societal infrastructure, the 1943 edition predicted far worse conditions: “Civil affairs control may have to be performed under the most difficult circumstances…. Civil administration may have broken down wholly or in part…. There may be rioting, looting, or other forms of disorder, particularly if the local police force has disintegrated…. If the area has been fought over or bombed, widespread destruction of buildings and other installations … may be anticipated.”⁸⁴ But the updated version retained the arch-occupier contractual concept of military rule. It reiterated that MG’s mission was “to assist military operations” through social control. Specifically, its role remained “maintaining order, promoting security,” and “preventing interference with military operations.”⁸⁵

The updated manual’s descriptions of postconflict conditions showed remarkable foresight in 1943, before the full extent of the war’s destruction was realized. The writers predicted “large numbers of … homeless” at least in part foreseeing the massive DP problem that the Allies later faced in Germany.⁸⁶ Their dire prognosis of the horrors of Nazi and Japanese rule aimed to steel MGOs: “The enemy may have brought in large numbers of forced laborers from distant areas, who will desperately seek repatriation…. Water supplies may have been polluted…. The health and morale of the population may have been undermined. There may be few facilities to prevent the spread of pestilence from cities and concentration camps.”⁸⁷ More devastating war elevated the urgency of providing “emergency relief” such as “food, clothing, shelter, and medical aid, to meet subsistence standards.” The authors also stressed that such conditions could require a more domineering form of martial rule than that traditionally employed by Americans. Officers could not assume local cooperation and were to prepare for “the actual administration of the chief political offices of the government.”⁸⁸ This included the existing police, and MGOs were to prepare for “creation of a new [force].”⁸⁹

The authors of the 1943 edition accurately predicted the consequences of twentieth-century, technologically enhanced warfare. Their linking of physical destruction to crime also foreshadowed the destruction-and-anarchy trope that has since permeated literature on postwar Germany. But rather than necessitating an adjustment in approach, the core calculus and overarching philosophy of MG remained the same. Officers were to care for occupied people and assume greater administrative responsibilities only where necessary to “preserve order … and [reestablish] … law and order.” Greater challenges further required officers to be more adaptive than previously, rather than less so.⁹⁰

Other US military manuals and handbooks produced late in the war maintained the 1943 edition’s assumption that Nazism and Japanese Imperialism would leave a trail of destruction.⁹¹ The manuals specific to Germany cast Nazism as a totalizing, corruptive ideology. The German Police Handbook, for instance, described the “net of the SD [the SS Security Service, Sicherheitsdienst] having been thrown over the entire population,” therefore suggesting that every German police officer posed a threat to occupation security. This suggests a poor understanding of internal SS structures. Although all police fell under SS control—and ultimately that of Heinrich Himmler—the SD was SS intelligence and was not responsible for policing. But the authors of the Police Handbook appear to have used the specter of the SD to demonstrate the pervasiveness of Nazism.⁹² This view of Nazi Germany as different from other enemies was maintained in the Public Safety Manual of Procedures for Germany published in September 1944 on the eve of the first incursions into Germany. It adjusted MG approaches toward the specifics of Nazism so that enforcing order became suspending Nazi law, shutting down Nazi courts, and arresting Nazis.⁹³

For the political establishment in Washington, however, Nazism posed a unique, existential threat to world peace such that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau’s plan to permanently break Germany into four agrarian states was not especially radical. Although not adopted, the Morgenthau Plan was seriously considered within Roosevelt’s administration until early 1945 because it answered the American public’s and the Allies’ fear of Nazism and German militarism.⁹⁴ In Britain, Lord Robert Vansittart’s plan was virtually identical, and British paymaster general Frederick Lindemann, First Viscount Cherwell, openly called for his government to support Morgenthau’s vision.⁹⁵ The common thinking in Washington was only barely less extreme, and the consensus fell on using occupation to transform Germany into a peaceful member of the democratic Western world order.⁹⁶

Transformational ambitions were the antithesis of the military’s approach to MG. The War Department and key generals like Eisenhower resisted MG’s becoming an agent for social change. But they agreed that American legal principles like due process separated Western democracies from arbitrary Nazi rule and should be emphasized during the occupation. Fair legal practice complemented the good governance required in the arch-occupier model. If Nazi concepts of state supremacy over law and justice were also undermined, then so much the better.⁹⁷

American military government was predicated on honorable officers imposing the law fairly and justly, but the historical reality was quite different. Rather than viewing the law as a transcendent, impartial arbiter of behaviors, MGOs had historically tended to use martial law (through MG Legal Codes) subjectively in order to enforce their authority. This subjectivity was clearest in the promulgation of the occupation laws themselves, which were determined on a case-by-case basis by the theatre commander who tailored the military’s court martial code. Local commanders then enforced this specific law through a two-tiered tribunal system in which commissions handled minor offenses and provost courts tried serious offenses. They were free to interpret the legal code, allocate cases to different courts, and consequently assign punishments largely as they saw fit.⁹⁸ Bringing greater equity in procedure and outcome to this system required entirely rewriting criminal justice policy, and from late 1942, the army recruited numerous civilian lawyers to standardize the MG Legal Code and tribunal system.⁹⁹

According to Nobleman, the legal division faced an impossible challenge of creating a standardized system that would be reliant on regular officers rather than lawyers and would consistently produce the same consequences for the each offense. Procedures had to be simple and formulaic, thereby restricting judicial discretion to virtually nil, yet MGOs’ ability to adaptively govern had to be retained. Therefore, fundamental questions of criminal justice remained with these officers, including the offense charged and determination of guilt.¹⁰⁰ Resolving these two conditions proved so vexing that planners fell far behind the progress of the war, and their indecision ultimately derailed the project. In April 1944, Eisenhower ordered them to provide new directives by D-Day in June. They had submitted nothing by September. Frustrated, his forces on the verge of invading of Germany, Eisenhower scraped the project, promulgated an MG Legal Code for Nazi Germany—Section 2M—and authorized frontline officers to follow a 1943 directive that maintained the military’s original approaches to law and order.¹⁰¹ These orders “authorized [MGOs] to establish such military courts for the control of the population of the occupied areas as may seem … desirable, and to establish appropriate regulations regarding their jurisdiction and power.”¹⁰² This 1943 directive reached back to a traditional American interpretation of martial law, instructing officers to “establish military commissions and provost courts to try inhabitants for offenses affecting the military administration.” The result was that MGOs were given carte blanche to do as they thought necessary to ensure security.¹⁰³

American martial law was first established in Germany in September 1944 in the village Kornelimünster, on the Belgian border outside Aachen. Aachen was subsequently captured after a month-long battle through October that saw an American force of one hundred thousand waylaid by a German defense less than one-fifth the size.¹⁰⁴ MGOs followed Eisenhower’s September orders and enforced martial law through tribunals that followed the two-tiered structure. Most were perfunctory trials before the local MG commander or his delegate lasting little more than a few minutes.¹⁰⁵

The Allied advance in the west stalled over the winter of 1944–45, and for three months Aachen and its surrounds were the only areas of Germany under American and British control. American MG established strict martial law in the city and in the surrounding rural district, enforcing curfews and restrictions on travel. Bombing and subsequent fighting had destroyed much of the city, and looting and thievery occurred, but Germans mostly passively accepted Allied rule. The vast majority of offenses were minor violations of MG’s social controls including curfews and restrictions on unauthorized travel. The conviction rate was near 98 percent and punishments were harsh. The average sentence for violating curfews and travel bans was three months. Yet on the whole, occupied Germans behaved cordially as MG predicted. Locals were recalled to administrative posts and life returned to a semblance of peacetime normality.¹⁰⁶

This rough-and-ready approach to occupation in Aachen quickly became a problem in the United States. Being the only part of Germany under American occupation, this toehold in Nazi territory drew media attention and then sustained criticism, surprising a military leadership used to patriotic support. In January 1945, a series of news stories describing the MG of Aachen’s overly accommodating embrace of Germans sparked public outrage.¹⁰⁷ The stories originated with three officers from the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the modern Central Intelligence Agency), Saul K. Padover, Paul Sweet, and Lewis F. Gittler, who discovered that Aachen’s MG detachment had appointed former Nazis and German elites (many of whom had profited from Nazism) to positions of power in the city’s government.¹⁰⁸ Their Padover-Sweet report accused MG of facilitating the emergence of a “new elite” antithetical to American democratic values and the Allies’ transformational aims for Germany. The press attention concerned Eisenhower and sparked fears within SHAEF that other MG detachments would be investigated, making it difficult to justify expedience over social transformation. In response, Eisenhower ordered outspoken support for denazification and implementation of democracy in occupied Germany.¹⁰⁹ Raymond Daniell of the New York Times pointed out a few months later that this rhetorical shift did not change MG practice on the ground. In fact, there remained a “vast difference between the avowed policy towards Germany enunciated at top and the manner in which it is administered at the level where it touches the German people.”¹¹⁰ While the war continued, MG detachments continued to operate like Hamilton in Nuremberg and Joublanc in Augsburg. They exercised control through local institutions staffed by Germans and, beyond removing overt Nazis, only barely considered administrators’ former Nazi affiliations. This maintenance of the arch-occupier approach aligned with instructions to restore basic infrastructure and government administration, suggesting that overt concerns about the unique dangers of Nazism were little more than a gloss on long-standing institutional thinking.¹¹¹