Читать книгу The Art of Occupation - Thomas J. Kehoe - Страница 13

3 A Violent Transition

First Lieutenant Harry D. Condron of the US First Army’s Historical Service arrived in Aachen on the morning of 21 October 1944. The city had surrendered that day, and he had orders to interview participants and document the battle. The report he produced is a glorification of American heroism in the face of implacable Nazi resistance. He glosses over the human trauma and horror, choosing to describe the consequences of warfare by focusing on the physical damage he saw. Nearly all the buildings “over the route … travelled” had been “completely gutted,” he wrote. “It was rare indeed when a building was found that was still usable.” The violence and chaos of the prior three weeks of sustained combat is almost entirely absent from his account, as is any overt discussion of social disorder or crime.¹

Condron instead offers a liberationist narrative in which the Americans fought through the city and discovered German civilians cowering in air raid shelters and ruined homes. Evacuating them was “of primary importance … for the protection of the rear [of the American forces] from any possible enemy action.”² But this tactical concern did not affect the American army’s humanity: “As the infantry took an area … the civilians would surrender. They would be organized and the march to the rear would commence under infantry guard, to be taken over after a few blocks by the military government and the MPs [military police].”³ The Germans were surprised by the Americans’ management. Rather than “harsh and cruel treatment” including being detained in “barbed wire enclosures with no shelter” and having “their families broken up,” they were sent to camps and provided with food, coffee, and winter clothing.⁴ “Needless to say,” writes Condron, “they were happily amazed at the humane treatment.”⁵ He portrays the Americans as the Nazis’ antithesis. Even for Germans, the American arrival meant a better life, such that the physical destruction of war became a backdrop to well-ordered lines of civilians walking toward warm food, comfortable beds, and peace.⁶

Some of the uglier social realities of combat and American conquest are apparent from a careful reading. Large numbers of Poles and Russians discovered among the civilian evacuees were separated from the Germans and removed to a different, unspecified area. These people were most likely forced laborers brought west by the Nazis and liberated by the Americans; and like other liberated Nazi slaves, some had no doubt celebrated their freedom by drinking, rioting, and looting. Many would join the millions of DPs who moved en masse around Germany and Europe throughout 1945. Condron also skims over the mass identification of the German evacuees, their detention in camps, and a subsequent systematic search for plainclothes German soldiers. He omits that the Americans prioritized security and social control over civilian comfort (let alone happiness). They kept German civilians detained until satisfied that all threats were eliminated, and they summarily executed as spies and “partisans” those nonuniformed soldiers that failed to identify themselves.⁷

Condron’s account contrasts sharply with narratives that emerged just a short time later, which vividly portray destruction, disorder, and violence accompanying the Western Allies’ advance. In 1946, correspondent for the US military’s Army Talks magazine Julian Bach described the Germany of 1945 as “a country without cities.” Images of a land laid to waste by war underpin the destruction-and-anarchy narrative and voice the link that observers drew between extensive physical damage and fraying social bonds, which supposedly gave rise to social disorder and crime.⁸ In a 1948 description of MG’s arrival in Darmstadt, the officers dismiss “fantastic reports” of the city’s being “eighty per cent destroyed,” only to find that the reality was far worse. “All life … was at a complete standstill,” and the city, physically destroyed, was awash in gangs and criminals as rioting, looting, rape, and murder were rampant.⁹

Though sanitized and self-glorifying, Condron’s account illuminates some of the complexities of the transition from Nazi to Allied control during conquest, a transition that is obscured in narratives where war destroys physical and social infrastructure and results in lawless space. Condron touches on a tenacity in social bonds—even if only between Germans—and points to a cycle of social disorder surrounding combat rather than just emerging from it. Even for historians who argue that social conditions deteriorated before Allied conquest, pointing to the disintegration of Nazism and a consequent rise in crime as a precursor to postwar social conditions, the transitory moments—often little more than days or hours, and in the countryside even minutes—remain a blind spot. But civilians lived through these moments. They experienced the weakening of Nazi control, they cowered when the Allies arrived, and they survived through actual fighting. This period of transition occurred progressively across Germany as the Allies advanced over the winter and spring of 1944–45. It was frequently disorderly and violent, and criminal behavior by civilians and soldiers was common. Understanding the phases of this process and the social realities that obtained in each is foundational to the longer history of American control and German recovery.

Disintegrating Nazi Control

For people living in Germany in 1945, the terror of war began long before the arrival of the Allies. No urban area was safe from Allied bombing, and by the end of the war the British and Americans had together bombed nearly every major German town and city. In industrial and economic centers like Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, and Bremen, bombing was an ever-present threat. The Germans responded by evacuating people to the countryside.¹⁰ Most of Aachen’s population was evacuated after British bombing raids in spring 1944, and according to Condron, when the Americans arrived only approximately 20,000 people remained, reduced from 165,000 before the war.¹¹

Those in the countryside escaped the dangers of sustained bombardment, but rural life had its own problems. After the D-Day landings in June 1944, the Allies’ three-front assault on Germany cut its access to basic resources, forcing reductions in rations to near starvation levels.¹² Even so, the Nazi regime strained to maintain a sense of normal daily life until the very end, promoting soccer matches and continuing to show movies until mere days before the Allies arrived.¹³ These efforts to maintain morale did little to minimize the anxiety of impending defeat or overshadow the lack of resources, and crime rose as Germans struggled to survive. The problem became pronounced during the winter of 1944–45. People supplemented their state rations with petty thievery and from a burgeoning black market, and for the Nazis, this rise in crime became another front in a losing war, a vivid reminder of their disintegrating control. Police tracked a proliferation of youth gangs, criminal syndicates, and criminal violence, which in Nazi thinking indicated a failure of the German national will that was necessary for victory.¹⁴

All criminal behavior in Nazi thinking reflected the perpetrator’s fundamental—often believed to be incurable—personal weakness. From the beginning, the regime had moved to end criminality by removing these “criminal deviants” from society.¹⁵ But the rising disorder at the end of the war was something different, a collapse of national spirit due to defeatism. A defeatist attitude was sometimes defined by Nazi thinkers as a physical deviance and other times as something like a spiritual weakness, but in each case it was believed to be infectious. To Hitler, the deteriorating social order before Allied invasion was a terrifyingly familiar repeat of the home-front collapse at the end of World War I, which he believed precipitated Germany’s defeat. He so firmly believed in the deleterious effects of defeatism that he enacted special civilian and military laws in 1939 to prevent just such a collapse, and throughout the war People’s Courts and military tribunals aggressively punished offenders. The punishments became steadily more severe until death was standard.¹⁶ But as defeat became inevitable in the waning days of the war, even the prospect of a court-adjudicated capital sentence did not prevent rising crime, and swift and public repercussions were ordered. Squads of Nazis hunted down even the most minor violators, labeling petty criminals “defeatists” along with more serious offenders and often summarily executing them.¹⁷

But even the Nazis’ most violent efforts at quelling disorder had little effect. Threat of reprisal did force many Germans to fight against overwhelming odds; it did not, however, eliminate needs-driven crime, and in many places it merely sped disintegration of societal infrastructure.¹⁸ For many living through the regime’s last months, a desperate desire for survival overrode all but the most potent threats of retaliation. Even in Berlin, where Nazi control was ostensibly strongest, the black market became so pervasive in late 1944 that traders were visible on the streets and police rarely did more than observe them.¹⁹ The pervasive anxiety driving this crime was not just a result of the economic disaster caused by Allied encirclement; Germans were also deeply afraid of imminent conquest.²⁰ It stripped them of ability to predict a future beyond defeat, which was damaging psychologically and, in turn, socially. The result was resource hoarding as people vainly tried to buttress their livelihoods against impending calamity.²¹

The Nazis’ loss of control in the final stages of the war has supported narratives of a postwar crime wave, such as Bessel’s depiction of Germany’s “ravaged landscape,” which extends beyond physical destruction to collapse of the political, administrative, cultural, and psychological scaffolding believed necessary for maintaining social order.²² For scholars like Bessel who rightly reject the idea of a zero-hour (Stunde Null) caesura between the scourge of war and the postwar recovery the crime and violent reprisals in the Nazi regime’s final days are thought to have created a cycle of worsening disorder that the Allies could not easily contain in occupation.²³

Extending a psychological view of trauma as leading to disordered patterns of behavior, some scholars assume that traumatic events in society—such as war—propagate lasting cycles of disorder and violence.²⁴ Such thinking has shaped interpretations of social disorder and crime in postwar Germany, though the research base is unsteady. The existing literature on psychological damage—including post-traumatic stress and vicarious trauma (i.e., the experience of another person’s trauma, such as a parent)—does acknowledge personal consequences such as depression and gradually emergent sociological effects, including domestic violence and reactionary political movements.²⁵ It does not include the immediate emergence of the destabilizing social disorder and crime imagined to have occurred after the war.²⁶ By contrast, the studies that do suggest criminal behavior examine marginalized, persistently traumatized groups such as African Americans and indigenous peoples that endure ongoing depredations extending from dislocation and dispossession in the past. Such analyses may apply to European Jews and other victims of the Holocaust targeted by the Nazis, partly because of ancient animosities.²⁷

But natural disaster is a better analogue for the experience of many Germans after the war. People certainly suffer psychological scars from such horrific events, yet there is little evidence of such an enduring disorganization of society. Such incidents instead tend to draw people together.²⁸ This was true of bombing during the war, which tightened social bonds rather than breaking them as predicted. It is the often-overlooked tenacity of lateral social bonds in Germany between families, friends, and neighbors that Condron highlights. Indeed, American MG anticipated that such bonds would prevail through combat and could be used by MG.²⁹

Allied conquest did in the short run break up society, separating family members and friends, shutting down local government, and all but halting normal daily life. And the cycle of social disorder and Nazi-initiated reciprocal violence did create consequences that were evident to the first Allied soldiers. They found “criminals” lying shot in the streets and “defeatists” hanging from trees with condemnations around their necks. Key government administrators were often among the dead, while others had been driven into hiding for fear of denouncement and summary execution. The new occupiers were often bereft of even rudimentary knowledge of the area and the local administrative support on which they planned to rely.³⁰ According to an internal US military history of MG, “The conditions the detachments found [across Germany] were the same. Government buildings had been damaged or destroyed … personnel had been evacuated, or were in hiding. People were starving…. Water sources were contaminated…. All electricity had stopped. Displaced persons, former slave laborers, and homeless Germans crowded the roads and the communities stealing and looting.”³¹ But the idea that the Nazis had lost control was unexpected, and it often took a while for the Allies to recognize that some of the criminal problems they faced were legacies of Nazi-era disorder rather than combat. One British MG detachment commander in the Netherlands just across the border wrote with evident surprise in January 1945 that it had “become apparent … that the black market has existed in this area longer and on a far larger scale than at first believed.”³² The desperate situation that the Allies found was not merely a result of German defeat and what one cursory study calls a consequent “law and order gap” but rather a cycle of disorder initiated during Nazi rule, exacerbated by the regime’s violent reprisals, and entrenched for a period by Allied conquest.³³

Lawless Transitions

The Allied advance in the west stalled following the capture of Aachen. Winter set in. And then, on 16 December 1944, the Germans launched a massive surprise offensive through the Ardennes forest. The resulting Battle of the Bulge—named for the deep incursion through the American lines—lasted over a month. Though the Allies ultimately reversed German gains by the end of January, it took through February before an attack across the Rhine was possible. Once the assault was underway, Nazi rule crumbled quickly and progressively as the Allies swept across Germany, the Americans heading southeast into Bavaria and the British moving north. A similar pattern of social conditions obtained in each area conquered. The approach of Allied forces intensified social disorder and Nazi reprisals. Bombardment and combat drove civilians into hiding. Then power transitioned, and what had once been Nazi territory fell under Allied control.³⁴

The social, psychological, and political ramifications of these—often very brief—moments of transition are not well understood. Most accounts focus on the emotional dimensions of conquest, the sensation of defeat, or, for Nazi slaves and state enemies like Jews, the feeling of liberation. Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf’s vivid personal anecdote of the fear, uncertainty, and freedom he and other Germans in Berlin experienced when the Nazi regime collapsed has become a narrative touchstone.³⁵ He describes stealing because there were no repercussions for doing so during this “holding breath between regimes,” a space of literal lawlessness.³⁶ For Dahrendorf, this caesura helps explain postwar disorder. In his telling, even reasonable people committed crimes in the absence of social constraints. This lawless period has been magnified in many histories of the postwar such that when Dahrendorf was writing in the 1980s, it was reasonable to describe the entire occupation from 1945 to 1948 as one of “chaos.”³⁷

He did not make this claim, however. Careful reading of Dahrendorf’s anecdote reveals the brevity of the actual transition between the end of Nazi rule and the Allies’ assumption of power. Soviet soldiers stopped the looting that Dahrendorf describes within hours. More importantly, the experience of transition was not just geographic; it was personal, an intersection between psychology and space, the analysis of which is crucial to understanding the social realities surrounding the Allies’ advance. The moment of lawlessness passed in an instant for many Germans: for those in air raid shelters opened by Allied soldiers, or those in rural areas like Kulmbach and Eschwege who suddenly found foreign soldiers passing their farms and parking in their villages. For others, the period of lawlessness was longer. In cities like Bremen, Hamburg, Darmstadt, and Nuremberg, combat created lawless spaces where the transition took days or weeks. In other areas, the Nazis disappeared and the Allies did not arrive until sometime later, leaving inhabitants in limbo in the interim. Some people avoided Allied control and, for as long as possible, existed in the interim space. Developing a picture of transitory crime therefore requires examining three overlapping categories of mental and geographic lawless space: that which existed during combat; in the interim between Nazi collapse and the Allies’ arrival; and on the margins, involving people that refused to accept new authority. It also requires clarifying the major perpetrators. As Dahrendorf suggests, all manner of people committed crimes during the time surrounding conquest. But for clarity, they roughly fell into three categories that remained the dominant framework throughout the occupation: German civilians, foreigners (often labeled “DPs,” even though that grouping was narrower), and Allied soldiers. Even in the haze of war, the American military approached the policing and prosecuting of these groups differently. The first two fell under the responsibility of MG, while soldiers were the concern of regular military command.³⁸

It is difficult to develop a satisfactory account of crime that occurs during combat using historical, criminological, or interdisciplinary methods. Firstly, it is not clear what constitutes a “crime” in a live combat environment. Most violence by soldiers against soldiers falls under combat immunity and is legally classified as noncriminal.³⁹ But the hard line this implies between combat violence and criminal behavior blurs when we consider the killing of enemy soldiers in the process of surrender, violence against nonuniformed defenders (sometimes now referred to as “enemy combatants”), or violence against civilians. The well-known issues of collateral damage and accidental victimization make the problem murkier still.⁴⁰

It is only marginally easier to establish a property offense during combat. During World War II, nearly every military rationalized the theft of food and other staples by soldiers as their acquiring the basic necessities for survival. But on the rare occasions that MPs did investigate theft and looting, finding a wronged party was nearly impossible. Arrested soldiers rarely remembered (or were willing to remember) where they had acquired stolen goods, and oftentimes the likely places had been destroyed in the fighting.⁴¹

The extent to which categorization problems affected prosecutions is difficult to determine. It is clear, however, that virtually no American or British soldier was prosecuted—let alone punished—for a violent crime against Germans, or for looting and theft, committed during combat. There were very few prosecutions of soldiers for any crimes against civilians during the advance across Germany in 1944–45.⁴² Evidence from criminal investigations and observer accounts suggest that the number of crimes soldiers committed far exceeded the rate at which they were arrested or prosecuted.⁴³ The US military was aware of a rise in soldier-perpetrated murder between August 1944 and the end of the war, with a “sudden large increase in April and May [1945].” But violent offenses such as assault and murder were especially difficult for military investigators to identify and therefore prosecute, even if they were wont to do so.⁴⁴

Maintaining the morale and integrity of tactical units also outweighed the military’s concerns about potential crimes by its soldiers. Sexual offenses were one partial exception: the context of combat does not mitigate or obscure the obvious criminality of sex crimes, and the military was aware that “rape” was “a large problem in the European Theater of Operations.” This included “Continental France” and, in “March and April [1945],” the “large scale invasion of Germany.”⁴⁵ But very little was done about it. JAG rarely prosecuted American soldiers for sex crimes. Only between 600 and 1,500 soldiers were charged during the first half of 1945, most for incidents occurring outside combat.⁴⁶ This may suggest the military’s inattention to crime occurring during combat. In one of the first examinations of American-perpetrated rape in World War II, Susan Brownmiller famously describes the battlefield as space for predatory male sexual violence.⁴⁷ While it is now evident that American soldiers committed far more sex crimes than suggested by the small number of JAG prosecutions, it is not clear how many of these crimes occurred during combat. They appear to be a problem that emerged in the victorious aftermath.⁴⁸

It is equally difficult to categorize, or identify, crimes committed by civilians. It is not clear, for instance, whether a civilian who during combat steals food or some other resource vital for survival should be considered to have committed a crime. Such questions tap old ethical quandaries: what constitutes a “crime” in desperate circumstances, and can context justify needs-driven acts? On the whole, US officers and MGOs were not affected by such philosophical problems and instead aggressively moved to restore social order, arresting and detaining any civilian suspected of thievery, looting, or property damage, no matter the motivation. MPs and the first MG detachments handled this initial stabilization. In the cities, MG detachments closely shadowed frontline forces and were often little more than a few blocks behind them. Quite frequently they saw what they believed to be looting.⁴⁹ Those arrested were referred for trial in a military court, which at first consisted of little more than an officer dispensing summary judgments with the loosest reference to either the MG Legal Code or German law. Few records remain, and those that do suggest that hearings rarely lasted more than a few minutes and conviction was near certain.

A small number of defendants arrested by American forces were referred to more formal military courts attached to the First, Third, and Ninth Armies.⁵⁰ These records provide scant details, often making it impossible to determine where a crime occurred. But the distribution of charges laid during these trials foreshadowed the later standard: disproportionately high rates of offenses against the strict MG controls such as curfew and travel restrictions, followed by a far smaller number of property crimes, and comparatively few violent offenses.⁵¹

The picture was very different in combat areas or in places where Allied authority was weak. During the Battle of the Bulge, numerous civilians were arrested in the countryside around Aachen for looting, many in groups. The punishments MG courts imposed were severe, ranging from two to ten years’ imprisonment. The apparent intention was to disperse nascent gangs. Those who were not German frequently had their sentences suspended on the condition that they “[left] Germany within 24 hours and [did] not return during the occupation.”⁵² Urban areas were even more chaotic. One set of records shows arrests made around Oberkassel—a neighborhood of Düsseldorf—during March and April 1945. Düsseldorf abutted the heavily defended Ruhr industrial region, which the Allies bypassed and isolated during the initial advance. This Ruhr Pocket was then effectively besieged until late April. Spurred by the threat of violent Nazi retaliation against defeatists, the motley remnants of Wehrmacht units and Volkssturm militia kept fighting, making the area one of the truest examples of near total lawlessness.⁵³

American soldiers frequently arrested German looters who, trying to survive, strayed out of the pocket. They were then tried in the summary courts in Oberkassel. There is little evidence of even rudimentary gang formation in the records of these arrests, suggesting that even the most tenacious social bonds may have disappeared. Unlike in occupied areas, however, where conviction rates were frequently over 90 percent, in Oberkassel just under 60 percent of those charged were convicted. And their punishments were mild, ranging between thirty days’ and six months’ imprisonment. These differences suggest that MGOs recognized both the terrible conditions those arrested were escaping and the likelihood that many were swept up in the indiscriminate efforts at social control by frontline units.⁵⁴

The Allies often struggled to restore order immediately after combat. Most looting and rioting occurred as people emerged from hiding after combat ceased but before Allied power was firmly established. Crime and disorder soared, for instance, after the British captured Bremen on 27 April. The city, which was to be turned over to the Americans as their deepwater port, continued to experience disorder well after the handover. One of the first American MGOs later explained that “in the early days of occupation” there was “considerable … looting.”⁵⁵ The records of the Bremen MG courts support his impressions, showing that it took at least six weeks for the Americans to restore some semblance of order.⁵⁶ MGOs and MPs used whatever means necessary to quell this criminality, including mass arrests and aggressive prosecution. In Bremen, MG began “a practice of increasing sentences … as a deterrent,” which they believed “practically stopped” looting.⁵⁷

The rapidity of the Allied advance created other, less easily defined spaces in which law and order essentially did not exist. Many were rural. The Americans bypassed large areas of southern Bavaria and Austria, for example, and Nazi control just melted away during April 1945. It was sometimes weeks before the first occupiers arrived. Some of these essentially unoccupied areas became the amoral, near postapocalyptic environments that have figured prominently in accounts of postwar disorder: where the strong ruled, the weak suffered, gangs were formed, and brutality, violence, and theft were normalized. Some refugees and internally displaced people were perpetually pushed into this lawlessness by the destruction of towns and cities. Others wanted to remain in these marginal spaces.

Developing a picture of crime and social conditions is hardest for these marginal spaces because they were, by their very nature, unobserved; there is little direct reporting of specific incidents. Early depictions of occupation crime nonetheless focus on these rural, uncontrolled areas where Allied power was notionally weakest. Lieutenant General Lucius Clay, then the deputy military governor of the American Zone (de facto military governor from 1945, and military governor from 1947), claims in his memoir that DP gangs impersonating soldiers threatened to “get out of hand” during 1945, becoming a particularly pressing problem in the summer after the war ended.⁵⁸ At least partially reflecting Clay, both Frederiksen in the early 1950s and Kosyra later both describe a lawless countryside filled with dangerous gangs that robbed and killed at will, raiding farms and ambushing travelers. These gangs were allegedly so well organized that they challenged military units dispatched to control them. These narratives of near anarchy in the countryside are primarily supported by inference from circumstantial conditions: masses of DPs and refugees moving around the country, an absence of administration, a desperate shortage of food and other necessities, and widespread reports of German and Allied fears. They also have their foundations in the transitory phase of the occupation when large areas of Germany remained essentially lawless, which allowed formation of gangs.⁵⁹

In the end, we have no way of knowing how many criminals existed in these marginal spaces. From a historical viewpoint, their potentially criminal acts are lost among the evidence of combat violence and Nazi reprisals. It nonetheless appears that profound disorder emerged in some areas abandoned by the Nazis. In certain places this disorder continued for days or weeks after the Allies established control over nearby towns and cities, though the loose groups of criminals arrested lack the sophisticated organization that Frederiksen, Kosyra, and others suggest in their depictions of gang crime. Much of this interim lawlessness dissipated quickly, however, so the arriving soldiers typically only saw the consequences: houses showing signs of break-in, discarded goods from looting, and the occasional body. Germans also reported the previous disorder to their new Allied governors. Over the summer of 1945, American MG detachments often delegated an officer to record and investigate the numerous complaints received, though he could rarely offer more than condolences.⁶⁰

The brevity of postconflict disorder is suggested in the absence of charges for civilian-perpetrated violence. It seems unimaginable that such violence did not occur at higher rates than normal, especially in the course of looting and robbery. Observer reports and accounts from a few years later describe widespread rioting, rape, and murder in the time surrounding conquest.⁶¹ And while there are reasons to believe that such disorder did occur, there are also reasons to question its nature, its extent, and the identity of the perpetrators. Violence may have occurred, but most of the evidence for it was likely lost in the melee. MPs and MGOs could arrest civilians for looting; they could not easily separate victims of violent crime from those harmed or killed in combat. Nor could criminal investigators pay much attention to crimes that occurred during or before the transition to Allied control. Many later accounts portray DPs as perpetrators and Germans as victims, yet even in the scant evidence available, Germans constitute the vast majority of those arrested for looting and similar crimes. Later narratives about DP violence likely externalize guilt for the opportunistic crimes committed by Germans, which—in keeping with Dahrendorf’s account—ended when the Allies reestablished control.⁶²

The First Hours of Occupation

MGOs faced a daunting and uncertain prospect wherever they first arrived in Germany. Victorious tactical units typically announced the occupation in a perfunctory manner by pinning Eisenhower’s “Proclamation No. 1”—promulgated along with the MG Legal Code in September 1944—on the doors of town halls, churches, and farmsteads. Its first article announced the transformative aims of the Allies, who came “as conquerors, but not as oppressors … to obliterate Nazism and German militarism … and abolish the cruel, oppressive, and discriminatory laws and institutions which the party has created.” Article II explained how Allied rule would work in the west: “Supreme legislative, judicial, and executive authority and powers” resided with the supreme commander and were exercised through MG. “All persons in the occupied territory will obey immediately and without question all the enactments and orders of Military Government. Military Government courts will be established for punishment of offenders,” which meant “ruthlessly stamping out” resistance and dealing with “other serious offences” severely. This was to be a military dictatorship based on new laws, though the systems of power were familiar to Germans.⁶³

American combat units were moving quickly and MG detachments were left largely alone in their wake. The detachments’ first task was subduing any continuing Nazi threat. Recent history suggested that resistance was far more likely than acquiescence to foreign occupation. Partisans had emerged in nearly every German-controlled area of Europe, and the Nazis stoked Allied fears of German resistance by broadcasting orders for loyalists to form “werewolf” cells and wage a guerrilla war after the regime’s collapse.⁶⁴ American and British counterintelligence also discovered instructions for forming these cells. One set described how “women helpers” should disperse and “put on civilian clothing,” as opposed to their Nazi uniforms, when hearing the code word Tarung (camouflage), and soldiers were to move to predesignated locations, go into hiding and prepare for resistance when the code word Wehrwolf was broadcast. The directions were to be burned once followed.⁶⁵ Nazi planning for resistance appeared so comprehensive that the Allies remained on high alert through the summer of 1945. In July, French military intelligence (Sécurité Militaire) reported to SHAEF that werewolf cells remained a real security threat, despite noting little determinative evidence for them.⁶⁶

Apart from a few scattered incidents, werewolf cells and German resistance more broadly failed to emerge. MG detachments may have had to contend with initial social unrest, but it did not conceal a greater problem of armed insurrection. The lack of German resistance frequently surprised the Allies. On the day after the Nazi surrender, the commander of the Seventy-First Infantry Division noted that “no incidents indicating civilian resistance or sabotage had been reported.” Germans instead appeared exhausted, accepting defeat and occupation virtually without fuss.⁶⁷ Why Germans relented to Allied conquest remains an important question for historians with answers running the gamut from war exhaustion to the attractiveness of liberalism following thirteen years of Nazism.⁶⁸ Their passivity was crucial to MGOs’ ability to restore order. Although some elements of command and many observers continued to worry long after the end of the war about Germans developing a desire to challenge foreign rule, local MGOs’ fears diminished quickly. When in December 1945 leaflets were found throughout central Munich calling on “German men and German women” to “return to Hitler’s vision” and join the resistance, local officers deployed police to search for the culprits but were otherwise almost entirely unmoved.⁶⁹

During the earliest stages of the wartime occupation, however, American MGOs saw potential partisans everywhere, and officers were trained to see crime as both a motivator of armed resistance and a mask for it. Instructors at Charlottesville repeatedly turned to historic cases to illustrate how generalized disorder could develop into armed insurrection. The Philippines after the 1898 war and Siberia during the Russian Revolution were pertinent examples. US forces had in each case struggled to restore order and essential services, and insurgency ultimately emerged.⁷⁰ The sociological explanations for this connection between disorder and resistance were not clear at the time. The experiences had nonetheless powerfully shaped interwar thinking about the conduct of military governance, which was reflected in FM 27-5.⁷¹

To the first MGOs, nearly everywhere in Nazi Germany seemed potentially overrun with disorder. Bombing and combat had left many cities barely habitable and filled with thousands of desperate, traumatized civilians. Although the countryside, by contrast, often remained physically untouched, DPs and refugees were moving en masse, and officers, having little real knowledge of social conditions, worried about unseen threats. Looting occurred nearly everywhere, creating lasting impressions. One of the first officers in Darmstadt recalled that the city “was a sorry mess. Germans and DPs had looted all food stores and railway cars.”⁷² The MG Legal Code predicted this postconflict lawlessness and specified looting as a separate crime from theft, punishable by any permitted fine, prison term, and even death.⁷³ MGOs rarely imposed such harsh sentences. Only 5 cases were found in this study (from 387 total) and none by an American court. Two death sentences were handed down by the British General Court in Oldenburg and three by the British General Court in Hanover. Additional conditions may have been relevant to the sentences in these cases; notably, the crimes occurred well after the end of the war—in September 1945 for Oldenburg and April 1946 for Hanover—and were committed by groups, suggesting gang activity. It was less important that these were non-American MG courts. Although cultural differences in the approach to criminal justice existed between the Allies, these appear to have had little meaningful effect on conviction rates or punishments.⁷⁴

Similarities in the American and British approaches to criminal justice, as well as their shared MG court system and legal code, permit useful comparisons across occupied western Germany. During the first six weeks of the occupation in Cologne, British MGOs typically punished looting more harshly than theft or burglary, with an average of seventy-five days’ imprisonment compared to twenty-five days (or commensurate fine) for the latter offenses.⁷⁵ These punishments were at the lower end, but not markedly so. In American-controlled Bremen, sentences for looting ranged from thirty days to one year, and in British Hanover, the punishment was typically one hundred eighty days.⁷⁶ MGOs’ responses were little different in the countryside; however, comparably very few arrests were for looting. Detachments instead prosecuted theft, burglary, and trespass far more often, suggesting more orderly social conditions and less acute economic strain. Punishments were also lenient, ranging from five to sixty days’ imprisonment. Rather than pursuing aggressive repression of occupied Germans, American and British MGOs across the west followed SHAEF priorities, containing disorder and avoiding unduly antagonizing locals.⁷⁷

As it was not always clear who was committing crimes, perpetrator identification was a major obstacle to restoring law and order. The first MG commanders received fragmentary reports of looting and rioting by DPs, Germans, and American soldiers. Different laws applied to each of these groups, creating challenges for policing. MGOs could use dragooned German police against other Germans, but Allied soldiers and DPs had extraterritoriality as United Nations personnel, exempting them from German law and criminal justice. MGOs could use MPs, who were effective against DPs, but camaraderie often made them less willing to restrain other American soldiers, resulting in few arrests. In any case, the initial wave of American crime tended to dissipate quickly when tactical forces moved on.⁷⁸ MGOs were less concerned about maintaining DPs’ extraterritoriality and, despite the restrictions, often deployed German police against them. When exposed, this maintenance of Nazi-era power structures in pursuit of short-term order provoked outrage among former Nazi victims and Americans, though it was more common than the military acknowledged and reflected the spirit of MG strategy, if not the stated policy.⁷⁹

MG more frequently employed German police to impose restrictions on freedom of movement, a less impolitic decision that also helped restore order. MGOs ordered streets cleared and announced strict curfews and travel restrictions. They carried out mass arrests following the lockdown of entire areas, detaining real and potential troublemakers. Nearly half of all arrests in Cologne during the first weeks of occupation were for minor violations.⁸⁰ In Nuremberg, 320 people were tried in just fifteen separate cases during the first two weeks of occupation, 312 for violating curfew.⁸¹ Of these, 249 were convicted, receiving an average of five days’ imprisonment or equivalent fine, though most were tried toward the end of the second week and received no consideration for their prior detention.⁸² MG in the American Zone would later officially authorize protective custody, but in the earliest stages of the occupation, MGOs regularly employed this sort of informal detention without charge in pursuit of social control.⁸³

MGOs’ use of mass arrests and protective detention extended from their tendency to view the MG Legal Code as a tool for enforcing order subject to changing local demands. The law could become a cudgel against offenders appearing to resist Allied authority. The first case in Nuremberg involved a fifty-three-year-old man charged with illegal possession of a firearm and “concealment of records.”⁸⁴ He was acquitted on the first count but convicted on the second and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. The second case was against a young man charged with “interfering with [Allied] communications,” an offense that warranted an additional charge under Section 43 for “acting to the prejudice of the good order.” He was fined 400 RM, which resulted in four hundred days’ imprisonment when he could not pay, rather than the standard of forty days (10 RM per day) recommended by JAG in February 1945 and already widely used at the time.⁸⁵

Hiding one’s prior Nazi affiliations was the most common form of resistance and in the early weeks of the occupation often resulted in harsh sentences. Two men in Oldenburg received five years’ imprisonment. But MGOs could easily construe virtually any offense as resistance, and harsh punishments were also meted out for otherwise nonserious offenses. The first trial held in Augsburg was for a young man charged with possession of stolen Allied property, tried in a hastily convened intermediate court. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. The next five trials in the intermediate court occurred over a month later, four for the ostensibly more serious charge of firearm possession and one for hiding a Nazi history. The punishments for weapons were between five and thirty-seven years in prison. But in an indication of how flexible sentencing was, hiding a Nazi past only resulted in a 1,000 RM fine, or one hundred days.⁸⁶

SHAEF was aware that detachments deviated widely in their application of the MG Legal Code. At the beginning of March 1945, JAG released a list of recommended sentences for nearly all offenses in the MG and the German Criminal Codes. MGOs paid little, if any, attention to it, or to the principle of equal justice that underlay the recommendations.⁸⁷ The same notional offense could receive a sentence of anything between a small fine and life imprisonment or death. Moreover, practical concerns often mitigated punishments. Fines were handed down when jails were unavailable, which then changed after a few months when they were reconstructed.⁸⁸

Variations in sentencing stemmed in part from MGOs’ arbitrary use of the law. A problem of charge clarity pervades the military court records. Officers applied widely varying charges to the same criminal behavior, obscuring early criminal conditions. MGOs in many cases failed to record any reason for applying one of the catchall laws (Sections 21 and 43). Wilhelm Dietz (aged forty-four) was charged under Section 43 in the Frankfurt Summary Court on 10 April 1945 and received a punishment of six months in prison, but the record offers no further explanation of his actual crime or reason for the lengthy sentence.⁸⁹ On the same day, three other people were prosecuted and convicted for curfew violation and received 100 RM fines, so Dietz’s crime was likely comparatively serious, but as with many files that remain, we have little way of knowing.⁹⁰ MGOs’ use of the law to assert Allied power further exacerbates the problem of charge clarity. It is possible that Dietz ran afoul of the regime in some noncriminal way that led to harsh punishment. For many MGOs, enforcing order meant ensuring that Germans were duly deferential. Even the mildest infractions could attract harsh punishments if the perpetrator was disrespectful, often recorded as “Disrespect of Allied Forces” next to a charge under Section 21 or 43. The British in Cologne most consistently detailed the underlying offense, such as shouting insults, making indiscreet drunken comments, or refusing to obey orders. Punishments again varied wildly. “Disobey police” often meant 180 days in prison, while “drunk” could mean anything from 2 to 30 days. “Attempt to mislead Allied forces” resulted in eighteen months.⁹¹ In Darmstadt and Augsburg, punishments for similar offenses against Allied authority ranged from five days to one year of imprisonment.⁹²

MGOs’ concern for fairness ran a distant to second to demonstrating power. In one of the first cases in Nuremberg, twenty-one people were charged with violating curfew despite claiming that German civilian time was one hour behind American military time. All were found guilty and received 100 RM fines or ten days’ imprisonment. The following case involved forty-one curfew violators who also claimed the clocks were wrong. Of these, thirty-two were found guilty, despite the MGO’s then noting that a change in German time had occurred and “all arrests were made within 45 minutes after 2000 hours,” meaning the defendants had believed they were adhering to the law.⁹³

MG detachments’ independence continued into the postwar occupation. Consequently, the variations that arose from ceding such power and discretion to local commands also remained. MGOs continued to respond to conditions in their areas as they saw fit, with little to no regard for the actions of other detachments, even as the American occupation transitioned from an overtly combat operation to one of reconstruction and social rehabilitation. Ensuring the peace remained MG’s and MG detachments’ primary objective through much of the next three years. But as we shall see, through the summer of 1945, that objective consistently overrode transformational aims.