Читать книгу The Art of Occupation - Thomas J. Kehoe - Страница 15

4 Order and Disorder

The first two weeks for MG Detachment H4 B3 in rural district Kulmbach were bookended by major train disasters. The first occurred on 1 June 1945, the day the officers arrived in the bucolic, sparsely populated country area in northeastern Bavaria. The district had fallen to American forces nearly seven weeks earlier without a shot fired, and it was unscathed by war, at least physically. The area comprised some thirty villages and communities that centered on the small Kulmbach township, set in a valley on a slow-moving river overlooked by the sixteenth-century castle Plassenburg. But the idyllic setting masked profound problems, and that first day was hardly peaceful for the new MGOs. The previous American occupying unit had known their tenure was temporary and had done little more than keep the peace. Many of the villages still had Nazi mayors and administrators, in clear violation of denazification orders, and the new MGOs were concerned about resistance. An MG court had not been established; the backlog of cases meant people were languishing in district jails. There were severe shortages of vital resources including coal, rye, and penicillin. And then, as the new MGOs tried to make sense of the situation, two trains collided, injuring thirty-five Russian DPs, five seriously, and overwhelming the local hospital.¹

The new MGOs worked diligently over the next two weeks to restore administrative order, but they were for all intents and purposes alone. A summary court was established to try the backlogged cases, and village mayors were ordered to tally stocks of coal and other supplies. Some of the overt Nazis that remained in government were replaced with popular members of the local communities. Refugees moved through the district virtually every day, straining limited resources and local security. But acquiring supplies was the most pressing issue, and conferences were arranged with neighboring detachments to exchange sugar for rye and grain for penicillin.² Coal, which was vital to nearly every aspect of local infrastructure from health care to food processing, proved impossible to source.³ On 11 June, after numerous failed attempts to barter for more with other American detachments, detachment officers took a train 175 kilometers north to Altenburg in the Soviet Zone to acquire some by trade or theft. Their cover was a claim to be seeking sugar, though the Soviets discovered the plot and sent them back with a threatening rebuke to the district commander.⁴

Civilian crime was not a major problem for the Kulmbach detachment, and most arrests were for violations of occupation restrictions like curfews. But the legacies of war and Nazi rule were more than overt social disorder; psychological trauma permeated the district, and local Germans were deeply anxious about their futures. The strain was potentially worse for the foreign DPs whom the Nazis used as slave labor. Most were from Eastern Europe and resisted returning there; although terrorized by their experience under Nazi rule, many preferred occupied Germany to Poland and the Soviet Union. On 7 June, orders came down to deport all Russians in the district. After the detachment commander announced his intention to fulfill these orders, sixty-two-year-old DP Ivan Meschkow went to the Kulmbach MG office to plead for permission to stay. When denied, he grabbed for a weapon and attempted suicide in front of the Americans.⁵

The second train accident occurred on 15 June and this time involved deportees under American guard. Soldiers were injured, and again the casualties swamped local hospitals. CIC agents had arrived after the first train accident, suspecting Nazi partisans. Their presence, however, emphasized the MG detachment’s isolation. The agents repeatedly asserted precedence over the district MGOs’ administrative concerns, hampering relief efforts. They also aggressively pursued denazification, removing German administrators and professionals for Nazi affiliations on a near daily basis as well as forcing MGOs to repeatedly restaff local government offices, hospitals, and banks, which undermined district stability.

CIC’s countervailing actions were just one example of the broader military’s intrusions into district Kulmbach, intrusions that more often impeded the detachment’s efforts than aided them. The greatest problem came from the disorderly behavior of regular tactical soldiers. These men had virtually unfettered free reign and by mid-July locals were protesting vehemently about their behavior to district MGOs. Drunken soldiers repeatedly fired their weapons during the night, and doctors at a local mental hospital complained that it was “causing consternations among the patients … many of whom [were] in a poor mental condition.” In another incident, soldiers shot out the power lines, causing a twenty-four-hour blackout for some of the district’s villages. The detachment requested that a curfew be imposed on soldiers matching that applied to civilians, though it is unclear whether this happened.⁶

Crimes by soldiers were occasionally even more serious and could have a deleterious effect on German attitudes toward the occupation. On 7 July, the body of local man Ernst Keller was found “hanging from a tree in the woods” near the Kulmbach town. He had been due to give testimony in the local summary court on 4 July against a criminal syndicate with which he was affiliated. The syndicate, comprising Germans and American soldiers, was responsible for many of the local black market operations. Members had allegedly broken into a factory and stolen vital goods. Following the discovery of Keller’s body, the detachment opened an investigation into the apparent killing of a witness. German police and MPs were ordered to arrest all of Keller’s known associates, including American soldiers where appropriate. But none of the Americans were ever found, and much to MGOs’ consternation, the case appears to have remained unsolved when the detachment left.⁷

The Kulmbach detachment’s experiences during the summer of 1945 are emblematic of the challenges that MG detachments faced across Germany. The damage to the social order wrought by the war created more than overtly disorderly and criminal behaviors; it temporarily demolished institutions and the culture that had supported them. People lost faith in the possibility of a peaceful future and the protections afforded by a functioning society. This deeper, more insidious destruction was expressed in myriad ways, but it is worth noting that, geographically speaking, the Allied advance created profoundly disparate experiences of war and its aftermath. The ravages to Germany’s towns and cities contrasted with a countryside that was often physically unaffected. The destruction of German cities was shocking and powerfully shaped both impressions at the time and later memories of the war’s consequences. Some of the scars of that warfare still linger in Germany’s cities today, and this urban devastation, complete with images of blasted buildings and cities reduced to rubble, has come to characterize the postwar environment in popular memory and in many historical portrayals. But these visual consequences of the war are merely an approximate metaphor for a more profound societal, social, and psychological destruction. The visual imagery of urban rubble has power in the memory of postwar Germany partly because MGOs in the cities more frequently struggled to restore basic social order and restrain criminality. The deeper, more damaging trauma of the war was more immediately apparent in the countryside where physical conditions remained largely unchanged. In these areas, small, isolated MG detachments found themselves closely managing people bearing the mental scars of war. They lacked answers to fundamental questions like what it was to be German, or even to feel safe from day to day. It was this universal trauma and the pressures it created for MG detachments that shaped the execution of military governance during its first postwar phase, the period of direct military rule that roughly extended from the end of the war to the middle of 1946.

Urban Isolation and the Rural Wasteland

Although subordinate to SHAEF, and later to zonal commands (the US Office of Military Government and the British Control Commission), MG in American- and British-controlled Germany was designed to be superimposed on existing German administrative divisions. The occupation therefore hierarchically reflected German states (Länder), each of which would have an Office of MG, and then city and rural districts, roughly equivalent to the size of counties. (MG detachments were also assigned to oversee intermediate-level administrative districts called Regierungsbezirke—“government districts”—in the states like Bavaria that had them.) But while this structure created the appearance of a strict hierarchy, the Handbook for Military Government in Germany reflected SHAEF thinking that “the basic unit for Military Government” was to be “the Military District,” meaning the Kreis.⁸

In practice, this diffusion of power to the districts meant that “the Military District Commander [was] directly responsible for the efficient working of the Military Government machine … for the whole region under his control,” and in turn these local detachments carried the weight of authority and responsibility for MG overall.⁹ Investing such power in them had some unexpected consequences, however: it granted significant autonomy to detachments and their commanders while isolating them and dissecting occupied Germany into distinct urban and rural areas. SHAEF anticipated questions about relative authority between detachments and respective jurisdiction. The commander with responsibility for a “regional capital” was notionally superior to others in the area. This division was apparent in MG courts—intermediate and general courts were typically established in urban centers—but little else. As in Kulmbach, district detachments were primarily inward looking; they concentrated on local security and reconstruction efforts with little regard for what occurred beyond their borders.¹⁰

The challenges associated with ensuring local security and restoring basic functions were manifold, and detachments were forced to address them largely without support. Detachment E1 F3, for instance, arrived in Munich on 15 May 1945. The level of devastation astounded the officers.¹¹ Detachment commander Colonel Charles E. Keegan marveled at the all-but-leveled city and echoed other Allied soldiers across Germany, writing: “Upon arriving in Munich, State government was found to be non-existent … all ministries had either been bombed out or removed to dispersed locations.”¹² The SS had summarily executed key German administrators for defeatism and forced the rest into hiding. For all intents and purposes the basic societal infrastructure was gone; the city itself was devoid of life. Yet Keegan expected widespread crime and even resistance, and on arrival he contacted nearby tactical forces in case their support was required. The same day, he opened a public safety office, evaluated available prison space, and then began planning to restore civil functions.¹³

Keegan’s actions in Munich were similar to those taken by H4 B3 in Kulmbach. Even when arriving well after the German surrender, detachments approached potential disorder and resistance, and the challenge of civil reconstruction, in essentially the same way. They notionally had support available from tactical units and investigative assistance from CIC, but most detachments addressed law and order independently, imposing civil restrictions, making mass detentions, and using MG courts to try criminal offenders. These pro forma tactics were applied uniformly across vastly different urban and rural conditions, with social disorder ranging from persistent rioting and looting to administrative chaos and debilitating social unease. Differences in social circumstances roughly spanned the urban-rural divide. Cities tended to experience more pronounced disorder, while fear was the most immediate problem in the geographically larger, less populated, rural districts.

MG methods were suited to imposing order in defined urban spaces. Cities with clear boundaries were readily demarcated into prescribed zones. Streets were cleared with curfew orders while armed patrols could ensure the population’s confinement, dampening rioting and looting. These processes took anywhere from a few days in cities like Nuremberg to weeks in Bremen and Cologne; but once order was restored, societal infrastructure could be returned rather quickly. MGOs could then begin rebuilding a sense of peacetime normality. People were gathered, organized, and from there instructed in the operation of the new regime. German police and administrators returned to their positions, creating a visible, societal continuity. Moreover, once order was restored, survivors were able to find family and friends, and social bonds could be reformed. In Augsburg, which surrendered, all of these steps occurred rapidly during the first days of the occupation.¹⁴

Although rural detachments took similar approaches, the environment meant that the outcomes looked very different. For the most part, the countryside remained relatively unscathed. A British report on conditions in Schleswig-Holstein at the end of the war noted there was “very little war damage” outside the cities.¹⁵ And the first MGOs found the apparent normality eerie; to many, the countryside seemed an almost natural space for crime. It was a feeling exacerbated by the size of rural districts, which were littered with the remnants of Nazi brutality, and their comparatively sparse populations. When Captain Ben H. Logan’s detachment arrived in rural district Obernburg, southeast of Frankfurt, on 26 June 1945, he was surprised to find that he, nine other officers, and an equal number of enlisted personnel were to govern an area of approximately 2,500 square kilometers containing thirty-five separate communities.¹⁶ His first action was to make contact with the local American combat unit in case of resistance or uncontrolled criminal disorder, though there was virtually no sign of either.¹⁷ His officers nonetheless remained vigilant, though as in Kulmbach the detachment mostly faced administrative challenges stemming from the geography. Restoring telephone services and providing transport connections to doctors was a problem throughout July. There were only about three hundred DPs, but district officers were forced to monitor and care for nearly ten thousand refugees. Denazification complicated the search for German staff for key administrative positions. Over the course of July, the detachment conducted background evaluations of existing politicians and government officials. They discovered avowed Nazi mayors, administrators, and police who either had initially been overlooked by prior MG detachments or had simply escaped detection because they governed tiny villages beyond officers’ attentions.¹⁸

Not only was there no partisan activity in the district; there was also very little crime of any sort. When two unidentified bodies were found in a local river on 8 July, officers were unable to determine whether they had died from murder or by accident. At the end of the month, a detachment tally showed only thirty-one reported cases of looting across the district from mid-June. No cases appear in the trial records, however, so it is impossible to determine how serious they were, whether the reports were multiplying a smaller number of actual incidents, or whether they were merely rumors. The first three criminal trials in the summary court established on 10 July were for minor breaches of civil restrictions. The court did not sit again until the 22nd when fifteen people were tried for minor (though unrecorded) offenses. Of these, twelve were convicted and sentenced to “between one and 14 days.” One man was sentenced to six months for violating curfew and being drunk and disorderly; his harsh punishment may suggest that he committed a more serious unrecorded offense such as looting, that the American governors held some deeper animosity toward him, or that being drunk and disorderly was the worst offense brought before the court that day.¹⁹

The low level of crime neither alleviated Logan’s or his officers’ concerns about what the ostensibly peaceful countryside concealed, nor calmed persistent fears about disorder among the local population. The reports of looting were especially disturbing, and despite a lack of arrests through July and August, Logan routinely recorded it as a major problem, noting reports from German police and citizens. On 2 August, he even informed the commanding officer of the nearby Combat Command Reserve of the Sixth Armored Division of “looting problems in the Landkreis” and requested the unit prepare for deployment to prevent spreading disorder. The tactical forces were never required, however, and it is unclear where the line between fear and actual criminal incidents lay. But whatever the motivation, the fear was itself pervasive and destabilizing, and rural MGOs across the zone struggled, as Logan did, to contain it.²⁰

The Loneliness of MG in the Districts

Fear was contagious among officers in the districts during the summer of 1945, in part because they rarely had a broader context within which to place their immediate experiences or the reports they received from Germans. For many, their first experience of Germany was during the months following the war. Most had not seen combat. And in the weeks after the German surrender, many of those who had fought achieved sufficient points on the military’s Adjusted Service Rating system to return home, leading to an overhaul of men during June and July. This transition marked a new phase of postwar MG. The first occupiers often knew they were leaving soon and limited their efforts to keeping the peace until relieved.²¹ The officers that replaced them had a different view. They were just beginning their deployment and proactively addressed restoring a normal society including physical infrastructure and civil concerns such as public health, the economy, postal services, and telecommunications.²²

One such detachment was GI G3, which arrived on 1 July 1945 in rural district Dillingen—in central Bavaria between Ulm and Augsburg. Security was their first priority, but the district was peaceful and the commander, Major Claude F. Baker, noted little crime.²³ Most offenses were curfew violations and other minor infractions.²⁴ Criminality was so infrequent in fact that the trial of a young man for stealing food from military stores became a local event, drawing public interest from across the district. So instead of crime, the detachment focused on local administration and finance for most of July and August. Where possible, they also prepared new building projects to create employment, though the district was mostly unscathed and there was limited money for them.²⁵

Most detachments similarly pursued a more holistic reconstruction of their districts. This was mostly slow-going, arduous work. The new MG commander in rural district Nuremberg (the area surrounding the city of Nuremberg), Charles H. Andrews, arrived at the end of June and doggedly worked to resurrect his district and also help reconstruction of Nuremberg city, going so far as to source glass for damaged government buildings from Czechoslovakia.²⁶ It took until 3 July before streetlights were turned on in Augsburg, but an arts and crafts exhibition followed two days later in the central square. It showcased new business opportunities and helped engender some much-needed conviviality between local Germans and American soldiers.²⁷

Although disorderly American soldiers remained one major social problem through the summer, the new MG detachments tended to proactively curtail their worst behaviors. Controlling them complemented other restoration efforts. In Munich, for instance, MGOs found American soldiers living in the Prince Regent Theatre, which lies across from the English Garden near the city center. Their presence prevented its reopening to the public, and they had to be forcibly removed.²⁸ Once the theater was reopened, however, the first performance was a success, boosting German morale. In a report to MG for Bavaria, local MGOs described the prevailing sentiment among the audience as “satisfaction that at least something had been done to start cultural life again.”²⁹

The rapidity with which new MGOs pursued reconstruction encouraged the emergence of state- and zone-wide polices. Discussions on reinstating a state taxation system for Bavaria were underway by 10 July.³⁰ But the beginnings of transdistrict policies belied the continued isolation of detachments in the districts. The requirement that districts manage their own finances exposed detachments’ solitude. Transition to US administration was administratively difficult, and meeting payroll expenses was problematic. Although the reichsmark was nearly valueless in practical terms, it remained the official medium of exchange for transactions in the occupation and MGOs devoted considerable time to the finer points of budgetary management. In Obernburg, Logan was bothered by even a “slight deficit in the Landkreis financial statement” and when a severe storm hit Dillingen on the night of 27 July, one of Baker’s first concerns was the cost of repairs and damage to the district’s budget. Repairs were nonetheless “expedited” by a crisis team including the trade and industry MGO, the German town superintendent, and the mayor, revealing the effectiveness with which civil affairs had already been restored and the emergence of positive relations between MGOs and Germans.³¹

Such collaborative efforts were not necessarily the norm, and tensions remained as MGOs attempted to develop collegial relationships with Germans while serving as autocratic military rulers. Denazification frequently exposed the fault lines. When, according to Baker, “thirty-six undesirable” former Nazis were found in one local finance office in Dillingen on 14 July, the American public safety officer Captain Harry Apple ordered them removed. The German district administrator objected, arguing that so many dismissals would force the office to shut down, which would harm the district’s financial viability. Commander Baker resolved the conflict by systematically firing and then rehiring the staff in question. Logan in Obernburg dealt with similar problems by delegating all staffing questions to German administrators, distancing the detachment from denazification questions. He did however monitor removals, resignations, and replacements of officials, intervening when he felt it was warranted.³²

The comparatively rapid restoration of civil administration did not assuage MGOs’ persistent concerns about disorder. And alongside continuingly high levels of German anxiety, American fears further impeded better working relationships with locals by pushing officers to exercise their power preventively. Logan may have been content to allow Germans tacit oversight of denazification, but he responded with near draconian measures to any perceived threats to stability. These included rumor mongering and potential protest. On 8 July, he ordered twenty-two people detained “on suspicion of promoting a public gathering.”³³ Later in the month, he informed local priests they would be arrested if found discussing American soldiers or MG, either privately with local citizens or publicly from the pulpit.³⁴ Logan’s proactive restraint of potentially damaging speech and civilian organization suggests an appreciation for the tenuous social environment, even if tensions in the district were not expressed as overt social disorder or criminal behavior. Unfounded and disturbing rumors were common during the first year of the occupation and elicited near hysteria.³⁵ The MG Legal Code criminalized them; detachments monitored them closely. Some of the most persistent claimed that the Soviets would soon occupy the American Zone and seek violent revenge against Germans for the eastward invasion.³⁶ These ideas permeated all levels of German society. The majority of German administrators in rural district Dachau, for instance, believed that “the final forcing of Germany to communism” was “a pre-arranged plan” among the Allies. Despite the Dachau detachment’s best efforts to dissuade them officers found that there was a near constant “air of depression” among the Germans that hindered reconstruction.³⁷

Fear was contagious in the cities as well, but there was frequently more overt social disorder and crime to support it. Major Everett S. Cofran arrived in Augsburg on 8 June 1945 and, according to military historian Earl F. Ziemke, later became renowned as one of the most hard-nosed commanders in the zone.³⁸ He began each daily report with an assessment of public safety. Like his rural counterparts, Cofran mostly dealt with curfew violations, but there was also more undisguised crime. Looting “by Germans and DPs” continued through July, though it was consistently decreasing.³⁹ Theft was common as well: over a number of nights, the local Dominican nunnery was repeatedly burglarized. Cofran was also alarmed by the size of the black market and the extent to which such trade was often flagrantly conducted. He responded to all this criminality aggressively, ordering soldiers to patrol around the nunnery and Augsburg’s German police to raid black market establishments, which they did with increasing intensity throughout June and July, netting numerous arrests.⁴⁰

Crime was worse in larger Munich and dominated the detachment’s attentions. MG commander Lieutenant Colonel Walter H. Kurtz closely monitored its rise and fall. The records for Munich are fragmentary; the registers for at least two of the summary courts are missing, and Kurtz’s diary only begins on 8 August. Yet between the 8th and 28th of August, he recorded 2,643 criminal incidents. Violations of curfews and civil restrictions were a plurality (1,236). There were also, however, 1,050 property offenses, including 806 thefts, 151 cases of black market participation (charged under Section 43 of the MG Legal Code), and 93 cases involving possession of stolen Allied property. “Miscellaneous” offenses such as traffic violations accounted for 384 of the cases.⁴¹ This was an astonishingly high crime rate compared to historic trends in Germany, and it reveals the social strain that urban MG detachments faced, which resulted from economic collapse, shattered infrastructure, poor supplies and resources, and the influx of refugees and DPs.⁴²

A black market was virtually inevitable in such conditions as people struggled to survive. Most MGOs viewed even this low-level crime as damaging to the social order because it exposed MG’s inability to meet people’s food and resource needs. MGOs frequently responded by imposing stricter rations, which drove resource hoarding, which MGOs in turn criminalized. In Munich, Kurtz made “Violation of Consumption Orders” a breach of Section 43. Similar actions were taken in Bremen and in major urban areas of the British Zone such as Cologne, creating a repressive cycle of desperation and criminalization of survival actions.⁴³

All crime and social unrest emphasized the importance of policing, which along with nearly all questions of governance fell to district detachments. They had to rely on German police. The instructions were clear, as the Public Safety Manual emphasized: “German police … will be responsible for maintaining law and order.”⁴⁴ But this requirement placed detachments in an unenviable position between the occupation’s transformative aims and the requirements of local law enforcement. Reluctant to remove the German police who were vital to maintaining order, MGOs often forwent denazification in favor of ensuring the peace. CIC agents then took care of the matter for them, checking German police for Nazi histories along with other government officials and dismissing many of them.⁴⁵ These sweeps were often more far reaching than MGOs were comfortable with, leaving district police forces understaffed and amplifying concerns about local security, which led to persistent conflict in the districts between MG and zone-level agents of denazification.⁴⁶ When Andrews in rural district Nuremberg noted “some increase in crime” in early July 1945, he reversed denazification and ordered “all persons dismissed … for political background … back to work immediately.” He also granted the German police greater authority to resolve civil disputes in order to relieve pressure on his detachment.⁴⁷ One month later, Andrews reported that a CIC-led denazification sweep had once again “hit some departments of the city very hard.” Faced with few options for hiring new officers, some MGOs simply reemployed dismissed police when CIC agents left. Andrews, for instance, pursued an “intensive campaign for new employees” this second time, which included once again reassessing—to his benefit—the political status of dismissed Germans.⁴⁸