The Art of Occupation. Thomas J. Kehoe

accounts of postwar disorder: where the strong ruled, the weak suffered, gangs were formed, and brutality, violence, and theft were normalized. Some refugees and internally displaced people were perpetually pushed into this lawlessness by the destruction of towns and cities. Others wanted to remain in these marginal spaces.

      Developing a picture of crime and social conditions is hardest for these marginal spaces because they were, by their very nature, unobserved; there is little direct reporting of specific incidents. Early depictions of occupation crime nonetheless focus on these rural, uncontrolled areas where Allied power was notionally weakest. Lieutenant General Lucius Clay, then the deputy military governor of the American Zone (de facto military governor from 1945, and military governor from 1947), claims in his memoir that DP gangs impersonating soldiers threatened to “get out of hand” during 1945, becoming a particularly pressing problem in the summer after the war ended.⁵⁸ At least partially reflecting Clay, both Frederiksen in the early 1950s and Kosyra later both describe a lawless countryside filled with dangerous gangs that robbed and killed at will, raiding farms and ambushing travelers. These gangs were allegedly so well organized that they challenged military units dispatched to control them. These narratives of near anarchy in the countryside are primarily supported by inference from circumstantial conditions: masses of DPs and refugees moving around the country, an absence of administration, a desperate shortage of food and other necessities, and widespread reports of German and Allied fears. They also have their foundations in the transitory phase of the occupation when large areas of Germany remained essentially lawless, which allowed formation of gangs.⁵⁹

      In the end, we have no way of knowing how many criminals existed in these marginal spaces. From a historical viewpoint, their potentially criminal acts are lost among the evidence of combat violence and Nazi reprisals. It nonetheless appears that profound disorder emerged in some areas abandoned by the Nazis. In certain places this disorder continued for days or weeks after the Allies established control over nearby towns and cities, though the loose groups of criminals arrested lack the sophisticated organization that Frederiksen, Kosyra, and others suggest in their depictions of gang crime. Much of this interim lawlessness dissipated quickly, however, so the arriving soldiers typically only saw the consequences: houses showing signs of break-in, discarded goods from looting, and the occasional body. Germans also reported the previous disorder to their new Allied governors. Over the summer of 1945, American MG detachments often delegated an officer to record and investigate the numerous complaints received, though he could rarely offer more than condolences.⁶⁰

      The brevity of postconflict disorder is suggested in the absence of charges for civilian-perpetrated violence. It seems unimaginable that such violence did not occur at higher rates than normal, especially in the course of looting and robbery. Observer reports and accounts from a few years later describe widespread rioting, rape, and murder in the time surrounding conquest.⁶¹ And while there are reasons to believe that such disorder did occur, there are also reasons to question its nature, its extent, and the identity of the perpetrators. Violence may have occurred, but most of the evidence for it was likely lost in the melee. MPs and MGOs could arrest civilians for looting; they could not easily separate victims of violent crime from those harmed or killed in combat. Nor could criminal investigators pay much attention to crimes that occurred during or before the transition to Allied control. Many later accounts portray DPs as perpetrators and Germans as victims, yet even in the scant evidence available, Germans constitute the vast majority of those arrested for looting and similar crimes. Later narratives about DP violence likely externalize guilt for the opportunistic crimes committed by Germans, which—in keeping with Dahrendorf’s account—ended when the Allies reestablished control.⁶²

       The First Hours of Occupation

      MGOs faced a daunting and uncertain prospect wherever they first arrived in Germany. Victorious tactical units typically announced the occupation in a perfunctory manner by pinning Eisenhower’s “Proclamation No. 1”—promulgated along with the MG Legal Code in September 1944—on the doors of town halls, churches, and farmsteads. Its first article announced the transformative aims of the Allies, who came “as conquerors, but not as oppressors … to obliterate Nazism and German militarism … and abolish the cruel, oppressive, and discriminatory laws and institutions which the party has created.” Article II explained how Allied rule would work in the west: “Supreme legislative, judicial, and executive authority and powers” resided with the supreme commander and were exercised through MG. “All persons in the occupied territory will obey immediately and without question all the enactments and orders of Military Government. Military Government courts will be established for punishment of offenders,” which meant “ruthlessly stamping out” resistance and dealing with “other serious offences” severely. This was to be a military dictatorship based on new laws, though the systems of power were familiar to Germans.⁶³

      American combat units were moving quickly and MG detachments were left largely alone in their wake. The detachments’ first task was subduing any continuing Nazi threat. Recent history suggested that resistance was far more likely than acquiescence to foreign occupation. Partisans had emerged in nearly every German-controlled area of Europe, and the Nazis stoked Allied fears of German resistance by broadcasting orders for loyalists to form “werewolf” cells and wage a guerrilla war after the regime’s collapse.⁶⁴ American and British counterintelligence also discovered instructions for forming these cells. One set described how “women helpers” should disperse and “put on civilian clothing,” as opposed to their Nazi uniforms, when hearing the code word Tarung (camouflage), and soldiers were to move to predesignated locations, go into hiding and prepare for resistance when the code word Wehrwolf was broadcast. The directions were to be burned once followed.⁶⁵ Nazi planning for resistance appeared so comprehensive that the Allies remained on high alert through the summer of 1945. In July, French military intelligence (Sécurité Militaire) reported to SHAEF that werewolf cells remained a real security threat, despite noting little determinative evidence for them.⁶⁶

      Apart from a few scattered incidents, werewolf cells and German resistance more broadly failed to emerge. MG detachments may have had to contend with initial social unrest, but it did not conceal a greater problem of armed insurrection. The lack of German resistance frequently surprised the Allies. On the day after the Nazi surrender, the commander of the Seventy-First Infantry Division noted that “no incidents indicating civilian resistance or sabotage had been reported.” Germans instead appeared exhausted, accepting defeat and occupation virtually without fuss.⁶⁷ Why Germans relented to Allied conquest remains an important question for historians with answers running the gamut from war exhaustion to the attractiveness of liberalism following thirteen years of Nazism.⁶⁸ Their passivity was crucial to MGOs’ ability to restore order. Although some elements of command and many observers continued to worry long after the end of the war about Germans developing a desire to challenge foreign rule, local MGOs’ fears diminished quickly. When in December 1945 leaflets were found throughout central Munich calling on “German men and German women” to “return to Hitler’s vision” and join the resistance, local officers deployed police to search for the culprits but were otherwise almost entirely unmoved.⁶⁹

      During the earliest stages of the wartime occupation, however, American MGOs saw potential partisans everywhere, and officers were trained to see crime as both a motivator of armed resistance and a mask for it. Instructors at Charlottesville repeatedly turned to historic cases to illustrate how generalized disorder could develop into armed insurrection. The Philippines after the 1898 war and Siberia during the Russian Revolution were pertinent examples. US forces had in each case struggled to restore order and essential services, and insurgency ultimately emerged.⁷⁰ The sociological explanations for this connection between disorder and resistance were not clear at the time. The experiences had nonetheless powerfully shaped interwar thinking about the conduct of military governance, which was reflected in FM 27-5.⁷¹

      To the first MGOs, nearly everywhere in Nazi Germany seemed potentially overrun with disorder. Bombing and combat had left many cities barely habitable and filled with thousands of desperate, traumatized civilians. Although the countryside, by contrast, often remained physically untouched, DPs and refugees were moving en masse, and officers, having little real knowledge