Crime and policing therefore sit at the nexus of a history of occupied Germany that seeks to track the interplay between key events and the psychology of the postwar space. Unweaving the known, the inferred, and the imagined facilitates a fuller account of the complicated sociology of occupied Germany—a world shaped by recent war, Nazi violence, and various forms of racial and ethnic hatred—where crime in some form was a major part of daily life. The issue at hand is the nature of the crime. Uncovering the extent of gangs, organized crime, and violent foreign criminals as well as the relationship between serious offenses and seemingly ubiquitous petty criminality—notably the black market—provides a basis for addressing questions related to how the Allies reasserted control and ensured order; what personal, familial, and societal struggles accompanied postwar recovery; and what social effects resulted from wartime psychological damage. Finally, by contextualizing crimes by occupation soldiers and the effect of those crimes on recovery, the centering of crime and policing allows new insight into a topic that has gained increasing prominence in recent years: the interaction between occupied people and their occupiers.
For conceptual and practical reasons, this book focuses on the American Zone. Any study of crime is equally an examination of governance and policing. As a result of unique military traditions, differing views of Germany and related security concerns, pressures on the home front, and relations with each other, each of the four Allies—the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—conducted their occupation of Germany differently. This reality and the volume of data available made one monograph unwieldy. As will become apparent, there was considerable overlap between the American and British approaches to governance, particularly in regard to criminal justice, extending from shared planning and joint command. From the invasion of Europe in June 1944, until July 1945, all American and British forces fell under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) commanded by American general Dwight Eisenhower. Thereafter, the two zones were separate until the end of 1946, but they shared a military court system and legal code that only became more integrated from 1 January 1947, when the zones merged into Bizonia. Even so, accounting for differences made addressing the area as a whole too expansive for one book.10
A division in the literature created another reason to focus on the Americans. As with broader histories of the postwar, portrayals of American-controlled Germany commonly describe it as subject to “destruction and anarchy” (from the German Zerstörung und Chaos). From the 1940s, postwar histories of everything from Europe and Germany to individual regions have been replete with verbose illustrations—often accompanied by photographs—of devastated landscapes, battered people among the ruins, and the implication that social disorder and crime were natural accompaniments.11 Studies of the Americans have frequently asserted that generalized social disorder, gangs, and organized crime threatened MG control.12 These portrayals fit common intuition, which recent cases of war and natural disaster further support. There was a dramatic rise in crime in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the near anarchic conditions in Iraq following the US-led invasion in 2003 are well documented.13 Viewed in light of recent events and the frequency of the anarchy trope, assertions like Keith Lowe’s almost postapocalyptic depiction of Europe as “without institutions” or “law and order,” and in which there was “no shame … no morality … [and] only survival,” become plausible and generalizable.14
Beyond the visual cues of desperate people and extensive destruction, the intuitive account has evidentiary support in postwar Germany. Numerous reports from Germans, Allied soldiers, and other observers describe profound social breakdown.15 Michael Neiberg notes that even the representatives of the Allied powers at the postwar conference at Potsdam, outside Berlin, were eager to escape the “death and widespread destruction” for the “picture-postcard town.”16 The destruction-and-anarchy trope is also powerful, supporting even contradictory interpretations of postwar history. Mass disorder and crime is evidence of a zero-hour caesura (frequently rendered in German: Stunde Null) for German society at the war’s end.17 It also supports Mark Mazower’s opposing thesis of conflict and trauma continuing well past the arbitrary date of 7 May 1945, when Germany surrendered.18 It fits many other narratives as well. High levels of disorder and destruction are thought to have contributed to Cold War divisions. For instance, the ability of new East and West German governments to handle reconstruction was defined in relation to each other and to the preceding disorder. By extension, postwar disorder also became a foundational point against which to assess West Germany’s postwar “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder).19
But the literature on American MG takes a different view. Though frequently redescribing an end-of-war humanitarian crisis including masses of refugees and displaced persons, scholars of MG rarely cite social disorder and crime as major problems.20 Beginning with Harold Zink and Eli E. Nobleman in the 1940s and 1950s, they instead maintain that the Americans imposed strict martial law, which fixed as its primary aim enforcing German compliance with Allied rule.21 And though evocative words like “chaos” and “anarchy” appear in these studies, they nearly always reference administrative, organizational, and logistical challenges. Social unrest and uncontrolled crime in particular are antithetical to this view.22
Two of the most recent works on the American occupation extend from this MG perspective. Walter Hudson is interested in the implications for diplomatic history when large swathes of Asia and Europe fell under American military governance after World War II, particularly how military regional military governors informed US policy during the emerging Cold War. Some similar terrain is covered in this book, including the origins of an American philosophy of military occupation and its role in the conduct of MG in Germany, though I have a very different focus. Hudson devotes only one chapter to Germany, viewing it through the lens of the War Department, the White House, and military command in Europe. He barely acknowledges crime and policing, or their implications for understanding the conduct of American MG and postwar history. For him, deputy military governor in Germany General Lucius Clay is a “lower level” of examination. But exploring policing and social conditions requires that this book go even lower, examining the occupation at the point of contact between American officers and ordinary Germans rather than from the perspective of national governments and command.23
Susan Carruthers also takes a larger view, scrutinizing the conduct of MG in Europe, Africa, and Asia during and after World War II. She also centers the experience of ordinary soldiers and officers, unpacking the psychological toll of occupation and, in so doing, rejecting popular fantasies of American involvement in the former Axis powers as good or benign. Her reason for challenging these narratives derives from their recent implications. Belief that the success of the World War II occupation could be repeated bore terrible fruit in the Bush administration’s misguided attempt in 2003 to follow a historically idealized model of the American occupation of Germany in postwar Iraq. Through exploring soldiers’ experiences as recounted in personal diaries and letters, she shows the darker aspects of occupation including a morally ambiguous world defined by frustration, racism, intoxication, and crime. Regarding the last, she touches on well-documented issues of soldiers’ drunkenness, racism, assault and rape of occupied persons, and participation in ubiquitous black markets. Here, I partially extend Carruthers’s work, foregrounding occupation psychology to explore in more detail how social conditions were perceived and crime was understood and, in turn, the implications of those beliefs to