locations of the archives holding these records explains, at least partially, why historians have not used them previously. Locating them was a major challenge and took years of archival research. Most of the MG court records are held in the US National Archives at College Park, Maryland, in the civilian section (rather than the military section where one assumes they should be). There are tens of thousands of entries in the court registers that briefly summarize in a single line each case heard by each MG court.36 However, this is not the complete collection. Some of the files are in the British National Archives in Kew, London, in the United Kingdom (for example, the American MG court registers for Aachen).37 Many of the detachment diaries are held in the Bavarian State Archives in Munich (Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv), and some are in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, though these may be duplicates of records held at College Park.38 Other documents are scattered through different record groups in the US National Archives or are held in various city and state archives in Germany.39
Although the collection is vast, the records are still fragmentary. Many of the MG court registers are damaged or have sections missing. In some cases it is clear from the sequence of case numbers that entire booklets have disappeared. The detachment diaries and reports are also far from complete. Those in Bavaria are of scattered months. There is no full, continual diary for any particular unit that has yet been found. Furthermore, aligning the register entries for an individual case with its fuller case file is often nearly impossible. Detachments’ recordkeeping was haphazard, which evidently complicated the archiving of case files. A case may be entered in the register under one name and the fuller file stored under another. One case examined in this book had five different spellings for the lead defendant and there were four defendants in total. It took weeks to track down. Such problems are well known in histories of crime and policing and are obstacles to virtually every study of historical criminology. Therefore, I also have no doubt that future researchers will uncover new records that will add greater clarity to our understanding of this important history. Far from writing this book to draw a line under this period, I look forward to seeing what other scholars may develop in the future.40
Despite these limitations, I was able to accumulate approximately forty thousand criminal cases covering the period from September 1944 to the early 1950s and spanning the American and, for comparison, parts of the British Zone. The vast majority of these cases from the MG court registers provide just a name, date of trial, charges, plea, finding, and sentence if there was one. However, a great deal can be gleaned from this limited information, including, among other things, the general profile of perpetrators and trends in offenses charged. About fifty of the cases derive from fuller individual case files, which provide significantly more qualitative detail.
To date, these collected cases provide the fullest picture of civilian crime in the American Zone as well as the quantitative—and qualitative—basis for essentially the only dedicated account of crime in western Germany during the period from September 1944 to July 1946. After mid-1946, these data extend to the American Zone data analyzed previously by Schönke, Bader, and Kramer on the British Zone.41
As with virtually every study of historic crime and criminal justice, much of the scholar’s work involves sifting a dark, hidden world for information about events that most people at the time wished to keep secret. To compensate for this problem, the book centers on the course of American military occupation in Germany from its origins in prewar thought and wartime planning through to its implementation and later consequences. As one-half of the story, this focus on government provides a lens through which to interpret social conditions, and the first section is primarily concerned with how social order figured in American ideas about military occupation. Importantly, in World War II, how did military priorities align with the popular ambition to transform Germany from a Nazi state into a democracy, and to what extent did transformational aims shape the military’s strategies in occupation?
From the invasion of Germany recounted in chapter 3, the collected case data as well as the police and MG detachment files provide a basis against which to assess the level and nature of crime and the extent to which American conceptions of MG were executed during the occupation. Chapters 4–7 primarily examine the period of “direct” military rule through 1946, during which MG exercised the greatest level of control over Germany. These chapters explore the different aspects of localized military governance, the crime that occurred, and the perceptions of it during this crucial period. They develop a better picture of criminality during martial law, including the most frequent offenses and the regular collisions between civilians and a strict American regime.
Given the scale of the occupation, no study could ever hope to be complete. This account is primarily based on local German government and police reports; the available detachment daily diaries, reports, and working materials; and records from seventeen different city and rural districts including those of the courts. These were then aligned with records from the higher levels of state and zonal MG and German government and with inter-Allied communications. Later accounts and reflective pieces by participants provided valuable context, and throughout the chapters I also use the individual criminal case files. Because of the challenges described above, not all of these cases came from the districts I focused on, especially in the later years of the occupation when district divisions lost their importance. These cases nonetheless more fully illustrate both the trends in crime and the expressions of dominant perceptions and beliefs, particularly for the later military occupation and after it ended.
As a new cadre of historians point out, postwar histories are as much about what ordinary people felt and imagined as they are about key actors and events.42 Documenting a history of crime and policing requires straddling the line between discrete events and the perceptions and fear that surrounded them. As a result, the court and policing data provide an empirical basis for charting part of the picture, though they consistently abut the popular imagination that permeated life in Germany after the war. As with many new works of crime history and historical criminology in all contexts, developing a more holistic account requires taking a transdisciplinary approach. Throughout the book, I draw on theories from psychology, sociological criminology, and political science in the attempt to describe how crime and deviance was understood during the occupation, how criminal perpetrators were constructed, and what sociological phenomena derive from crime fear and its causes.43
This approach permits examining the association of displaced persons and other foreigners with crime as well as the extrapolations from observed petty offenses to belief in an underlying, unseen serious disorder. It also facilitates analyses that provide historically and culturally contextualized answers, along with more universal human behaviors. This approach is evident throughout the book, but it shapes the final section, which uses a series of case studies to explore how ideas about crime and societal integrity that were seeded early in the occupation endured into later years. The emerging Cold War and development of a new West German identity are important aspects of this story, and the final chapters address questions about how far these geopolitical changes affected popular perceptions, and persistent anxieties among Germans and Americans about social fragility.
The later chapters also deal with the important issue of memory—namely, the extent to which later experience refashioned memories of the early occupation experience. Later narratives of anarchy and chaos that derive in part from memories of the early occupation are as much a part of this history as the actions of ordinary people, MG detachments, and the German police. Charting the extent to which these later narratives, derived from memory, reflect the heightened emotions of the period and diverge from the discernable crime that occurred, as well as charting the actions of a martial system fixed on law and order, facilitates better insight into western Germany’s postwar recovery and a new history of the American military occupation.
