faced a daunting and uncertain prospect wherever they first arrived in Germany. Victorious tactical units typically announced the occupation in a perfunctory manner by pinning Eisenhower’s “Proclamation No. 1”—promulgated along with the MG Legal Code in September 1944—on the doors of town halls, churches, and farmsteads. Its first article announced the transformative aims of the Allies, who came “as conquerors, but not as oppressors … to obliterate Nazism and German militarism … and abolish the cruel, oppressive, and discriminatory laws and institutions which the party has created.” Article II explained how Allied rule would work in the west: “Supreme legislative, judicial, and executive authority and powers” resided with the supreme commander and were exercised through MG. “All persons in the occupied territory will obey immediately and without question all the enactments and orders of Military Government. Military Government courts will be established for punishment of offenders,” which meant “ruthlessly stamping out” resistance and dealing with “other serious offences” severely. This was to be a military dictatorship based on new laws, though the systems of power were familiar to Germans.63
American combat units were moving quickly and MG detachments were left largely alone in their wake. The detachments’ first task was subduing any continuing Nazi threat. Recent history suggested that resistance was far more likely than acquiescence to foreign occupation. Partisans had emerged in nearly every German-controlled area of Europe, and the Nazis stoked Allied fears of German resistance by broadcasting orders for loyalists to form “werewolf” cells and wage a guerrilla war after the regime’s collapse.64 American and British counterintelligence also discovered instructions for forming these cells. One set described how “women helpers” should disperse and “put on civilian clothing,” as opposed to their Nazi uniforms, when hearing the code word Tarung (camouflage), and soldiers were to move to predesignated locations, go into hiding and prepare for resistance when the code word Wehrwolf was broadcast. The directions were to be burned once followed.65 Nazi planning for resistance appeared so comprehensive that the Allies remained on high alert through the summer of 1945. In July, French military intelligence (Sécurité Militaire) reported to SHAEF that werewolf cells remained a real security threat, despite noting little determinative evidence for them.66
Apart from a few scattered incidents, werewolf cells and German resistance more broadly failed to emerge. MG detachments may have had to contend with initial social unrest, but it did not conceal a greater problem of armed insurrection. The lack of German resistance frequently surprised the Allies. On the day after the Nazi surrender, the commander of the Seventy-First Infantry Division noted that “no incidents indicating civilian resistance or sabotage had been reported.” Germans instead appeared exhausted, accepting defeat and occupation virtually without fuss.67 Why Germans relented to Allied conquest remains an important question for historians with answers running the gamut from war exhaustion to the attractiveness of liberalism following thirteen years of Nazism.68 Their passivity was crucial to MGOs’ ability to restore order. Although some elements of command and many observers continued to worry long after the end of the war about Germans developing a desire to challenge foreign rule, local MGOs’ fears diminished quickly. When in December 1945 leaflets were found throughout central Munich calling on “German men and German women” to “return to Hitler’s vision” and join the resistance, local officers deployed police to search for the culprits but were otherwise almost entirely unmoved.69
During the earliest stages of the wartime occupation, however, American MGOs saw potential partisans everywhere, and officers were trained to see crime as both a motivator of armed resistance and a mask for it. Instructors at Charlottesville repeatedly turned to historic cases to illustrate how generalized disorder could develop into armed insurrection. The Philippines after the 1898 war and Siberia during the Russian Revolution were pertinent examples. US forces had in each case struggled to restore order and essential services, and insurgency ultimately emerged.70 The sociological explanations for this connection between disorder and resistance were not clear at the time. The experiences had nonetheless powerfully shaped interwar thinking about the conduct of military governance, which was reflected in FM 27-5.71
To the first MGOs, nearly everywhere in Nazi Germany seemed potentially overrun with disorder. Bombing and combat had left many cities barely habitable and filled with thousands of desperate, traumatized civilians. Although the countryside, by contrast, often remained physically untouched, DPs and refugees were moving en masse, and officers, having little real knowledge of social conditions, worried about unseen threats. Looting occurred nearly everywhere, creating lasting impressions. One of the first officers in Darmstadt recalled that the city “was a sorry mess. Germans and DPs had looted all food stores and railway cars.”72 The MG Legal Code predicted this postconflict lawlessness and specified looting as a separate crime from theft, punishable by any permitted fine, prison term, and even death.73 MGOs rarely imposed such harsh sentences. Only 5 cases were found in this study (from 387 total) and none by an American court. Two death sentences were handed down by the British General Court in Oldenburg and three by the British General Court in Hanover. Additional conditions may have been relevant to the sentences in these cases; notably, the crimes occurred well after the end of the war—in September 1945 for Oldenburg and April 1946 for Hanover—and were committed by groups, suggesting gang activity. It was less important that these were non-American MG courts. Although cultural differences in the approach to criminal justice existed between the Allies, these appear to have had little meaningful effect on conviction rates or punishments.74
Similarities in the American and British approaches to criminal justice, as well as their shared MG court system and legal code, permit useful comparisons across occupied western Germany. During the first six weeks of the occupation in Cologne, British MGOs typically punished looting more harshly than theft or burglary, with an average of seventy-five days’ imprisonment compared to twenty-five days (or commensurate fine) for the latter offenses.75 These punishments were at the lower end, but not markedly so. In American-controlled Bremen, sentences for looting ranged from thirty days to one year, and in British Hanover, the punishment was typically one hundred eighty days.76 MGOs’ responses were little different in the countryside; however, comparably very few arrests were for looting. Detachments instead prosecuted theft, burglary, and trespass far more often, suggesting more orderly social conditions and less acute economic strain. Punishments were also lenient, ranging from five to sixty days’ imprisonment. Rather than pursuing aggressive repression of occupied Germans, American and British MGOs across the west followed SHAEF priorities, containing disorder and avoiding unduly antagonizing locals.77
As it was not always clear who was committing crimes, perpetrator identification was a major obstacle to restoring law and order. The first MG commanders received fragmentary reports of looting and rioting by DPs, Germans, and American soldiers. Different laws applied to each of these groups, creating challenges for policing. MGOs could use dragooned German police against other Germans, but Allied soldiers and DPs had extraterritoriality as United Nations personnel, exempting them from German law and criminal justice. MGOs could use MPs, who were effective against DPs, but camaraderie often made them less willing to restrain other American soldiers, resulting in few arrests. In any case, the initial wave of American crime tended to dissipate quickly when tactical forces moved on.78 MGOs were less concerned about maintaining DPs’ extraterritoriality and, despite the restrictions, often deployed German police against them. When exposed, this maintenance of Nazi-era power structures in pursuit of short-term order provoked outrage among former Nazi victims and Americans, though it was more common than the military acknowledged and reflected the spirit of MG strategy, if not the stated policy.79
MG more frequently employed German police to impose restrictions on freedom of movement, a less impolitic decision that also helped restore order. MGOs ordered streets cleared and announced strict curfews and travel restrictions. They carried out mass arrests following the lockdown of entire areas, detaining real and potential troublemakers. Nearly half of all arrests in Cologne during the first weeks of occupation were for minor violations.80 In Nuremberg, 320 people
