But even the Nazis’ most violent efforts at quelling disorder had little effect. Threat of reprisal did force many Germans to fight against overwhelming odds; it did not, however, eliminate needs-driven crime, and in many places it merely sped disintegration of societal infrastructure.18 For many living through the regime’s last months, a desperate desire for survival overrode all but the most potent threats of retaliation. Even in Berlin, where Nazi control was ostensibly strongest, the black market became so pervasive in late 1944 that traders were visible on the streets and police rarely did more than observe them.19 The pervasive anxiety driving this crime was not just a result of the economic disaster caused by Allied encirclement; Germans were also deeply afraid of imminent conquest.20 It stripped them of ability to predict a future beyond defeat, which was damaging psychologically and, in turn, socially. The result was resource hoarding as people vainly tried to buttress their livelihoods against impending calamity.21
The Nazis’ loss of control in the final stages of the war has supported narratives of a postwar crime wave, such as Bessel’s depiction of Germany’s “ravaged landscape,” which extends beyond physical destruction to collapse of the political, administrative, cultural, and psychological scaffolding believed necessary for maintaining social order.22 For scholars like Bessel who rightly reject the idea of a zero-hour (Stunde Null) caesura between the scourge of war and the postwar recovery the crime and violent reprisals in the Nazi regime’s final days are thought to have created a cycle of worsening disorder that the Allies could not easily contain in occupation.23
Extending a psychological view of trauma as leading to disordered patterns of behavior, some scholars assume that traumatic events in society—such as war—propagate lasting cycles of disorder and violence.24 Such thinking has shaped interpretations of social disorder and crime in postwar Germany, though the research base is unsteady. The existing literature on psychological damage—including post-traumatic stress and vicarious trauma (i.e., the experience of another person’s trauma, such as a parent)—does acknowledge personal consequences such as depression and gradually emergent sociological effects, including domestic violence and reactionary political movements.25 It does not include the immediate emergence of the destabilizing social disorder and crime imagined to have occurred after the war.26 By contrast, the studies that do suggest criminal behavior examine marginalized, persistently traumatized groups such as African Americans and indigenous peoples that endure ongoing depredations extending from dislocation and dispossession in the past. Such analyses may apply to European Jews and other victims of the Holocaust targeted by the Nazis, partly because of ancient animosities.27
But natural disaster is a better analogue for the experience of many Germans after the war. People certainly suffer psychological scars from such horrific events, yet there is little evidence of such an enduring disorganization of society. Such incidents instead tend to draw people together.28 This was true of bombing during the war, which tightened social bonds rather than breaking them as predicted. It is the often-overlooked tenacity of lateral social bonds in Germany between families, friends, and neighbors that Condron highlights. Indeed, American MG anticipated that such bonds would prevail through combat and could be used by MG.29
Allied conquest did in the short run break up society, separating family members and friends, shutting down local government, and all but halting normal daily life. And the cycle of social disorder and Nazi-initiated reciprocal violence did create consequences that were evident to the first Allied soldiers. They found “criminals” lying shot in the streets and “defeatists” hanging from trees with condemnations around their necks. Key government administrators were often among the dead, while others had been driven into hiding for fear of denouncement and summary execution. The new occupiers were often bereft of even rudimentary knowledge of the area and the local administrative support on which they planned to rely.30 According to an internal US military history of MG, “The conditions the detachments found [across Germany] were the same. Government buildings had been damaged or destroyed … personnel had been evacuated, or were in hiding. People were starving…. Water sources were contaminated…. All electricity had stopped. Displaced persons, former slave laborers, and homeless Germans crowded the roads and the communities stealing and looting.”31 But the idea that the Nazis had lost control was unexpected, and it often took a while for the Allies to recognize that some of the criminal problems they faced were legacies of Nazi-era disorder rather than combat. One British MG detachment commander in the Netherlands just across the border wrote with evident surprise in January 1945 that it had “become apparent … that the black market has existed in this area longer and on a far larger scale than at first believed.”32 The desperate situation that the Allies found was not merely a result of German defeat and what one cursory study calls a consequent “law and order gap” but rather a cycle of disorder initiated during Nazi rule, exacerbated by the regime’s violent reprisals, and entrenched for a period by Allied conquest.33
Lawless Transitions
The Allied advance in the west stalled following the capture of Aachen. Winter set in. And then, on 16 December 1944, the Germans launched a massive surprise offensive through the Ardennes forest. The resulting Battle of the Bulge—named for the deep incursion through the American lines—lasted over a month. Though the Allies ultimately reversed German gains by the end of January, it took through February before an attack across the Rhine was possible. Once the assault was underway, Nazi rule crumbled quickly and progressively as the Allies swept across Germany, the Americans heading southeast into Bavaria and the British moving north. A similar pattern of social conditions obtained in each area conquered. The approach of Allied forces intensified social disorder and Nazi reprisals. Bombardment and combat drove civilians into hiding. Then power transitioned, and what had once been Nazi territory fell under Allied control.34
The social, psychological, and political ramifications of these—often very brief—moments of transition are not well understood. Most accounts focus on the emotional dimensions of conquest, the sensation of defeat, or, for Nazi slaves and state enemies like Jews, the feeling of liberation. Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf’s vivid personal anecdote of the fear, uncertainty, and freedom he and other Germans in Berlin experienced when the Nazi regime collapsed has become a narrative touchstone.35 He describes stealing because there were no repercussions for doing so during this “holding breath between regimes,” a space of literal lawlessness.36 For Dahrendorf, this caesura helps explain postwar disorder. In his telling, even reasonable people committed crimes in the absence of social constraints. This lawless period has been magnified in many histories of the postwar such that when Dahrendorf was writing in the 1980s, it was reasonable to describe the entire occupation from 1945 to 1948 as one of “chaos.”37
He did not make this claim, however. Careful reading of Dahrendorf’s anecdote reveals the brevity of the actual transition between the end of Nazi rule and the Allies’ assumption of power. Soviet soldiers stopped the looting that Dahrendorf describes within hours. More importantly, the experience of transition was not just geographic; it was personal, an intersection between psychology and space, the analysis of which is crucial to understanding the social realities surrounding the Allies’ advance. The moment of lawlessness passed in an instant for many Germans: for those in air raid shelters opened by Allied soldiers, or those in rural areas like Kulmbach and Eschwege who suddenly found foreign soldiers passing their farms and parking in their villages. For others, the period of lawlessness was longer. In cities like Bremen, Hamburg, Darmstadt, and Nuremberg, combat created lawless spaces where the transition took days or weeks. In other areas, the Nazis disappeared and the Allies did not arrive until sometime later, leaving inhabitants in limbo in the interim. Some people avoided Allied control and, for as long as possible, existed in the interim space. Developing a picture of transitory crime therefore requires examining three overlapping categories of mental and geographic lawless space: that which existed during