swept up by soldiers and police who exercised little discretion, defendants received due process and the punishments were not overly severe. This picture of assertive American-led law enforcement and the rather fair dispensation of criminal justice, contrasts markedly with many of the existing narratives of occupied Germany, which assert a “law and order gap,” “massive” and “colossal” crime waves, and “profound violence” as the natural accompaniment to the physical destruction and psychological trauma resulting from the war.4 Tony Judt reflects a significant consensus when he writes that “to live normally in Europe meant breaking the law” and that “violence became a daily part of life.” Despite its frequency, this narrative has not been well problematized or explored. Instead, for the most part, social disorder and criminality exist as a literary turn illustrating the ordeals of war and the struggles of the postwar recovery.5
But social disorder, crime, and policing have far greater explanatory power. Exploring them provides a new avenue into the nature of the occupation and for charting the course of Germany’s postwar history. Social disorder and crime exist on a spectrum of behaviors that are socially, culturally, historically, and—of course—legally contextualized.6 Understanding the specific contexts surrounding historic definitions of deviance and disorder exposes dominant perceptions and cultural assessments as much as it does actual crimes and criminals, and therefore it illuminates cultural forces at work during the occupation years. As sociological phenomena, disorder and crime span the real and the imaginary, and fear is the dominant emotion. Fear can be toxic to social order. And for governments and their police, crime control extends beyond prosecuting individual perpetrators for discrete incidents to calming socially emergent fears. As criminologists Mariel Alper and Allison T. Chappell write, “the consequences of fear reach beyond feelings of personal anxiety. It undermines the quality of life.”7 Rod McCrea and his fellow authors agree, arguing, “At the neighborhood level, fear of crime decreases … cohesion, participation in neighborhood associations, and community ties.”8 For historians, emotions complicate inquiry of the past by shaping reports and memory. Fear was a powerful force in postwar western Germany, and analyzing the extent to which it shaped everything from beliefs about crime to a new German nationalism incorporated with the West is crucial for buttressing an account of the discrete, discernable events.9
Crime and policing therefore sit at the nexus of a history of occupied Germany that seeks to track the interplay between key events and the psychology of the postwar space. Unweaving the known, the inferred, and the imagined facilitates a fuller account of the complicated sociology of occupied Germany—a world shaped by recent war, Nazi violence, and various forms of racial and ethnic hatred—where crime in some form was a major part of daily life. The issue at hand is the nature of the crime. Uncovering the extent of gangs, organized crime, and violent foreign criminals as well as the relationship between serious offenses and seemingly ubiquitous petty criminality—notably the black market—provides a basis for addressing questions related to how the Allies reasserted control and ensured order; what personal, familial, and societal struggles accompanied postwar recovery; and what social effects resulted from wartime psychological damage. Finally, by contextualizing crimes by occupation soldiers and the effect of those crimes on recovery, the centering of crime and policing allows new insight into a topic that has gained increasing prominence in recent years: the interaction between occupied people and their occupiers.
For conceptual and practical reasons, this book focuses on the American Zone. Any study of crime is equally an examination of governance and policing. As a result of unique military traditions, differing views of Germany and related security concerns, pressures on the home front, and relations with each other, each of the four Allies—the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—conducted their occupation of Germany differently. This reality and the volume of data available made one monograph unwieldy. As will become apparent, there was considerable overlap between the American and British approaches to governance, particularly in regard to criminal justice, extending from shared planning and joint command. From the invasion of Europe in June 1944, until July 1945, all American and British forces fell under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) commanded by American general Dwight Eisenhower. Thereafter, the two zones were separate until the end of 1946, but they shared a military court system and legal code that only became more integrated from 1 January 1947, when the zones merged into Bizonia. Even so, accounting for differences made addressing the area as a whole too expansive for one book.10
A division in the literature created another reason to focus on the Americans. As with broader histories of the postwar, portrayals of American-controlled Germany commonly describe it as subject to “destruction and anarchy” (from the German Zerstörung und Chaos). From the 1940s, postwar histories of everything from Europe and Germany to individual regions have been replete with verbose illustrations—often accompanied by photographs—of devastated landscapes, battered people among the ruins, and the implication that social disorder and crime were natural accompaniments.11 Studies of the Americans have frequently asserted that generalized social disorder, gangs, and organized crime threatened MG control.12 These portrayals fit common intuition, which recent cases of war and natural disaster further support. There was a dramatic rise in crime in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the near anarchic conditions in Iraq following the US-led invasion in 2003 are well documented.13 Viewed in light of recent events and the frequency of the anarchy trope, assertions like Keith Lowe’s almost postapocalyptic depiction of Europe as “without institutions” or “law and order,” and in which there was “no shame … no morality … [and] only survival,” become plausible and generalizable.14
Beyond the visual cues of desperate people and extensive destruction, the intuitive account has evidentiary support in postwar Germany. Numerous reports from Germans, Allied soldiers, and other observers describe profound social breakdown.15 Michael Neiberg notes that even the representatives of the Allied powers at the postwar conference at Potsdam, outside Berlin, were eager to escape the “death and widespread destruction” for the “picture-postcard town.”16 The destruction-and-anarchy trope is also powerful, supporting even contradictory interpretations of postwar history. Mass disorder and crime is evidence of a zero-hour caesura (frequently rendered in German: Stunde Null) for German society at the war’s end.17 It also supports Mark Mazower’s opposing thesis of conflict and trauma continuing well past the arbitrary date of 7 May 1945, when Germany surrendered.18 It fits many other narratives as well. High levels of disorder and destruction are thought to have contributed to Cold War divisions. For instance, the ability of new East and West German governments to handle reconstruction was defined in relation to each other and to the preceding disorder. By extension, postwar disorder also became a foundational point against which to assess West Germany’s postwar “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder).19
But the literature on American MG takes a different view. Though frequently redescribing an end-of-war humanitarian crisis including masses of refugees and displaced persons, scholars of MG rarely cite social disorder and crime as major problems.20 Beginning with Harold Zink and Eli E. Nobleman in the 1940s and 1950s, they instead maintain that the Americans imposed strict martial law, which fixed as its primary aim enforcing German compliance with Allied rule.21 And though evocative words like “chaos” and “anarchy” appear in these studies, they nearly always reference administrative, organizational, and logistical challenges. Social unrest and uncontrolled crime in particular are antithetical to this view.22
Two of the most recent works on the American occupation extend from this MG perspective. Walter Hudson is interested in the implications for diplomatic history when large swathes of Asia and Europe fell under American military governance after World War II, particularly how military regional military governors informed US policy during the emerging Cold War. Some similar terrain is covered in this book, including the origins of an American philosophy of military occupation and its role in the conduct
