its militarism and foreign aggression came from an aberrant history, culture, and even a deviant German psyche. This assessment of Nazism as an extraordinary threat to international peace became the Allies’ rationale for pursuing an occupation aimed at transforming Germany.1 More than the British or even the Soviets, the Americans were eager to characterize a transformational aim through distinct policies, which became the five D’s of Germany’s occupation: denazification, demilitarization, decartelization, decentralization, and democratization. The five D’s clearly (if simplistically) identified key problems with Nazi Germany and offered straightforward solutions, an equation that resonated with Washington’s political establishment and the American public.
The extent to which the US military implemented the aims characterized by the five D’s has important ramifications for interpreting law and order in American-occupied Germany. One widely accepted interpretation dichotomizes Washington idealism and military pragmatism. The War Department and SHAEF are portrayed as staving off efforts to use MG to transform Germany. This narrative of civil-military conflict may explain key events including the Padover-Sweet incident in Aachen and Eisenhower’s promulgation of a military court system and legal code based in prewar thinking. For many historians, the conflict also goes a long way toward explaining why the American occupation appears fractious and disorganized.2 Historians of MG tend to agree that the military rejected the more radical aims popular in Washington, viewing them as impractical and incompatible with traditional occupation strategies. MG’s mission was, in turn, sensibly limited to maintaining order and restoring infrastructure and local government.3
A binary framing masks important historical nuances, not least of all that US military officers including Eisenhower shared the prevailing view of Nazism, which necessitated a different type of war and occupation. There is important explanatory power in unraveling the nature of this civil-military division and the extent to which military versus civilian priorities shaped the course of the occupation.
The Pressures on Washington
World War II fundamentally changed the American view of the world beyond the United States. It broke down a tenacious culture of isolationism that existed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 The rise of aggressive regimes in Italy, Japan, and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s began to change popular thinking, though Americans’ and Congress’s fears of Nazism lagged behind international developments. Roosevelt and his administration had a better appreciation of the danger posed by Hitler. Yet through the 1930s, the president oscillated between idealistically believing he could quell Hitler’s expansionist desires with diplomacy and laying American fortunes with Britain and France. Through the second half of the decade it became clear to him that German aggression could not be abated. Even so, after Hitler created the Sudetenland crisis in Czechoslovakia in 1938 by claiming that the Czechoslovak majority was persecuting ethnic Germans, Roosevelt publicly endorsed the Munich Agreement negotiated by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain. In its wake, Roosevelt called for peace and even asked Italian dictator Mussolini to intercede with Hitler to achieve permanent stability in central Europe. In a private cabinet session, however, Roosevelt criticized the prime minister’s plan to appease Hitler by forcing Prague to cede its border territories to Germany.5
Isolationism prevailed within the United States despite these developments in Europe, and Roosevelt was hamstrung in 1938 by a stalwartly isolationist Congress. Through the 1930s, Congress repeatedly passed “neutrality pacts” preventing greater US involvement overseas.6 After the Munich Agreement failed to curtail Hitler and German forces occupied the entirety of Czechoslovakia, Roosevelt positioned the United States firmly on the side of the British and the French, casting any coming war as an ideological contest between “freedom” and “democracy” on the one hand versus militarism, authoritarianism, and unbridled expansionism on the other. For the president, Hitler’s aims threatened to unwind in Europe the very idea of national inviolability as espoused in international law and subordinate the continent to German power.7 Roosevelt committed the United States to becoming the “great arsenal of democracy,” the financial—if not military—protector of the existing world order, at least in Europe and parts of the Americas.8
The outbreak of European war in 1939 did not end isolationism, and Roosevelt was forced to maintain a “short of war” strategy in which the United States aided Britain and France without providing troops.9 A slim majority of Americans supported war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan before the attacks on Pearl Harbor; it would take the surprise by the Japanese, followed by Hitler’s and Mussolini’s quick declarations of war against the United States, before the public’s opinion turned decisively and motivated congressional support for intervention.10 The realization that war could reach US territory terrified ordinary Americans, shaking their belief that they were separated from the machinations of major powers in Europe and Asia. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, people from California to New York, and across the Midwest, took steps to protect themselves from highly improbable Axis bombing and invasion. These fears drove punitive measures against so-called enemy aliens: Italians, Germans, and—notably—Japanese within the United States. On 19 February 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which ordered the detention of nearly all Japanese people in the United States on suspicion that they maintained allegiance to their ethnic homeland and endangered US security.11
New ideological enemies redefined the measure of victory. In the great moral contest that Roosevelt described, victory could not be brokered or diplomatically mediated. Polls from 1942 show that the majority of Americans believed defeating the Axis powers meant destroying Nazism and Japanese militarism and fundamentally changing both societies. A significant minority desired vengeance and even something like genocide; 13 percent wanted to “annihilate” all Germans, and 15 percent sought the destruction of the Japanese people. Similar minorities hoped for some sort of overt punishment of Germans and Japanese (20 percent and 14 percent respectively), though what this meant in practice remains unclear. For Roosevelt, such a rapid turn in attitudes meant there was no politically viable end to the war in which a Nazi government or Imperial Japanese regime survived, whether he would have accepted it or not.12
A new US standard for victory aligned with feelings in Britain and the Soviet Union, both of which had already suffered terribly before the United States entered the war. Of the two, the Soviets had and would suffer the most. The Nazis were waging an explicitly existential war against them that would ultimately result in approximately twenty-five million Soviet deaths. In 1941, with German forces on Moscow’s doorstep, Stalin faced the real prospect of seeing his nation, communism, and even himself destroyed.13 Moreover, the Nazis intended to either exterminate or subjugate all the Slavic peoples that fell under their control.14 Although the British would not suffer anywhere near this level of destruction, they had experienced the ignominy of repeated defeats through 1940 and 1941. The Germans drove the British Expeditionary Force back across the English Channel in 1940 when France fell and had beaten them across North Africa and defeated them in Crete and mainland Greece. Although victory in the Battle of Britain helped prevent German invasion in 1940, the British Isles were in constant danger of being isolated and starved by a concerted U-boat campaign. For both Churchill and Stalin, these experiences of unbridled German aggression required a reciprocal response.15
At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, it was Roosevelt who first articulated the Allies’ objective of total victory over Nazi Germany. At the conference, the three Allied powers agreed to portray the war as an ideological conflict with Nazism, to seek its annihilation, and to demand Germany’s unconditional surrender. The framing was mostly rhetorical. An alliance between the United States and Britain on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other was in reality based in brute national interest that only barely overrode ideological enmities. Nonetheless, a desire for Germany’s unconditional surrender facilitated agreement on remodeling the country’s politics, societal structures, and even culture during a postwar occupation, even if the scope and nature of a postwar Germany and world order remained undefined.16
Their
