a crime. Such questions tap old ethical quandaries: what constitutes a “crime” in desperate circumstances, and can context justify needs-driven acts? On the whole, US officers and MGOs were not affected by such philosophical problems and instead aggressively moved to restore social order, arresting and detaining any civilian suspected of thievery, looting, or property damage, no matter the motivation. MPs and the first MG detachments handled this initial stabilization. In the cities, MG detachments closely shadowed frontline forces and were often little more than a few blocks behind them. Quite frequently they saw what they believed to be looting.49 Those arrested were referred for trial in a military court, which at first consisted of little more than an officer dispensing summary judgments with the loosest reference to either the MG Legal Code or German law. Few records remain, and those that do suggest that hearings rarely lasted more than a few minutes and conviction was near certain.
A small number of defendants arrested by American forces were referred to more formal military courts attached to the First, Third, and Ninth Armies.50 These records provide scant details, often making it impossible to determine where a crime occurred. But the distribution of charges laid during these trials foreshadowed the later standard: disproportionately high rates of offenses against the strict MG controls such as curfew and travel restrictions, followed by a far smaller number of property crimes, and comparatively few violent offenses.51
The picture was very different in combat areas or in places where Allied authority was weak. During the Battle of the Bulge, numerous civilians were arrested in the countryside around Aachen for looting, many in groups. The punishments MG courts imposed were severe, ranging from two to ten years’ imprisonment. The apparent intention was to disperse nascent gangs. Those who were not German frequently had their sentences suspended on the condition that they “[left] Germany within 24 hours and [did] not return during the occupation.”52 Urban areas were even more chaotic. One set of records shows arrests made around Oberkassel—a neighborhood of Düsseldorf—during March and April 1945. Düsseldorf abutted the heavily defended Ruhr industrial region, which the Allies bypassed and isolated during the initial advance. This Ruhr Pocket was then effectively besieged until late April. Spurred by the threat of violent Nazi retaliation against defeatists, the motley remnants of Wehrmacht units and Volkssturm militia kept fighting, making the area one of the truest examples of near total lawlessness.53
American soldiers frequently arrested German looters who, trying to survive, strayed out of the pocket. They were then tried in the summary courts in Oberkassel. There is little evidence of even rudimentary gang formation in the records of these arrests, suggesting that even the most tenacious social bonds may have disappeared. Unlike in occupied areas, however, where conviction rates were frequently over 90 percent, in Oberkassel just under 60 percent of those charged were convicted. And their punishments were mild, ranging between thirty days’ and six months’ imprisonment. These differences suggest that MGOs recognized both the terrible conditions those arrested were escaping and the likelihood that many were swept up in the indiscriminate efforts at social control by frontline units.54
The Allies often struggled to restore order immediately after combat. Most looting and rioting occurred as people emerged from hiding after combat ceased but before Allied power was firmly established. Crime and disorder soared, for instance, after the British captured Bremen on 27 April. The city, which was to be turned over to the Americans as their deepwater port, continued to experience disorder well after the handover. One of the first American MGOs later explained that “in the early days of occupation” there was “considerable … looting.”55 The records of the Bremen MG courts support his impressions, showing that it took at least six weeks for the Americans to restore some semblance of order.56 MGOs and MPs used whatever means necessary to quell this criminality, including mass arrests and aggressive prosecution. In Bremen, MG began “a practice of increasing sentences … as a deterrent,” which they believed “practically stopped” looting.57
The rapidity of the Allied advance created other, less easily defined spaces in which law and order essentially did not exist. Many were rural. The Americans bypassed large areas of southern Bavaria and Austria, for example, and Nazi control just melted away during April 1945. It was sometimes weeks before the first occupiers arrived. Some of these essentially unoccupied areas became the amoral, near postapocalyptic environments that have figured prominently in accounts of postwar disorder: where the strong ruled, the weak suffered, gangs were formed, and brutality, violence, and theft were normalized. Some refugees and internally displaced people were perpetually pushed into this lawlessness by the destruction of towns and cities. Others wanted to remain in these marginal spaces.
Developing a picture of crime and social conditions is hardest for these marginal spaces because they were, by their very nature, unobserved; there is little direct reporting of specific incidents. Early depictions of occupation crime nonetheless focus on these rural, uncontrolled areas where Allied power was notionally weakest. Lieutenant General Lucius Clay, then the deputy military governor of the American Zone (de facto military governor from 1945, and military governor from 1947), claims in his memoir that DP gangs impersonating soldiers threatened to “get out of hand” during 1945, becoming a particularly pressing problem in the summer after the war ended.58 At least partially reflecting Clay, both Frederiksen in the early 1950s and Kosyra later both describe a lawless countryside filled with dangerous gangs that robbed and killed at will, raiding farms and ambushing travelers. These gangs were allegedly so well organized that they challenged military units dispatched to control them. These narratives of near anarchy in the countryside are primarily supported by inference from circumstantial conditions: masses of DPs and refugees moving around the country, an absence of administration, a desperate shortage of food and other necessities, and widespread reports of German and Allied fears. They also have their foundations in the transitory phase of the occupation when large areas of Germany remained essentially lawless, which allowed formation of gangs.59
In the end, we have no way of knowing how many criminals existed in these marginal spaces. From a historical viewpoint, their potentially criminal acts are lost among the evidence of combat violence and Nazi reprisals. It nonetheless appears that profound disorder emerged in some areas abandoned by the Nazis. In certain places this disorder continued for days or weeks after the Allies established control over nearby towns and cities, though the loose groups of criminals arrested lack the sophisticated organization that Frederiksen, Kosyra, and others suggest in their depictions of gang crime. Much of this interim lawlessness dissipated quickly, however, so the arriving soldiers typically only saw the consequences: houses showing signs of break-in, discarded goods from looting, and the occasional body. Germans also reported the previous disorder to their new Allied governors. Over the summer of 1945, American MG detachments often delegated an officer to record and investigate the numerous complaints received, though he could rarely offer more than condolences.60
The brevity of postconflict disorder is suggested in the absence of charges for civilian-perpetrated violence. It seems unimaginable that such violence did not occur at higher rates than normal, especially in the course of looting and robbery. Observer reports and accounts from a few years later describe widespread rioting, rape, and murder in the time surrounding conquest.61 And while there are reasons to believe that such disorder did occur, there are also reasons to question its nature, its extent, and the identity of the perpetrators. Violence may have occurred, but most of the evidence for it was likely lost in the melee. MPs and MGOs could arrest civilians for looting; they could not easily separate victims of violent crime from those harmed or killed in combat. Nor could criminal investigators pay much attention to crimes that occurred during or before the transition to Allied control. Many later accounts portray DPs as perpetrators and Germans as victims, yet even in the scant evidence available, Germans constitute the vast majority of those arrested for looting and similar crimes. Later narratives about DP violence likely externalize guilt for the opportunistic crimes committed by Germans, which—in keeping with Dahrendorf’s account—ended when the Allies reestablished control.62
The First Hours
