Isolationism prevailed within the United States despite these developments in Europe, and Roosevelt was hamstrung in 1938 by a stalwartly isolationist Congress. Through the 1930s, Congress repeatedly passed “neutrality pacts” preventing greater US involvement overseas.6 After the Munich Agreement failed to curtail Hitler and German forces occupied the entirety of Czechoslovakia, Roosevelt positioned the United States firmly on the side of the British and the French, casting any coming war as an ideological contest between “freedom” and “democracy” on the one hand versus militarism, authoritarianism, and unbridled expansionism on the other. For the president, Hitler’s aims threatened to unwind in Europe the very idea of national inviolability as espoused in international law and subordinate the continent to German power.7 Roosevelt committed the United States to becoming the “great arsenal of democracy,” the financial—if not military—protector of the existing world order, at least in Europe and parts of the Americas.8
The outbreak of European war in 1939 did not end isolationism, and Roosevelt was forced to maintain a “short of war” strategy in which the United States aided Britain and France without providing troops.9 A slim majority of Americans supported war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan before the attacks on Pearl Harbor; it would take the surprise by the Japanese, followed by Hitler’s and Mussolini’s quick declarations of war against the United States, before the public’s opinion turned decisively and motivated congressional support for intervention.10 The realization that war could reach US territory terrified ordinary Americans, shaking their belief that they were separated from the machinations of major powers in Europe and Asia. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, people from California to New York, and across the Midwest, took steps to protect themselves from highly improbable Axis bombing and invasion. These fears drove punitive measures against so-called enemy aliens: Italians, Germans, and—notably—Japanese within the United States. On 19 February 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which ordered the detention of nearly all Japanese people in the United States on suspicion that they maintained allegiance to their ethnic homeland and endangered US security.11
New ideological enemies redefined the measure of victory. In the great moral contest that Roosevelt described, victory could not be brokered or diplomatically mediated. Polls from 1942 show that the majority of Americans believed defeating the Axis powers meant destroying Nazism and Japanese militarism and fundamentally changing both societies. A significant minority desired vengeance and even something like genocide; 13 percent wanted to “annihilate” all Germans, and 15 percent sought the destruction of the Japanese people. Similar minorities hoped for some sort of overt punishment of Germans and Japanese (20 percent and 14 percent respectively), though what this meant in practice remains unclear. For Roosevelt, such a rapid turn in attitudes meant there was no politically viable end to the war in which a Nazi government or Imperial Japanese regime survived, whether he would have accepted it or not.12
A new US standard for victory aligned with feelings in Britain and the Soviet Union, both of which had already suffered terribly before the United States entered the war. Of the two, the Soviets had and would suffer the most. The Nazis were waging an explicitly existential war against them that would ultimately result in approximately twenty-five million Soviet deaths. In 1941, with German forces on Moscow’s doorstep, Stalin faced the real prospect of seeing his nation, communism, and even himself destroyed.13 Moreover, the Nazis intended to either exterminate or subjugate all the Slavic peoples that fell under their control.14 Although the British would not suffer anywhere near this level of destruction, they had experienced the ignominy of repeated defeats through 1940 and 1941. The Germans drove the British Expeditionary Force back across the English Channel in 1940 when France fell and had beaten them across North Africa and defeated them in Crete and mainland Greece. Although victory in the Battle of Britain helped prevent German invasion in 1940, the British Isles were in constant danger of being isolated and starved by a concerted U-boat campaign. For both Churchill and Stalin, these experiences of unbridled German aggression required a reciprocal response.15
At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, it was Roosevelt who first articulated the Allies’ objective of total victory over Nazi Germany. At the conference, the three Allied powers agreed to portray the war as an ideological conflict with Nazism, to seek its annihilation, and to demand Germany’s unconditional surrender. The framing was mostly rhetorical. An alliance between the United States and Britain on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other was in reality based in brute national interest that only barely overrode ideological enmities. Nonetheless, a desire for Germany’s unconditional surrender facilitated agreement on remodeling the country’s politics, societal structures, and even culture during a postwar occupation, even if the scope and nature of a postwar Germany and world order remained undefined.16
Their objectives were marginally clarified on 1 November 1943 when, after a series of meetings in Moscow, a European Advisory Commission (EAC) was established to oversee intergovernmental planning for Germany’s occupation. Though in reality little more than diplomatic window dressing, the EAC crystallized the Allies’ shared intention to transform Germany into a nonaggressive, democratic member of the international community, and it laid the groundwork for a three-power Control Commission in which the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union would jointly govern Germany after the war. Fundamental questions on how transformation would occur, what it meant, and even what “democracy” meant remained unanswered. This lack of shared understanding on crucial issues hampered coordinated planning. The three Allies also had fundamentally different perceptions of Nazism’s root causes, the Soviets viewing it as unbridled capitalism and the British as imperial competition. For the Americans, Nazism was the inverse of Jeffersonian-style democratic capitalism.17
The Allies were clear, however, about their desire to replace Nazism, agreeing that it was an expression of systemic cultural and moral deviance in Germany, though without agreement on fundamental questions about the cause of Nazism and the character of a transformed Germany, their only agreement was that some form of radical transformation should be enacted. Political scientist Adam Roberts has recently labeled this sort of forced change through military occupation as “transformative occupation,” a concept that originated with the Allies during World War II, though none of them (nor the US military) used the term.18 Defining such an occupation as distinct from nation-building, postconflict reconstruction, and straight military occupation remains a challenge. Roberts’s definition of such projects as “[those] whose stated purpose (whether or not actually achieved) is to change states that have failed, or have been under tyrannical rule” is useful, but we can go further.19 A transformative occupation fuses the other three missions (nation-building, reconstruction, and military occupation). Following conquest, victorious states seek to reconstruct anew a conquered state through an occupation that is militarily enforced (or at least military-backed), which necessitates addressing all aspects of governance and building a new nation while subjugating the occupied people.20 For Roberts, the occupier’s vision is paramount to isolating transformative occupation as a discrete event. It is characterized by viewing as feasible the ability to forcibly change a state’s character in fundamental ways, which separates it from simple occupation, reconstruction, and even nation-building based on existing social and societal infrastructure. The Allies tacitly agreed on this more radical interpretation of the occupation of Germany. They sought not merely to end Nazism, but to create an entirely new state.21 They agreed to remove the existing political, social, and cultural structures and replace them so as to refashion the very character of Germany.
The Military’s Approach
Shortly after the Nazi surrender in May 1945, the outspoken General George Patton questioned Eisenhower over the reach of denazification, arguing that the program was removing too many decent German administrators. Patton was the hero of the North African campaign, the capture of Sicily, and the Battle of the Bulge, but he had also earned a reputation for indiscretion and impulsiveness, and both were on display here. Eisenhower disagreed: “Victory is not complete until we have eliminated from