support on which they planned to rely.30 According to an internal US military history of MG, “The conditions the detachments found [across Germany] were the same. Government buildings had been damaged or destroyed … personnel had been evacuated, or were in hiding. People were starving…. Water sources were contaminated…. All electricity had stopped. Displaced persons, former slave laborers, and homeless Germans crowded the roads and the communities stealing and looting.”31 But the idea that the Nazis had lost control was unexpected, and it often took a while for the Allies to recognize that some of the criminal problems they faced were legacies of Nazi-era disorder rather than combat. One British MG detachment commander in the Netherlands just across the border wrote with evident surprise in January 1945 that it had “become apparent … that the black market has existed in this area longer and on a far larger scale than at first believed.”32 The desperate situation that the Allies found was not merely a result of German defeat and what one cursory study calls a consequent “law and order gap” but rather a cycle of disorder initiated during Nazi rule, exacerbated by the regime’s violent reprisals, and entrenched for a period by Allied conquest.33
Lawless Transitions
The Allied advance in the west stalled following the capture of Aachen. Winter set in. And then, on 16 December 1944, the Germans launched a massive surprise offensive through the Ardennes forest. The resulting Battle of the Bulge—named for the deep incursion through the American lines—lasted over a month. Though the Allies ultimately reversed German gains by the end of January, it took through February before an attack across the Rhine was possible. Once the assault was underway, Nazi rule crumbled quickly and progressively as the Allies swept across Germany, the Americans heading southeast into Bavaria and the British moving north. A similar pattern of social conditions obtained in each area conquered. The approach of Allied forces intensified social disorder and Nazi reprisals. Bombardment and combat drove civilians into hiding. Then power transitioned, and what had once been Nazi territory fell under Allied control.34
The social, psychological, and political ramifications of these—often very brief—moments of transition are not well understood. Most accounts focus on the emotional dimensions of conquest, the sensation of defeat, or, for Nazi slaves and state enemies like Jews, the feeling of liberation. Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf’s vivid personal anecdote of the fear, uncertainty, and freedom he and other Germans in Berlin experienced when the Nazi regime collapsed has become a narrative touchstone.35 He describes stealing because there were no repercussions for doing so during this “holding breath between regimes,” a space of literal lawlessness.36 For Dahrendorf, this caesura helps explain postwar disorder. In his telling, even reasonable people committed crimes in the absence of social constraints. This lawless period has been magnified in many histories of the postwar such that when Dahrendorf was writing in the 1980s, it was reasonable to describe the entire occupation from 1945 to 1948 as one of “chaos.”37
He did not make this claim, however. Careful reading of Dahrendorf’s anecdote reveals the brevity of the actual transition between the end of Nazi rule and the Allies’ assumption of power. Soviet soldiers stopped the looting that Dahrendorf describes within hours. More importantly, the experience of transition was not just geographic; it was personal, an intersection between psychology and space, the analysis of which is crucial to understanding the social realities surrounding the Allies’ advance. The moment of lawlessness passed in an instant for many Germans: for those in air raid shelters opened by Allied soldiers, or those in rural areas like Kulmbach and Eschwege who suddenly found foreign soldiers passing their farms and parking in their villages. For others, the period of lawlessness was longer. In cities like Bremen, Hamburg, Darmstadt, and Nuremberg, combat created lawless spaces where the transition took days or weeks. In other areas, the Nazis disappeared and the Allies did not arrive until sometime later, leaving inhabitants in limbo in the interim. Some people avoided Allied control and, for as long as possible, existed in the interim space. Developing a picture of transitory crime therefore requires examining three overlapping categories of mental and geographic lawless space: that which existed during combat; in the interim between Nazi collapse and the Allies’ arrival; and on the margins, involving people that refused to accept new authority. It also requires clarifying the major perpetrators. As Dahrendorf suggests, all manner of people committed crimes during the time surrounding conquest. But for clarity, they roughly fell into three categories that remained the dominant framework throughout the occupation: German civilians, foreigners (often labeled “DPs,” even though that grouping was narrower), and Allied soldiers. Even in the haze of war, the American military approached the policing and prosecuting of these groups differently. The first two fell under the responsibility of MG, while soldiers were the concern of regular military command.38
It is difficult to develop a satisfactory account of crime that occurs during combat using historical, criminological, or interdisciplinary methods. Firstly, it is not clear what constitutes a “crime” in a live combat environment. Most violence by soldiers against soldiers falls under combat immunity and is legally classified as noncriminal.39 But the hard line this implies between combat violence and criminal behavior blurs when we consider the killing of enemy soldiers in the process of surrender, violence against nonuniformed defenders (sometimes now referred to as “enemy combatants”), or violence against civilians. The well-known issues of collateral damage and accidental victimization make the problem murkier still.40
It is only marginally easier to establish a property offense during combat. During World War II, nearly every military rationalized the theft of food and other staples by soldiers as their acquiring the basic necessities for survival. But on the rare occasions that MPs did investigate theft and looting, finding a wronged party was nearly impossible. Arrested soldiers rarely remembered (or were willing to remember) where they had acquired stolen goods, and oftentimes the likely places had been destroyed in the fighting.41
The extent to which categorization problems affected prosecutions is difficult to determine. It is clear, however, that virtually no American or British soldier was prosecuted—let alone punished—for a violent crime against Germans, or for looting and theft, committed during combat. There were very few prosecutions of soldiers for any crimes against civilians during the advance across Germany in 1944–45.42 Evidence from criminal investigations and observer accounts suggest that the number of crimes soldiers committed far exceeded the rate at which they were arrested or prosecuted.43 The US military was aware of a rise in soldier-perpetrated murder between August 1944 and the end of the war, with a “sudden large increase in April and May [1945].” But violent offenses such as assault and murder were especially difficult for military investigators to identify and therefore prosecute, even if they were wont to do so.44
Maintaining the morale and integrity of tactical units also outweighed the military’s concerns about potential crimes by its soldiers. Sexual offenses were one partial exception: the context of combat does not mitigate or obscure the obvious criminality of sex crimes, and the military was aware that “rape” was “a large problem in the European Theater of Operations.” This included “Continental France” and, in “March and April [1945],” the “large scale invasion of Germany.”45 But very little was done about it. JAG rarely prosecuted American soldiers for sex crimes. Only between 600 and 1,500 soldiers were charged during the first half of 1945, most for incidents occurring outside combat.46 This may suggest the military’s inattention to crime occurring during combat. In one of the first examinations of American-perpetrated rape in World War II, Susan Brownmiller famously describes the battlefield as space for predatory male sexual violence.47 While it is now evident that American soldiers committed far more sex crimes than suggested by the small number of JAG prosecutions, it is not clear how many of these crimes occurred during combat. They appear to be a problem that emerged in the victorious aftermath.48
It is equally difficult to categorize, or identify, crimes committed by civilians. It is not clear, for instance, whether a civilian who during combat steals food or some other resource vital
