Military government officers (MGOs) arrived in each city shortly after its capture. They faced vastly different conditions. Nuremberg remained a combat zone filled with thousands of Germans and non-German displaced persons (DPs) when Major Clarence E. Hamilton established MG headquarters on 20 April. Sustained bombing and fighting had reduced the city to its bones, and the “occasional sniper” still stalked the streets.5 Augsburg, by contrast, was bombed once during the war. Its people were surely traumatized, but their surrender meant that Colonel Joseph C. Joublanc could better count on their compliance.6 Despite the different circumstances, Hamilton and Joublanc followed standing orders for establishing military rule. Martial law replaced German law and was supplemented by the special MG legal code enunciated in Section 2M of the Military Government Handbook, Germany. Curfews and travel restrictions were imposed, and weaponry, wireless transmitters, and carrier pigeons were confiscated. Criminal offenders of all types from petty thieves to partisans who attacked the Allied forces would be tried before military tribunals. But asserting control was the most pressing issue in these earliest hours of the occupation, and restoring order was the first step.7
According to Hamilton, crime was initially his “most difficult problem.”8 The Americans tended to immediately free the Nazis’ foreign forced laborers, giving them the freedom to celebrate but also to drink, riot, and seek revenge against Germans.9 In Nuremberg, thousands of these newly created “DPs” were “on the loose … looting,” and reports of disorder flooded in from around the city.10 Hamilton turned to the German police to calm the situation. On 21 April, he placed a captured police captain in charge of 150 officers. Though stripped of their uniforms, they retained many of their powers, and Hamilton charged them with distributing MG proclamations and assisting in crowd control. He noted in his diary that the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) would eventually screen these police for Nazi affiliations, but until then, preventing “general disorganization” was more pressing than denazification.11 He then reopened a local prison to house arrested persons. When rioting continued, he ordered the detention of all non-German DPs. A military tribunal was established three days later to begin trying the hundreds of people arrested.12
Joublanc in Augsburg also prioritized control, despite the city’s surrender. He also turned to German bureaucrats and police to effect the new regime. Most bureaucrats and administrators in the city were part of the Freedom Party that had surrendered before the mayor and Nazi Gauleiter committed suicide rather than be captured by the Americans.13 The Germans were still surprised by the power Joublanc granted to a new city leadership after a perfunctory selection process. The colonel questioned candidates for mere minutes before appointing them to key positions.14 Josef Mayr, the new regional magistrate (Oberbürgermeister) he appointed, later expressed astonishment that only ten American officers were left to supervise a mostly German government.15
Hamilton’s and Joublanc’s actions reflected the US military’s guiding principles that were articulated in handbooks and training. Both pursued social order, which was the fundamental objective for military government. But there were also differences in their approaches. Hamilton established MG courts almost immediately.16 For reasons that are unclear, courts were not established in Augsburg until 11 June, though its surrender may have mitigated the rioting and looting that necessitated immediate trials.17 These variations reflected a pattern of small, compounding differences between MG regions that was often most apparent in policing and criminal justice. For instance, MGOs recruited and uniformed German police at different rates. Sentences for the same offense also varied wildly. Across different regions (city and rural), the average punishment for violating curfews ranged between nineteen and seventy-one days’ imprisonment.18
These variations came from the wide-ranging discretion afforded to MGOs in the districts. It was exemplified in the MG Legal Code by two catchalls—Sections 21 and 43—that allowed officers to prosecute as a criminal offense virtually any behavior deemed “disobedience” or an “act to the prejudice of the good order.” Throughout the occupation, MGOs applied them to everything from public drunkenness and offensive language to murder. The ceding of such latitude and power to frontline officers at the rank of lieutenant, captain, and occasionally major was contentious and drew criticism from within and outside the military. Members of the military’s legal division objected most vociferously. In September 1945 for instance, legal officer for MG in Bruchsal, Baden-Württemberg, First Lieutenant William G. East wrote a memorandum to the detachment commander complaining about other MGOs’ regular deviations from what he saw as proper legal procedures. These included ignoring sentencing guidelines and voiding arrests without proper hearings or record.19 He was not alone. In 1947, chief of MG courts in Bavaria Eli E. Nobleman recommended that all defendants convicted of illegally possessing a firearm be imprisoned for approximately five years.20 Even at the beginning of the occupation, such recommendations had rarely been followed. In 1945, the average sentence handed down by MG courts in Bremen was 234 days’ imprisonment; it was a mere 41 days in Augsburg.21 Such variations led Nobleman to lament that across the board, MG’s approach to criminal justice was at best “haphazard.”22
These criticisms had little impact on MGOs’ consequentialist approach to military rule. But such flexible attitudes to law enforcement, sentencing, and the use of Germans in government were seemingly at odds with the Allies’ long-held aim to destroy Nazism. American and British command expected tenacious Nazi resistance during the occupation. As late as April 1945, the chief of staff for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF)—the overarching command structure on the western front—British Lieutenant-General Frederick E. Morgan was sufficiently confident that Germans would continue fighting after defeat of their regular army. He reminded commanders that draconian anti-reprisal measures were permitted,23 including “forced evacuation” and “destruction” of resistant areas “by bombing, artillery fire, or burning.”24 The need for such violence seemed to necessitate a repressive occupation. It was a vision of MG that SHAEF supreme commander, American general Dwight Eisenhower, appeared to suggest when characterizing MG as the answer to Nazi insurgency.25 Strict martial law would allow “resistance to … be ruthlessly stamped out,” he announced on the eve of the Western Allies’ invasion of Germany in September 1944.26
But as powerful as fears of German resistance were within Allied command, most MGOs on the ground approached occupation like Hamilton and Joublanc did, relying on cooperative Germans.27 The structure of MG meant that it could not be about domination. Small MG detachments (labeled so because they were groups of officers “detached” from a larger unit) comprising between five and twenty officers and an equal number of enlisted men were responsible for each city and rural district captured by the Allies.28 Consequently, Germans were expected to offer more than deference to martial law; they were to provide material assistance to MG.29 Thus at its very heart, there was a conflict in the American military’s approach to occupation during World War II between fear of Nazism and the expectation that MGOs could rely on helpful Germans.
The Long History of American Military Government
The conflict was not so apparent in late 1941 when, following the United States’ entrance into the war, the military began training officers for foreign occupation. The US Army’s Provost Marshal’s Office (PMO) established the first Military Government Training School in May 1942 at the Charlottesville campus of the University of Virginia. The academic setting was chosen to impart the challenging and august nature of this endeavor.30 The army felt that such training could not be formulaic learning by rote; MGOs