Rebecca Boehling’s book was arguably the most formative to this study. Although published over two decades ago, her approach remains relevant. Boehling examines the frontline of American MG in Germany, the small detachments consisting of between five and fifteen officers that governed the county-sized city and rural districts (Stadtkreise and Landkreise) that compose the local level of German government. She shows that it was at this level where the Americans truly affected governance and where MG succeeded.25 Boehling was not the first to examine the occupation at the local level and she did not explore crime, but she foreshadowed modern counterinsurgency theories by contending that the immediacy and flexibility of American martial rule contributed to German compliance. She also highlighted what appeared to be an important and overlooked paradox resulting from MG tactics: that democracy in some way grew from a system reliant on “military values of subordination and authoritarianism.”26 In so doing, she exposed a need for careful empirical study of social disorder, crime, and their management at the district level, as well as how these figured into a broader desire to democratize Germany.27
In the current literature, there is a profound divergence in the portrayals of social conditions in postwar Germany—including the American Zone—between depictions of a place of destruction and anarchy and depictions of one in which MG exercised strict social control. But close study of crime and policing offers a means to bridge the divide. Currently however, neither literature tends to reference the other. And importantly, existing explorations of crime and policing in postwar Germany tend to extend the destruction-and-anarchy perspective. The extensive black markets of postwar infamy, for instance, were traditionally seen as a consequence of the Nazi regime’s collapse.28 Recent literature has adopted a continuity analysis in which illegal trade resulting from economic strain grew throughout the Nazi period and then persisted into the postwar occupation, but the resulting interpretation of postwar social conditions is the same.29 Similarly, the studies of postwar German policing tend to take organizational disorder, crime waves, and social unrest as the foundational obstacles to rebuilding functional law enforcement agencies.30
That many of the destruction-and-anarchy portrayals exist within a framing established by German scholars Adolf Schönke and Karl Bader in the late 1940s partly explains their persistence. Both Schönke and Bader asserted weak law enforcement, extensive social disorder, and correspondingly staggering increases in violent and nonviolent crime extending to the time they were writing in 1948 and 1949, respectively. Both also had limited access to court and police data on crime and little evidentiary support for their conclusions. But social strain was apparent in all the zones, the economy was in a terrible condition, and Allied administration was a chaotic affair, all of which supported their views. There was also a massive humanitarian crisis as displaced persons were resettled, refugees returned home, and new waves of ethnic German expellees arrived from Eastern Europe. Rations were scarce and illegal trade was ubiquitous. Moreover, these conditions together spurred an anxiety that permeated daily life. Schönke and Bader argued that these conditions necessitated high levels of unobserved crime, a conclusion with which many scholars have since agreed.31
There are two primary critiques of Schönke and Bader’s analyses. Alan Kramer came out of the destruction-and-anarchy line of thinking and, in 1988, sought to verify high rates of postwar violence by examining MG court records from the British Zone beginning in 1947. These military tribunals were the functional end of MG’s criminal justice system and handled most criminal cases. As they had been classified in the 1940s, neither Schönke nor Bader had access to their records. Contrary to Kramer’s expectations, these data showed high rates of petty property and black market offenses yet a low rate of violent crime. Violence was instead commensurate with the very low prewar levels achieved under Nazi rule. These findings narrowed the window of supposed “chaos” from three postwar years to at most one.32 Around the same time, Bernd-A Rusinek raised similar queries about the duration of postconquest disorder, though, like Kramer, he was hampered by a lack of data for the postwar years.33
Jose Canoy’s history of the postwar Bavarian police sits more comfortably in the MG literature. He demonstrates the rapid return of authoritarian policing, and collaboration between German law enforcement and American MG, which shared similar values. He extends Brian Chapman’s salient analysis of police authoritarianism in Germany as a system of legal and moral regulation, which was not traditionally—or necessarily—tyrannical. Traditional authoritarian policing grew from the Gendarme model and permits the effective exercise of control by a comparatively small number of police. The officers rely on tight community networks and lateral observation to detect crime and preventively address potential sources of disorder. Such reasoning helps answer the apparent paradox raised by Boehling. In this view, authoritarian policing is not fundamentally contrary to democratic institutions or systems of government but instead supports the institutions prescribed by the executive. Using that logic, Canoy argues that this type of authoritarianism provided the “scaffolding,” as he calls it, on which democracy was built. One consequence, however, is considerable suspicion among the populace and the proliferation of fear-driven rumors that are fed to police as civilian observations, which can then distort contemporary assessments of crime and later historical interpretations. In that vein, Canoy found extensive fear of crime among German civilians and police, which in turn propagated rumors about foreign gangs and violent criminals. But there were few salient incidents to support these stories, which led him to question whether postwar Germany was “really that violent a place, in historical terms.”34
Kramer and Canoy raise important questions about the existing interpretations of postwar conditions, including the extent to which anarchy of any sort actually occurred and the inferred connection between petty criminality and more serious, yet unseen, offenses. Addressing these questions offers a means of bringing together currently divergent interpretations. As new scholarship deriving from studies of counterinsurgency suggests, obtaining a fuller account of the German case requires adopting an incorporative view in which crime and social unrest, and the beliefs about them, are recognized as different facets of the same story.35
The records of the MG courts, MG detachments, and the various military and German police agencies responsible for criminal justice in occupied Germany remain a largely untapped resource. The dispersed locations of the archives holding these records explains, at least partially, why historians have not used them previously. Locating them was a major challenge and took years of archival research. Most of the MG court records are held in the US National Archives at College Park, Maryland, in the civilian section (rather than the military section where one assumes they should be). There are tens of thousands of entries in the court registers that briefly summarize in a single line each case heard by each MG court.36 However, this is not the complete collection. Some of the files are in the British National Archives in Kew, London, in the United Kingdom (for example, the American MG court registers for Aachen).37 Many of the detachment diaries are held in the Bavarian State Archives in Munich (Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv), and some are in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, though these may be duplicates of records held at College Park.38 Other documents are scattered through different record groups in the US National Archives or are held in various city and state archives in Germany.39
Although the collection is vast, the records are still fragmentary. Many of the MG court registers are damaged or have sections missing. In some cases it is clear from the sequence of case numbers that entire booklets have disappeared. The detachment diaries and reports are also far from complete. Those in Bavaria are of scattered months. There is no full, continual diary for any particular unit that has yet been found. Furthermore, aligning the register entries for an individual case with its fuller case file is often nearly impossible. Detachments’ recordkeeping was haphazard, which evidently complicated the archiving of case files. A case may be entered in the register under one name and the fuller file stored under another. One case examined in this book had five different spellings for the lead defendant and there were four defendants in total. It took weeks to track down. Such problems are well known in histories of crime and policing and are obstacles to virtually every study of historical criminology. Therefore,