considered criminal such as “counterfeiting” (Art. II, Sec. 27), “bribery” (Art. II, Sec. 29), and “resisting arrest” (Art. II, Sec. 38). But the antipartisan focus was evident in these regulations as well. Each MG detachment commander was to announce curfews for which violation was criminal (Art. II, Sec. 22). Similarly, “failure … to have possession of a valid identity card” (Art. II, Sec. 25) was criminalized, along with “dissemination of any rumor calculated to alarm or excite the people or to undermine the morale of the Allied Forces” (Art. II, Sec. 40). In the same vein, “defacement or unauthorized removal of written or printed matter posted under authority of Military Government” (Art. II, Sec. 35) was also illegal; such behavior defied Allied authority and could ignite wider discontent.60
Restricting liberties allowed MGOs to confine and regulate Germans, an emphasis in the MG Legal Code that was further elaborated by the inclusion of catchall laws Sections 21 and 43.61 Together, the MG Legal Code and court system gave MGOs the means to articulate the near unfettered power invested in them by command. MGOs could in turn pursue the twin aims of immediate security and the transformation of German society, though they were never to sacrifice the former for the latter.
Practical Concerns
Early in the planning process it became apparent that the State Department was not capable of assuming responsibility for the occupation when the war ended. MG would continue in Germany for an undetermined period of time. At the beginning of April 1945, Roosevelt rejected Morgenthau’s plan to permanently dismantle Germany. The president died shortly after on 12 April, but the imperative for transforming Germany remained.62 Within four days of Roosevelt’s death, new president Harry Truman approved Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 (JCS 1067), which outlined a radical plan for denazification and demilitarization to be carried out by the military in the imminent transition from war to peace. This directive was the final fusing of political and military views into a formalized policy for Germany. Although not as draconian as Morgenthau’s plan, it nevertheless carried forward the same basic perception that, in the words of contemporary US Army historian Harold Zink, “the German people [were] a menace to humanity and guilty of crimes,” and it extended the military’s wartime priorities into the postwar occupation.63 Though the Americans would help restore a unified and industrialized Germany, JCS 1067 authorized sweeping changes to the perceived cultural underpinnings of Nazism, including the attempt to achieve what David Large calls the “demilitarization of the German mind.”64
JCS 1067 required the dissolution of all Nazi institutions, disbandment of military and paramilitary formations, and removal from public positions of power “all members of the Nazi Party who [had] been more than nominal participants.”65 This order extended beyond government to positions in civic leadership and business. The directive also established a structure for Germany’s democratization. The school system was to be denazified by changing textbooks and the curriculum.66 Decentralization was particularly important to the Americans and their approach to policing. The Americans believed that the Third Reich’s centralized state police strengthened the regime. Policing and law enforcement more broadly were devolved to the MG districts, which neatly allowed existing military strategies to dovetail with the transformative agenda.67
The State Department remained the intended agency to ultimately enact Germany’s transformation from Nazism to democracy. But the State Department would not assume control until September 1949, when the High Commission for Occupied Germany (HICOG) was formed. The military held power until that point and, whether explicitly intended or not, was at the forefront of transformative occupation. This reality only exacerbated the practical and philosophical problems that military planners had grappled with throughout the war. During the phase of direct military control over the occupation (from the invasion of Germany in October 1944 to July 1946), small MG detachments were required to govern large German city and rural districts virtually autonomously and were therefore reliant on local administrators and police, all of whom had in some way been affiliated with the Nazi regime. Later, as German administrations increasingly gained responsibilities for governance under American oversight, occupation security remained paramount and the balancing of security and stability with transformation remained.68 American MG consistently prioritized occupation security as a necessary precursor to societal change, even if it rarely articulated this reality openly.69
3 A Violent Transition
First Lieutenant Harry D. Condron of the US First Army’s Historical Service arrived in Aachen on the morning of 21 October 1944. The city had surrendered that day, and he had orders to interview participants and document the battle. The report he produced is a glorification of American heroism in the face of implacable Nazi resistance. He glosses over the human trauma and horror, choosing to describe the consequences of warfare by focusing on the physical damage he saw. Nearly all the buildings “over the route … travelled” had been “completely gutted,” he wrote. “It was rare indeed when a building was found that was still usable.” The violence and chaos of the prior three weeks of sustained combat is almost entirely absent from his account, as is any overt discussion of social disorder or crime.1
Condron instead offers a liberationist narrative in which the Americans fought through the city and discovered German civilians cowering in air raid shelters and ruined homes. Evacuating them was “of primary importance … for the protection of the rear [of the American forces] from any possible enemy action.”2 But this tactical concern did not affect the American army’s humanity: “As the infantry took an area … the civilians would surrender. They would be organized and the march to the rear would commence under infantry guard, to be taken over after a few blocks by the military government and the MPs [military police].”3 The Germans were surprised by the Americans’ management. Rather than “harsh and cruel treatment” including being detained in “barbed wire enclosures with no shelter” and having “their families broken up,” they were sent to camps and provided with food, coffee, and winter clothing.4 “Needless to say,” writes Condron, “they were happily amazed at the humane treatment.”5 He portrays the Americans as the Nazis’ antithesis. Even for Germans, the American arrival meant a better life, such that the physical destruction of war became a backdrop to well-ordered lines of civilians walking toward warm food, comfortable beds, and peace.6
Some of the uglier social realities of combat and American conquest are apparent from a careful reading. Large numbers of Poles and Russians discovered among the civilian evacuees were separated from the Germans and removed to a different, unspecified area. These people were most likely forced laborers brought west by the Nazis and liberated by the Americans; and like other liberated Nazi slaves, some had no doubt celebrated their freedom by drinking, rioting, and looting. Many would join the millions of DPs who moved en masse around Germany and Europe throughout 1945. Condron also skims over the mass identification of the German evacuees, their detention in camps, and a subsequent systematic search for plainclothes German soldiers. He omits that the Americans prioritized security and social control over civilian comfort (let alone happiness). They kept German civilians detained until satisfied that all threats were eliminated, and they summarily executed as spies and “partisans” those nonuniformed soldiers that failed to identify themselves.7
Condron’s account contrasts sharply with narratives that emerged just a short time later, which vividly portray destruction, disorder, and violence accompanying the Western Allies’ advance. In 1946, correspondent for the US military’s Army Talks magazine Julian Bach described the Germany of 1945 as “a country without cities.” Images of a land laid to waste by war underpin the destruction-and-anarchy narrative and voice the link that observers drew between extensive physical damage and fraying social bonds, which supposedly gave rise to social disorder and crime.8 In a 1948 description of MG’s arrival in Darmstadt, the officers dismiss “fantastic reports” of the city’s being “eighty per cent destroyed,” only to
