sugar, though the Soviets discovered the plot and sent them back with a threatening rebuke to the district commander.4
Civilian crime was not a major problem for the Kulmbach detachment, and most arrests were for violations of occupation restrictions like curfews. But the legacies of war and Nazi rule were more than overt social disorder; psychological trauma permeated the district, and local Germans were deeply anxious about their futures. The strain was potentially worse for the foreign DPs whom the Nazis used as slave labor. Most were from Eastern Europe and resisted returning there; although terrorized by their experience under Nazi rule, many preferred occupied Germany to Poland and the Soviet Union. On 7 June, orders came down to deport all Russians in the district. After the detachment commander announced his intention to fulfill these orders, sixty-two-year-old DP Ivan Meschkow went to the Kulmbach MG office to plead for permission to stay. When denied, he grabbed for a weapon and attempted suicide in front of the Americans.5
The second train accident occurred on 15 June and this time involved deportees under American guard. Soldiers were injured, and again the casualties swamped local hospitals. CIC agents had arrived after the first train accident, suspecting Nazi partisans. Their presence, however, emphasized the MG detachment’s isolation. The agents repeatedly asserted precedence over the district MGOs’ administrative concerns, hampering relief efforts. They also aggressively pursued denazification, removing German administrators and professionals for Nazi affiliations on a near daily basis as well as forcing MGOs to repeatedly restaff local government offices, hospitals, and banks, which undermined district stability.
CIC’s countervailing actions were just one example of the broader military’s intrusions into district Kulmbach, intrusions that more often impeded the detachment’s efforts than aided them. The greatest problem came from the disorderly behavior of regular tactical soldiers. These men had virtually unfettered free reign and by mid-July locals were protesting vehemently about their behavior to district MGOs. Drunken soldiers repeatedly fired their weapons during the night, and doctors at a local mental hospital complained that it was “causing consternations among the patients … many of whom [were] in a poor mental condition.” In another incident, soldiers shot out the power lines, causing a twenty-four-hour blackout for some of the district’s villages. The detachment requested that a curfew be imposed on soldiers matching that applied to civilians, though it is unclear whether this happened.6
Crimes by soldiers were occasionally even more serious and could have a deleterious effect on German attitudes toward the occupation. On 7 July, the body of local man Ernst Keller was found “hanging from a tree in the woods” near the Kulmbach town. He had been due to give testimony in the local summary court on 4 July against a criminal syndicate with which he was affiliated. The syndicate, comprising Germans and American soldiers, was responsible for many of the local black market operations. Members had allegedly broken into a factory and stolen vital goods. Following the discovery of Keller’s body, the detachment opened an investigation into the apparent killing of a witness. German police and MPs were ordered to arrest all of Keller’s known associates, including American soldiers where appropriate. But none of the Americans were ever found, and much to MGOs’ consternation, the case appears to have remained unsolved when the detachment left.7
The Kulmbach detachment’s experiences during the summer of 1945 are emblematic of the challenges that MG detachments faced across Germany. The damage to the social order wrought by the war created more than overtly disorderly and criminal behaviors; it temporarily demolished institutions and the culture that had supported them. People lost faith in the possibility of a peaceful future and the protections afforded by a functioning society. This deeper, more insidious destruction was expressed in myriad ways, but it is worth noting that, geographically speaking, the Allied advance created profoundly disparate experiences of war and its aftermath. The ravages to Germany’s towns and cities contrasted with a countryside that was often physically unaffected. The destruction of German cities was shocking and powerfully shaped both impressions at the time and later memories of the war’s consequences. Some of the scars of that warfare still linger in Germany’s cities today, and this urban devastation, complete with images of blasted buildings and cities reduced to rubble, has come to characterize the postwar environment in popular memory and in many historical portrayals. But these visual consequences of the war are merely an approximate metaphor for a more profound societal, social, and psychological destruction. The visual imagery of urban rubble has power in the memory of postwar Germany partly because MGOs in the cities more frequently struggled to restore basic social order and restrain criminality. The deeper, more damaging trauma of the war was more immediately apparent in the countryside where physical conditions remained largely unchanged. In these areas, small, isolated MG detachments found themselves closely managing people bearing the mental scars of war. They lacked answers to fundamental questions like what it was to be German, or even to feel safe from day to day. It was this universal trauma and the pressures it created for MG detachments that shaped the execution of military governance during its first postwar phase, the period of direct military rule that roughly extended from the end of the war to the middle of 1946.
Urban Isolation and the Rural Wasteland
Although subordinate to SHAEF, and later to zonal commands (the US Office of Military Government and the British Control Commission), MG in American- and British-controlled Germany was designed to be superimposed on existing German administrative divisions. The occupation therefore hierarchically reflected German states (Länder), each of which would have an Office of MG, and then city and rural districts, roughly equivalent to the size of counties. (MG detachments were also assigned to oversee intermediate-level administrative districts called Regierungsbezirke—“government districts”—in the states like Bavaria that had them.) But while this structure created the appearance of a strict hierarchy, the Handbook for Military Government in Germany reflected SHAEF thinking that “the basic unit for Military Government” was to be “the Military District,” meaning the Kreis.8
In practice, this diffusion of power to the districts meant that “the Military District Commander [was] directly responsible for the efficient working of the Military Government machine … for the whole region under his control,” and in turn these local detachments carried the weight of authority and responsibility for MG overall.9 Investing such power in them had some unexpected consequences, however: it granted significant autonomy to detachments and their commanders while isolating them and dissecting occupied Germany into distinct urban and rural areas. SHAEF anticipated questions about relative authority between detachments and respective jurisdiction. The commander with responsibility for a “regional capital” was notionally superior to others in the area. This division was apparent in MG courts—intermediate and general courts were typically established in urban centers—but little else. As in Kulmbach, district detachments were primarily inward looking; they concentrated on local security and reconstruction efforts with little regard for what occurred beyond their borders.10
The challenges associated with ensuring local security and restoring basic functions were manifold, and detachments were forced to address them largely without support. Detachment E1 F3, for instance, arrived in Munich on 15 May 1945. The level of devastation astounded the officers.11 Detachment commander Colonel Charles E. Keegan marveled at the all-but-leveled city and echoed other Allied soldiers across Germany, writing: “Upon arriving in Munich, State government was found to be non-existent … all ministries had either been bombed out or removed to dispersed locations.”12 The SS had summarily executed key German administrators for defeatism and forced the rest into hiding. For all intents and purposes the basic societal infrastructure was gone; the city itself was devoid of life. Yet Keegan expected widespread crime and even resistance, and on arrival he contacted nearby tactical forces in case their support was required. The same day, he opened a public safety office, evaluated available prison space, and then began planning to restore civil functions.13
Keegan’s actions in Munich were similar to those taken by H4 B3 in Kulmbach. Even when arriving well after
