Patton’s assertion appeared to absolve many Germans of the regime’s crimes, which was profoundly distasteful for Americans within and outside the military, and he was made to apologize for it. Patton may have been indiscrete, but his opposition to denazification exemplified one strand of thinking within the US officer corps. In this view, the occupation of Germany was little different from other US occupations and existing strategies could be employed successfully. Moreover, transformative aims did not align with the arch-occupier—“minimum change … maximum control”—approach. This position was not easily reconciled with the popular hatred of Nazism that many (if not most) US officers shared.24
The tension between pursuing transformative ends and taking a more traditional approach to MG played out on the ground in Germany as MGOs took radically different actions. Some MGOs in Patton’s mold were pragmatic and eschewed denazification, while others eagerly removed Nazi Party members and sympathizers. Both approaches were problematic, and MGOs struggled to find the right balance. The retention of former Nazis created animosity among DPs and non-Nazi Germans, but removing too many people left administrations understaffed. The MG commander in Dachau district, on the outskirts of Munich, described in his diary a debate with the local German regional administrator about the nature of government. The German opposed Nazism yet claimed to support “benevolent dictatorship” because the masses lacked good judgment.25 The nature of Nazi governance had been the problem, in his view, rather than its particular racial, dictatorial vision. Therefore, the Americans could retain former party members who accepted the new regime.26 This was a disturbing position for the American officer to face, not least of all because the region was home to the infamous original Nazi concentration camp, which was publicly opened in March 1933, shortly after the Nazis gained power. The American officer’s forceful disagreement appears to come from an understanding of this history. He argued that removing Nazis was necessary for securing democracy. But he added a caveat, acknowledging that for the US military, ideological transformation of Germans came second to the establishment of security and order.27
MGOs across the zone echoed this preference for order and security. During the first eighteen months of the postwar occupation (1945–46), most district MG commanders reiterated Eisenhower’s sentiments while actually prioritizing stability of government. This divergence between action and rhetoric stemmed from tension in the military’s approach to occupation and, in turn, from the instructions MGOs received. Military planners had spent three years from December 1941 attempting to balance the perceived uniqueness of the Nazi threat against existing American strategies for MG. Their initial plans reflected an understanding of how American occupation was previously conducted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ideas initially codified after World War I.28 Planners focused on short-term, wartime pacification of the enemy to protect frontline operations. The SHAEF Handbook for Military Government in Germany: Prior to Defeat or Surrender retained this limited approach despite being published in December 1944, after the invasion of Germany was underway. The “prior to defeat or surrender” addendum expressed the planners’ continuing effort to distinguish wartime occupation from postconflict governance. In their view, MGs existed to assist combat operations. MG detachments ensured social order and prevented resistance. Restoring local government and a semblance of normal life was only important insofar as it supported this primary objective.29
Separating wartime strategies for MG from postwar governance allowed planners to maintain the American myth of apolitical occupation in which US military operations overseas were different from European imperialism. In this self-glorifying narrative, the United States was a liberationist world power, projecting force only out of vital necessity, even in co-opted European colonies like the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.30 This division allowed military strategists planning for the occupation of Nazi Germany to avoid thinking about postwar concerns, which were pushed onto the State Department, the intended leader of Germany’s social, political, and cultural transformation.31
In the past, there had been good practical reasons to separate wartime occupation from postwar aims. The US military was historically small compared to its European counterparts, and prior to World War II regular combat units primarily conducted occupation. The US military had therefore sought to minimize the number of soldiers employed in rear areas in order to maintain frontline combat effectiveness. From the Rhineland experience after World War I, Smith recognized that this minimalist approach was little different in practice from the colonial models used by the British and the French.32 And when assessed as purely military operations together with all the British and French experiences, minimalist occupations appeared to have a long record of success.33
At the beginning of World War II, American planners imagined a limited occupation of dissected German territory similar to the previous Rhineland operation. The decision to pursue total victory over Nazi Germany dramatically enlarged the scope of MG to replacing the existing government and remaining for a potentially indefinite period of time. It was not a mission that planners were conceptually prepared for, and as documents like the SHAEF Handbook for Military Government in Germany indicate, they never really shook the Rhineland case as a working model. Most precedent in American history involved asymmetric, colonial-style endeavors, in action if not in name. The best analogue for the planned conquest of Nazi Germany was the Union’s occupation of the Confederacy during and after the Civil War. In that case, however, the Union officers’ understanding of Southern government and a shared language minimized cultural challenges. The Civil War was about reincorporating US territory. And such was the cultural affinity felt for the South that it was only after considerable debate within President Lincoln’s administration that he ordered the Confederate states be treated as foreign territory for the purposes of occupation by Union forces, which included abrogating local law and imposing martial law.34
The thinking of men like Barrows at the School of Military Government in Charlottesville offered a possible solution to bringing an expanded occupation of Germany into line with the military’s existing approaches to MG. Barrows and men like him—many of whom ended up teaching at Charlottesville—argued that despite the military’s best efforts to conceptually separate martial rule during wartime from postwar governance, American forces had in the past been involved in numerous engagements that continued after combat ended. The US military therefore already had available a suite of strategic options for postwar occupations. For Barrows, the question of wartime versus peacetime military occupation could be reformed to “discussion … of the termination of military government,” which he noted could “only be done by Congress”; until then, however, “military government continues.”35 This interim period before MG ended became what Charlottesville instructor Joseph Harris called a “breathing spell,” a period of months or even years after the end of open warfare when MG remained and prepared for the assumption of civilian control.36
Barrows acknowledged that even when the scope for MG was expanded, the military’s adherence to remaining apolitical was a problem. In existing thought, a military governor “[could not] create civil government,” Barrows noted, because “this right is reserved for civil power.” But he argued that there was “no doubt” that a military governor’s “authority and powers … continue undiminished into the period of peace following war and until Congress itself provides otherwise.” As a result, the governor was implicitly (if not explicitly) vested with responsibility for more comprehensive governance during the interim period. Barrows showed that the civil-military division so ardently advocated in American MG strategy had been violated repeatedly when it benefited the United States. During the Mexican-American war for example, the military governor of the then-occupied Mexican territory of California organized its application for US statehood by calling civil delegates and holding a constitutional convention. And in later years, commanders in Guam and American Samoa took similar political actions.37
Military