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