and the city, physically destroyed, was awash in gangs and criminals as rioting, looting, rape, and murder were rampant.9
Though sanitized and self-glorifying, Condron’s account illuminates some of the complexities of the transition from Nazi to Allied control during conquest, a transition that is obscured in narratives where war destroys physical and social infrastructure and results in lawless space. Condron touches on a tenacity in social bonds—even if only between Germans—and points to a cycle of social disorder surrounding combat rather than just emerging from it. Even for historians who argue that social conditions deteriorated before Allied conquest, pointing to the disintegration of Nazism and a consequent rise in crime as a precursor to postwar social conditions, the transitory moments—often little more than days or hours, and in the countryside even minutes—remain a blind spot. But civilians lived through these moments. They experienced the weakening of Nazi control, they cowered when the Allies arrived, and they survived through actual fighting. This period of transition occurred progressively across Germany as the Allies advanced over the winter and spring of 1944–45. It was frequently disorderly and violent, and criminal behavior by civilians and soldiers was common. Understanding the phases of this process and the social realities that obtained in each is foundational to the longer history of American control and German recovery.
Disintegrating Nazi Control
For people living in Germany in 1945, the terror of war began long before the arrival of the Allies. No urban area was safe from Allied bombing, and by the end of the war the British and Americans had together bombed nearly every major German town and city. In industrial and economic centers like Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, and Bremen, bombing was an ever-present threat. The Germans responded by evacuating people to the countryside.10 Most of Aachen’s population was evacuated after British bombing raids in spring 1944, and according to Condron, when the Americans arrived only approximately 20,000 people remained, reduced from 165,000 before the war.11
Those in the countryside escaped the dangers of sustained bombardment, but rural life had its own problems. After the D-Day landings in June 1944, the Allies’ three-front assault on Germany cut its access to basic resources, forcing reductions in rations to near starvation levels.12 Even so, the Nazi regime strained to maintain a sense of normal daily life until the very end, promoting soccer matches and continuing to show movies until mere days before the Allies arrived.13 These efforts to maintain morale did little to minimize the anxiety of impending defeat or overshadow the lack of resources, and crime rose as Germans struggled to survive. The problem became pronounced during the winter of 1944–45. People supplemented their state rations with petty thievery and from a burgeoning black market, and for the Nazis, this rise in crime became another front in a losing war, a vivid reminder of their disintegrating control. Police tracked a proliferation of youth gangs, criminal syndicates, and criminal violence, which in Nazi thinking indicated a failure of the German national will that was necessary for victory.14
All criminal behavior in Nazi thinking reflected the perpetrator’s fundamental—often believed to be incurable—personal weakness. From the beginning, the regime had moved to end criminality by removing these “criminal deviants” from society.15 But the rising disorder at the end of the war was something different, a collapse of national spirit due to defeatism. A defeatist attitude was sometimes defined by Nazi thinkers as a physical deviance and other times as something like a spiritual weakness, but in each case it was believed to be infectious. To Hitler, the deteriorating social order before Allied invasion was a terrifyingly familiar repeat of the home-front collapse at the end of World War I, which he believed precipitated Germany’s defeat. He so firmly believed in the deleterious effects of defeatism that he enacted special civilian and military laws in 1939 to prevent just such a collapse, and throughout the war People’s Courts and military tribunals aggressively punished offenders. The punishments became steadily more severe until death was standard.16 But as defeat became inevitable in the waning days of the war, even the prospect of a court-adjudicated capital sentence did not prevent rising crime, and swift and public repercussions were ordered. Squads of Nazis hunted down even the most minor violators, labeling petty criminals “defeatists” along with more serious offenders and often summarily executing them.17
But even the Nazis’ most violent efforts at quelling disorder had little effect. Threat of reprisal did force many Germans to fight against overwhelming odds; it did not, however, eliminate needs-driven crime, and in many places it merely sped disintegration of societal infrastructure.18 For many living through the regime’s last months, a desperate desire for survival overrode all but the most potent threats of retaliation. Even in Berlin, where Nazi control was ostensibly strongest, the black market became so pervasive in late 1944 that traders were visible on the streets and police rarely did more than observe them.19 The pervasive anxiety driving this crime was not just a result of the economic disaster caused by Allied encirclement; Germans were also deeply afraid of imminent conquest.20 It stripped them of ability to predict a future beyond defeat, which was damaging psychologically and, in turn, socially. The result was resource hoarding as people vainly tried to buttress their livelihoods against impending calamity.21
The Nazis’ loss of control in the final stages of the war has supported narratives of a postwar crime wave, such as Bessel’s depiction of Germany’s “ravaged landscape,” which extends beyond physical destruction to collapse of the political, administrative, cultural, and psychological scaffolding believed necessary for maintaining social order.22 For scholars like Bessel who rightly reject the idea of a zero-hour (Stunde Null) caesura between the scourge of war and the postwar recovery the crime and violent reprisals in the Nazi regime’s final days are thought to have created a cycle of worsening disorder that the Allies could not easily contain in occupation.23
Extending a psychological view of trauma as leading to disordered patterns of behavior, some scholars assume that traumatic events in society—such as war—propagate lasting cycles of disorder and violence.24 Such thinking has shaped interpretations of social disorder and crime in postwar Germany, though the research base is unsteady. The existing literature on psychological damage—including post-traumatic stress and vicarious trauma (i.e., the experience of another person’s trauma, such as a parent)—does acknowledge personal consequences such as depression and gradually emergent sociological effects, including domestic violence and reactionary political movements.25 It does not include the immediate emergence of the destabilizing social disorder and crime imagined to have occurred after the war.26 By contrast, the studies that do suggest criminal behavior examine marginalized, persistently traumatized groups such as African Americans and indigenous peoples that endure ongoing depredations extending from dislocation and dispossession in the past. Such analyses may apply to European Jews and other victims of the Holocaust targeted by the Nazis, partly because of ancient animosities.27
But natural disaster is a better analogue for the experience of many Germans after the war. People certainly suffer psychological scars from such horrific events, yet there is little evidence of such an enduring disorganization of society. Such incidents instead tend to draw people together.28 This was true of bombing during the war, which tightened social bonds rather than breaking them as predicted. It is the often-overlooked tenacity of lateral social bonds in Germany between families, friends, and neighbors that Condron highlights. Indeed, American MG anticipated that such bonds would prevail through combat and could be used by MG.29
Allied conquest did in the short run break up society, separating family members and friends, shutting down local government, and all but halting normal daily life. And the cycle of social disorder and Nazi-initiated reciprocal violence did create consequences that were evident to the first Allied soldiers. They found “criminals” lying shot in the streets and “defeatists” hanging from trees with condemnations around their necks. Key government administrators were often among the dead, while others had been driven into hiding for fear of denouncement and summary execution.
