The Art of Occupation: Crime and Governance in American-Controlled Germany, 1944–1949

By Thomas J. Kehoe

The literature describing social conditions during the post–World War II Allied occupation of Germany has been divided between seemingly irreconcilable assertions of prolonged criminal chaos and narratives of strict martial rule that precluded crime. In The Art of Occupation, Thomas J. Kehoe takes a different view on this history, addressing this divergence through an extensive, interdisciplinary analysis of the interaction between military government and social order.

Focusing on the American Zone and using previously unexamined American and German military reports, court records, and case files, Kehoe assesses crime rates and the psychology surrounding criminality. He thereby offers the first comprehensive exploration of criminality, policing, and both German and American fears around the realities of conquest and potential resistance, social and societal integrity, national futures, and a looming threat from communism in an emergent Cold War. The Art of Occupation is the fullest study of crime and governance during the five years from the first Allied incursions into Germany from the West in September 1944 through the end of the military occupation in 1949. It is an important contribution to American and German social, military, and police histories, as well as historical criminology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780821446812

Thomas J. Kehoe

Thomas J. Kehoe is postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New England, Australia. He completed graduate degrees in history and genocide studies at the universities of Sydney and Melbourne, and has published articles on crime and policing in occupied Germany, Nazi propaganda, Arab servicemen in the Wehrmacht, and the Wehrmacht judicial system.

Book preview

The Art of Occupation

WAR AND SOCIETY IN NORTH AMERICA

Series Editors: Ingo Trauschweizer and David J. Ulbrich

Editorial Board

Janet Bednarek

Michael W. Doyle

Nicole Etcheson

Joseph Fitzharris

John Grenier

John Hall

Paul Herbert

James Westheider

Lee Windsor

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Citizen-General: Jacob Dolson Cox and the Civil War Era, by Eugene D. Schmiel

Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War, by John A. Wood

Home Front to Battlefront: An Ohio Teenager in World War II, by Frank Lavin

The Art of Occupation: Crime and Governance in American-Controlled Germany, 1944–1949, by Thomas J. Kehoe

THE ART OF OCCUPATION

Crime and Governance in American-Controlled Germany, 1944–1949

Thomas J. Kehoe

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

ohioswallow.com

© 2019 by Ohio University Press

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kehoe, Thomas J., 1980- author.

Title: The art of occupation : crime and governance in American-controlled Germany, 1944-1949 / Thomas J. Kehoe.

Other titles: Crime and governance in American-controlled Germany, 1944-1949

Description: Athens, OH : Ohio University Press, [2019] | Series: War and society in North America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019014946| ISBN 9780821423820 (hbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821446812 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Military government--Germany (West) | Police--Germany (West)--History. | Crime--Germany (West)--History. | Criminal justice, Administration of--Germany (West)--History. | Germany--Social conditions--1945-1955. | Germany--History--1945-1955.

Classification: LCC DD257.2 .K37 2019 | DDC 940.087/4--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014946

For my beautiful daughter Maeve Eleanor, 2017–2019

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Tradition and an Unprecedented Enemy

Planning and First Steps

1    Crime and Control in American Military Thought

2    A Conflict of Visions?

3    A Violent Transition

Part II: Destruction, Disorder, Fear, and Fantasy

The Direct Military Occupation of Germany, 1945–1946

4    Order and Disorder

5    Common Enemies

6    Thieves and Gangs

7    Power and Discretion

Part III: Enduring Legacies, 1947–1949

Threat, Policing, and a Culture of Anxiety

8    Civilianization, Germanization, and the Rise of German-Led Policing

9    Winters of Discontent

10  Myth Formation and the End of Military Government

Conclusion

Appendix: The Military Government Legal Code

Proclamations, Ordinances and Laws Issued

by Allied Military Government in Germany

Glossary of Terms

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

As with many first books, the nascent idea for this project was formed years ago, which means that many people added constructively to my thinking or helped me bring this to completion in some other fashion. From the very beginning of my graduate studies at the University of Sydney in 2010 I was interested in occupation, though my curiosity extended beyond analyzing such events purely as military exercises. No matter the duration, a period of occupation is profound in the histories of the occupied and the occupiers alike. Allied control of Germany after World War II is an excellent case in point. It affected nearly every facet of daily life for people in Germany, including the social and political order as well as the economy.

There has been a great deal written on this history, and it took me significant time to find an avenue for this book. It is therefore a credit to my various instructors that I could ultimately contribute to our knowledge of this history. I have my supervisors from the University of Sydney, Professors A. Dirk Moses and Robert Aldrich, to thank for first pushing me to think creatively about craft, narrative, argument, and the current relevance of the past. My doctoral supervisors at the University of Melbourne, Dr. Steven Welch and Professor Barbara Keys, in equal measure gave me the freedom and constraint that allowed me chart an interdisciplinary approach to writing histories of crime and governance, which ultimately became the basis of this book. They pointed me toward new sources of data and a new way of thinking about the interactions between social and intellectual history. I credit both of them with forcing me to adopt the sort of focus necessary for completing a doctoral dissertation and pursuing a career in research. The subsequent advice of the doctoral examiners they selected to review my thesis, Professors Adam Seipp (Texas A&M) and Petra Goedde (Temple University), was instrumental to shaping this quite-different book that grew from my doctoral thesis. For that, I also have to thank the editorial team at Ohio University Press and the reviewers for offering constructive ideas that pushed me to refine my thinking.

This book would not have been possible without a number of benefactors. The aid of a research fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD) was crucial. In 2013, the DAAD funded my primary research in Germany. I thank Dr. Margit Szöllösi-Janze at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich for sponsoring me to travel to Germany and the Geyer family who hosted me in Munich. (Herr Geyer often very patiently listened to me as I rambled about my day’s research, gently correcting my German, asking intriguing questions, and sharing his favorite drinks.) Nor would this project have come to fruition if my first post-PhD employer, Professor Michael Wilmore at Swinburne University of Technology, had not supported my continued pursuit of historical research, despite its not explicitly being part of my role. I wrote the first book proposal while in that position.

The award of a postdoctoral research fellowship by the University of New England was critical. It allowed me the time and financial security to spend hours rethinking, redrafting, and ultimately honing the work that follows. For that position, I have to thank Professor Richard Scully for shepherding the application through its various stages. He has also proved an excellent sounding board during my tenure in the department. Thank you to Professors Klaus Neumann, Adam Seipp, and A. Dirk Moses for reading drafts of the book proposal and offering valuable constructive criticism.

There are many personal relationships that influenced my work. My father helped me photograph documents, and he ultimately constructed some of the statistical characterizations of crime that are referenced in this book. My mother was always encouraging of higher-degree study and first suggested an academic career long before I ever considered the option seriously. But most importantly, I have to thank my wife, Dr. Elizabeth Greenhalgh, who shared with me the challenges and excitements of pursuing graduate studies. She has been an invaluable source of support, a sounding board, and an excellent writing partner on a number of occasions. She also tolerated my working long hours as I endeavored to finish this book. For that sacrifice and all the many other ways that she has shown her support, I will be eternally grateful.

Introduction

Friedrich Wilhelm had just broken a US Army telephone wire when American soldiers happened on him outside of Nuremberg in early May 1945. Classified as an act of sabotage under the US martial law governing occupied Germany, it was a serious offense. If convicted by an American military court, Wilhelm faced the potential sentences of any fine, term of imprisonment, or even death. Making things worse for him, heavier punishments were more likely because the Allies feared resistance. Though nearing an end, the war was still ongoing, and the Americans were on alert for Nazi partisans, especially around Nuremberg, which had been significant to Hitler’s movement and was only captured two weeks earlier following an unexpectedly difficult battle.¹ So it astonished the American soldiers who arrested Wilhelm that he repeatedly told them freely that he broke the wire by twisting. They relayed their surprise at the trial on 4 May in the Nuremberg US Military Government (MG) Court. The city’s American commander Major Clarence E. Hamilton sat as judge, and though it was a formal affair—Wilhelm had a German defense attorney and testimony was duly given—it was brief. Hamilton barely deliberated before handing down a conviction and a fine of 10,000 reichsmarks (RM), with failure to pay resulting in one thousand days in prison.²

The sentence was lenient, effectively amounting to time served because the amount equaled Wilhelm’s bond, which was applied to the … fine. Despite committing a deliberate attack on the US army in wartime, he spent less than a week in jail. Information that is now unavailable may have swayed Hamilton, including Wilhelm’s defense, age, or personal circumstances. More likely, Hamilton did not see him as a threat and moved on to other concerns. As MG commander, he was responsible for every aspect of city governance, and his small detachment of military government officers (MGOs) was struggling with problems ranging from extensive combat damage and housing to scarce rations and thousands of displaced and dispossessed people. Ensuring order was their first priority as disorder remained a major obstacle to administration. At Hamilton’s orders, American soldiers and local German police were busy rounding up all offenders, major and minor, and, in accordance with MG practice, referred every one of them for trial by him. On that day, Wilhelm’s was the first of forty-three cases Hamilton heard, all of which required a hearing. Many more people languished in the city’s jails waiting for their day in court. One of the cases was serious and involved a woman charged with firearm possession. She was acquitted. The other forty-one cases were those of curfew violators, the majority of whom received 50 RM fines, equivalent to five days’ imprisonment.³

The events of 4 May illustrate the challenge that MG field commanders faced as they balanced enforcing public order and the careful rule of law. These events also highlight the prominence that a nuanced analysis of crime and policing should take in histories of the Allied occupation. MG was not unduly oppressive, at least in Nuremberg. Although the military courts were swamped with people swept up by soldiers and police who exercised little discretion, defendants received due process and the punishments were not overly severe. This picture of assertive American-led law enforcement and the rather fair dispensation of criminal justice, contrasts markedly with many of the existing narratives of occupied Germany, which assert a law and order gap, massive and colossal crime waves, and profound violence as the natural accompaniment to the physical destruction and psychological trauma resulting from the war.⁴ Tony Judt reflects a significant consensus when he writes that to live normally in Europe meant breaking the law and that violence became a daily part of life. Despite its frequency, this narrative has not been well problematized or explored. Instead, for the most part, social disorder and criminality exist as a literary turn illustrating the ordeals of war and the struggles of the postwar recovery.⁵

But social disorder, crime, and policing have far greater explanatory power. Exploring them provides a new avenue into the nature of the occupation and for charting the course of Germany’s postwar history. Social disorder and crime exist on a spectrum of behaviors that are socially, culturally, historically, and—of course—legally contextualized.⁶ Understanding the specific contexts surrounding historic definitions of deviance and disorder exposes dominant perceptions and cultural assessments as much as it does actual crimes and criminals, and therefore it illuminates cultural forces at work during the occupation years. As sociological phenomena, disorder and crime span the real and the imaginary, and fear is the dominant emotion. Fear can be toxic to social order. And for governments and their police, crime control extends beyond prosecuting individual perpetrators for discrete incidents to calming socially emergent fears. As criminologists Mariel Alper and Allison T. Chappell write, the consequences of fear reach beyond feelings of personal anxiety. It undermines the quality of life.⁷ Rod McCrea and his fellow authors agree, arguing, At the neighborhood level, fear of crime decreases … cohesion, participation in neighborhood associations, and community ties.⁸ For historians, emotions complicate inquiry of the past by shaping reports and memory. Fear was a powerful force in postwar western Germany, and analyzing the extent to which it shaped everything from beliefs about crime to a new German nationalism incorporated with the West is crucial for buttressing an account of the discrete, discernable events.⁹

Crime and policing therefore sit at the nexus of a history of occupied Germany that seeks to track the interplay between key events and the psychology of the postwar space. Unweaving the known, the inferred, and the imagined facilitates a fuller account of the complicated sociology of occupied Germany—a world shaped by recent war, Nazi violence, and various forms of racial and ethnic hatred—where crime in some form was a major part of daily life. The issue at hand is the nature of the crime. Uncovering the extent of gangs, organized crime, and violent foreign criminals as well as the relationship between serious offenses and seemingly ubiquitous petty criminality—notably the black market—provides a basis for addressing questions related to how the Allies reasserted control and ensured order; what personal, familial, and societal struggles accompanied postwar recovery; and what social effects resulted from wartime psychological damage. Finally, by contextualizing crimes by occupation soldiers and the effect of those crimes on recovery, the centering of crime and policing allows new insight into a topic that has gained increasing prominence in recent years: the interaction between occupied people and their occupiers.

For conceptual and practical reasons, this book focuses on the American Zone. Any study of crime is equally an examination of governance and policing. As a result of unique military traditions, differing views of Germany and related security concerns, pressures on the home front, and relations with each other, each of the four Allies—the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—conducted their occupation of Germany differently. This reality and the volume of data available made one monograph unwieldy. As will become apparent, there was considerable overlap between the American and British approaches to governance, particularly in regard to criminal justice, extending from shared planning and joint command. From the invasion of Europe in June 1944, until July 1945, all American and British forces fell under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) commanded by American general Dwight Eisenhower. Thereafter, the two zones were separate until the end of 1946, but they shared a military court system and legal code that only became more integrated from 1 January 1947, when the zones merged into Bizonia. Even so, accounting for differences made addressing the area as a whole too expansive for one book.¹⁰

A division in the literature created another reason to focus on the Americans. As with broader histories of the postwar, portrayals of American-controlled Germany commonly describe it as subject to destruction and anarchy (from the German Zerstörung und Chaos). From the 1940s, postwar histories of everything from Europe and Germany to individual regions have been replete with verbose illustrations—often accompanied by photographs—of devastated landscapes, battered people among the ruins, and the implication that social disorder and crime were natural accompaniments.¹¹ Studies of the Americans have frequently asserted that generalized social disorder, gangs, and organized crime threatened MG control.¹² These portrayals fit common intuition, which recent cases of war and natural disaster further support. There was a dramatic rise in crime in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the near anarchic conditions in Iraq following the US-led invasion in 2003 are well documented.¹³ Viewed in light of recent events and the frequency of the anarchy trope, assertions like Keith Lowe’s almost postapocalyptic depiction of Europe as without institutions or law and order, and in which there was no shame … no morality … [and] only survival, become plausible and generalizable.¹⁴

Beyond the visual cues of desperate people and extensive destruction, the intuitive account has evidentiary support in postwar Germany. Numerous reports from Germans, Allied soldiers, and other observers describe profound social breakdown.¹⁵ Michael Neiberg notes that even the representatives of the Allied powers at the postwar conference at Potsdam, outside Berlin, were eager to escape the death and widespread destruction for the picture-postcard town.¹⁶ The destruction-and-anarchy trope is also powerful, supporting even contradictory interpretations of postwar history. Mass disorder and crime is evidence of a zero-hour caesura (frequently rendered in German: Stunde Null) for German society at the war’s end.¹⁷ It also supports Mark Mazower’s opposing thesis of conflict and trauma continuing well past the arbitrary date of 7 May 1945, when Germany surrendered.¹⁸ It fits many other narratives as well. High levels of disorder and destruction are thought to have contributed to Cold War divisions. For instance, the ability of new East and West German governments to handle reconstruction was defined in relation to each other and to the preceding disorder. By extension, postwar disorder also became a foundational point against which to assess West Germany’s postwar economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder).¹⁹

But the literature on American MG takes a different view. Though frequently redescribing an end-of-war humanitarian crisis including masses of refugees and displaced persons, scholars of MG rarely cite social disorder and crime as major problems.²⁰ Beginning with Harold Zink and Eli E. Nobleman in the 1940s and 1950s, they instead maintain that the Americans imposed strict martial law, which fixed as its primary aim enforcing German compliance with Allied rule.²¹ And though evocative words like chaos and anarchy appear in these studies, they nearly always reference administrative, organizational, and logistical challenges. Social unrest and uncontrolled crime in particular are antithetical to this view.²²

Two of the most recent works on the American occupation extend from this MG perspective. Walter Hudson is interested in the implications for diplomatic history when large swathes of Asia and Europe fell under American military governance after World War II, particularly how military regional military governors informed US policy during the emerging Cold War. Some similar terrain is covered in this book, including the origins of an American philosophy of military occupation and its role in the conduct of MG in Germany, though I have a very different focus. Hudson devotes only one chapter to Germany, viewing it through the lens of the War Department, the White House, and military command in Europe. He barely acknowledges crime and policing, or their implications for understanding the conduct of American MG and postwar history. For him, deputy military governor in Germany General Lucius Clay is a lower level of examination. But exploring policing and social conditions requires that this book go even lower, examining the occupation at the point of contact between American officers and ordinary Germans rather than from the perspective of national governments and command.²³

Susan Carruthers also takes a larger view, scrutinizing the conduct of MG in Europe, Africa, and Asia during and after World War II. She also centers the experience of ordinary soldiers and officers, unpacking the psychological toll of occupation and, in so doing, rejecting popular fantasies of American involvement in the former Axis powers as good or benign. Her reason for challenging these narratives derives from their recent implications. Belief that the success of the World War II occupation could be repeated bore terrible fruit in the Bush administration’s misguided attempt in 2003 to follow a historically idealized model of the American occupation of Germany in postwar Iraq. Through exploring soldiers’ experiences as recounted in personal diaries and letters, she shows the darker aspects of occupation including a morally ambiguous world defined by frustration, racism, intoxication, and crime. Regarding the last, she touches on well-documented issues of soldiers’ drunkenness, racism, assault and rape of occupied persons, and participation in ubiquitous black markets. Here, I partially extend Carruthers’s work, foregrounding occupation psychology to explore in more detail how social conditions were perceived and crime was understood and, in turn, the implications of those beliefs to the course of postwar history.²⁴

Rebecca Boehling’s book was arguably the most formative to this study. Although published over two decades ago, her approach remains relevant. Boehling examines the frontline of American MG in Germany, the small detachments consisting of between five and fifteen officers that governed the county-sized city and rural districts (Stadtkreise and Landkreise) that compose the local level of German government. She shows that it was at this level where the Americans truly affected governance and where MG succeeded.²⁵ Boehling was not the first to examine the occupation at the local level and she did not explore crime, but she foreshadowed modern counterinsurgency theories by contending that the immediacy and flexibility of American martial rule contributed to German compliance. She also highlighted what appeared to be an important and overlooked paradox resulting from MG tactics: that democracy in some way grew from a system reliant on military values of subordination and authoritarianism.²⁶ In so doing, she exposed a need for careful empirical study of social disorder, crime, and their management at the district level, as well as how these figured into a broader desire to democratize Germany.²⁷

In the current literature, there is a profound divergence in the portrayals of social conditions in postwar Germany—including the American Zone—between depictions of a place of destruction and anarchy and depictions of one in which MG exercised strict social control. But close study of crime and policing offers a means to bridge the divide. Currently however, neither literature tends to reference the other. And importantly, existing explorations of crime and policing in postwar Germany tend to extend the destruction-and-anarchy perspective. The extensive black markets of postwar infamy, for instance, were traditionally seen as a consequence of the Nazi regime’s collapse.²⁸ Recent literature has adopted a continuity analysis in which illegal trade resulting from economic strain grew throughout the Nazi period and then persisted into the postwar occupation, but the resulting interpretation of postwar social conditions is the same.²⁹ Similarly, the studies of postwar German policing tend to take organizational disorder, crime waves, and social unrest as the foundational obstacles to rebuilding functional law enforcement agencies.³⁰

That many of the destruction-and-anarchy portrayals exist within a framing established by German scholars Adolf Schönke and Karl Bader in the late 1940s partly explains their persistence. Both Schönke and Bader asserted weak law enforcement, extensive social disorder, and correspondingly staggering increases in violent and nonviolent crime extending to the time they were writing in 1948 and 1949, respectively. Both also had limited access to court and police data on crime and little evidentiary support for their conclusions. But social strain was apparent in all the zones, the economy was in a terrible condition, and Allied administration was a chaotic affair, all of which supported their views. There was also a massive humanitarian crisis as displaced persons were resettled, refugees returned home, and new waves of ethnic German expellees arrived from Eastern Europe. Rations were scarce and illegal trade was ubiquitous. Moreover, these conditions together spurred an anxiety that permeated daily life. Schönke and Bader argued that these conditions necessitated high levels of unobserved crime, a conclusion with which many scholars have since agreed.³¹

There are two primary critiques of Schönke and Bader’s analyses. Alan Kramer came out of the destruction-and-anarchy line of thinking and, in 1988, sought to verify high rates of postwar violence by examining MG court records from the British Zone beginning in 1947. These military tribunals were the functional end of MG’s criminal justice system and handled most criminal cases. As they had been classified in the 1940s, neither Schönke nor Bader had access to their records. Contrary to Kramer’s expectations, these data showed high rates of petty property and black market offenses yet a low rate of violent crime. Violence was instead commensurate with the very low prewar levels achieved under Nazi rule. These findings narrowed the window of supposed chaos from three postwar years to at most one.³² Around the same time, Bernd-A Rusinek raised similar queries about the duration of postconquest disorder, though, like Kramer, he was hampered by a lack of data for the postwar years.³³

Jose Canoy’s history of the postwar Bavarian police sits more comfortably in the MG literature. He demonstrates the rapid return of authoritarian policing, and collaboration between German law enforcement and American MG, which shared similar values. He extends Brian Chapman’s salient analysis of police authoritarianism in Germany as a system of legal and moral regulation, which was not traditionally—or necessarily—tyrannical. Traditional authoritarian policing grew from the Gendarme model and permits the effective exercise of control by a comparatively small number of police. The officers rely on tight community networks and lateral observation to detect crime and preventively address potential sources of disorder. Such reasoning helps answer the apparent paradox raised by Boehling. In this view, authoritarian policing is not fundamentally contrary to democratic institutions or systems of government but instead supports the institutions prescribed by the executive. Using that logic, Canoy argues that this type of authoritarianism provided the scaffolding, as he calls it, on which democracy was built. One consequence, however, is considerable suspicion among the populace and the proliferation of fear-driven rumors that are fed to police as civilian observations, which can then distort contemporary assessments of crime and later historical interpretations. In that vein, Canoy found extensive fear of crime among German civilians and police, which in turn propagated rumors about foreign gangs and violent criminals. But there were few salient incidents to support these stories, which led him to question whether postwar Germany was really that violent a place, in historical terms.³⁴

Kramer and Canoy raise important questions about the existing interpretations of postwar conditions, including the extent to which anarchy of any sort actually occurred and the inferred connection between petty criminality and more serious, yet unseen, offenses. Addressing these questions offers a means of bringing together currently divergent interpretations. As new scholarship deriving from studies of counterinsurgency suggests, obtaining a fuller account of the German case requires adopting an incorporative view in which crime and social unrest, and the beliefs about them, are recognized as different facets of the same story.³⁵

The records of the MG courts, MG detachments, and the various military and German police agencies responsible for criminal justice in occupied Germany remain a largely untapped resource. The dispersed locations of the archives holding these records explains, at least partially, why historians have not used them previously. Locating them was a major challenge and took years of archival research. Most of the MG court records are held in the US National Archives at College Park, Maryland, in the civilian section (rather than the military section where one assumes they should be). There are tens of thousands of entries in the court registers that briefly summarize in a single line each case heard by each MG court.³⁶ However, this is not the complete collection. Some of the files are in the British National Archives in Kew, London, in the United Kingdom (for example, the American MG court registers for Aachen).³⁷ Many of the detachment diaries are held in the Bavarian State Archives in Munich (Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv), and some are in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, though these may be duplicates of records held at College Park.³⁸ Other documents are scattered through different record groups in the US National Archives or are held in various city and state archives in Germany.³⁹

Although the collection is vast, the records are still fragmentary. Many of the MG court registers are damaged or have sections missing. In some cases it is clear from the sequence of case numbers that entire booklets have disappeared. The detachment diaries and reports are also far from complete. Those in Bavaria are of scattered months. There is no full, continual diary for any particular unit that has yet been found. Furthermore, aligning the register entries for an individual case with its fuller case file is often nearly impossible. Detachments’ recordkeeping was haphazard, which evidently complicated the archiving of case files. A case may be entered in the register under one name and the fuller file stored under another. One case examined in this book had five different spellings for the lead defendant and there were four defendants in total. It took weeks to track down. Such problems are well known in histories of crime and policing and are obstacles to virtually every study of historical criminology. Therefore, I also have no doubt that future researchers will uncover new records that will add greater clarity to our understanding of this important history. Far from writing this book to draw a line under this period, I look forward to seeing what other scholars may develop in the future.⁴⁰

Despite these limitations, I was able to accumulate approximately forty thousand criminal cases covering the period from September 1944 to the early 1950s and spanning the American and, for comparison, parts of the British Zone. The vast majority of these cases from the MG court registers provide just a name, date of trial, charges, plea, finding, and sentence if there was one. However, a great deal can be gleaned from this limited information, including, among other things, the general profile of perpetrators and trends in offenses charged. About fifty of the cases derive from fuller individual case files, which provide significantly more qualitative detail.

To date, these collected cases provide the fullest picture of civilian crime in the American Zone as well as the quantitative—and qualitative—basis for essentially the only dedicated account of crime in western Germany during the period from September 1944 to July 1946. After mid-1946, these data extend to the American Zone data analyzed previously by Schönke, Bader, and Kramer on the British Zone.⁴¹

As with virtually every study of historic crime and criminal justice, much of the scholar’s work involves sifting a dark, hidden world for information about events that most people at the time wished to keep secret. To compensate for this problem, the book centers on the course of American military occupation in Germany from its origins in prewar thought and wartime planning through to its implementation and later consequences. As one-half of the story, this focus on government provides a lens through which to interpret social conditions, and the first section is primarily concerned with how social order figured in American ideas about military occupation. Importantly, in World War II, how did military priorities align with the popular ambition to transform Germany from a Nazi state into a democracy, and to what extent did transformational aims shape the military’s strategies in occupation?

From the invasion of Germany recounted in chapter 3, the collected case data as well as the police and MG detachment files provide a basis against which to assess the level and nature of crime and the extent to which American conceptions of MG were executed during the occupation. Chapters 4–7 primarily examine the period of direct military rule through 1946, during which MG exercised the greatest level of control over Germany. These chapters explore the different aspects of localized military governance, the crime that occurred, and the perceptions of it during this crucial period. They develop a better picture of criminality during martial law, including the most frequent offenses and the regular collisions between civilians and a strict American regime.

Given the scale of the occupation, no study could ever hope to be complete. This account is primarily based on local German government and police reports; the available detachment daily diaries, reports, and working materials; and records from seventeen different city and rural districts including those of the courts. These were then aligned with records from the higher levels of state and zonal MG and German government and with inter-Allied communications. Later accounts and reflective pieces by participants provided valuable context, and throughout the chapters I also use the individual criminal case files. Because of the challenges described above, not all of these cases came from the districts I focused on, especially in the later years of the occupation when district divisions lost their importance. These cases nonetheless more fully illustrate both the trends in crime and the expressions of dominant perceptions and beliefs, particularly for the later military occupation and after it ended.

As a new cadre of historians point out, postwar histories are as much about what ordinary people felt and imagined as they are about key actors and events.⁴² Documenting a history of crime and policing requires straddling the line between discrete events and the perceptions and fear that surrounded them. As a result, the court and policing data provide an empirical basis for charting part of the picture, though they consistently abut the popular imagination that permeated life in Germany after the war. As with many new works of crime history and historical criminology in all contexts, developing a more holistic account requires taking a transdisciplinary approach. Throughout the book, I draw on theories from psychology, sociological criminology, and political science in the attempt to describe how crime and deviance was understood during the occupation, how criminal perpetrators were constructed, and what sociological phenomena derive from crime fear and its causes.⁴³

This approach permits examining the association of displaced persons and other foreigners with crime as well as the extrapolations from observed petty offenses to belief in an underlying, unseen serious disorder. It also facilitates analyses that provide historically and culturally contextualized answers, along with more universal human behaviors. This approach is evident throughout the book, but it shapes the final section, which uses a series of case studies to explore how ideas about crime and societal integrity that were seeded early in the occupation endured into later years. The emerging Cold War and development of a new West German identity are important aspects of this story, and the final chapters address questions about how far these geopolitical changes affected popular perceptions, and persistent anxieties among Germans and Americans about social fragility.

The later chapters also deal with the important issue of memory—namely, the extent to which later experience refashioned memories of the early occupation experience. Later narratives of anarchy and chaos that derive in part from memories of the early occupation are as much a part of this history as the actions of ordinary people, MG detachments, and the German police. Charting the extent to which these later narratives, derived from memory, reflect the heightened emotions of the period and diverge from the discernable crime that occurred, as well as charting the actions of a martial system fixed on law and order, facilitates better insight into western Germany’s postwar recovery and a new history of the American military occupation.

PART I

Tradition and an Unprecedented Enemy: Planning and First Steps

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,