The Art of Occupation. Thomas J. Kehoe
occupation and followed by postconflict (transitory) military governance, postwar military administration, and finally, postwar civil administration. The overarching objectives throughout remained to ensure social control and prevent resistance, but MGOs were instructed to expect different social conditions in each operational phase as their subsidiary priorities changed accordingly. According to Harris, the first phase retained the traditional aims of MG: “maintenance of law and order, the protection of our troops … and the advancement of the military mission [were] the primary and practically the only considerations.” During the second transitory period, MGOs were “to restore the normal governmental services and … encourage citizens to proceed with their normal activities.” During the postwar military administration, MG was to “operate on a stable and more long-range basis,” addressing “administration and reconstruction” in place of civilian government, which then ultimately assumed responsibility for the fourth phase.38
The progression of MG in Germany would approximately adhere to these four phases, though Barrows and Harris were aware when presenting their ideas in 1942 that overtly declaring the potential political ends of American occupation remained unpopular within the military. The desire to view MG as a strategic operation was so strong that it led to confusing positions on seemingly straightforward issues. On the question of occupying formerly German-controlled “neutral territory”—such as French, Belgian, and Dutch lands—the military recognized that civilian governments could not immediately be restored and that military priorities would remain paramount during ongoing war. The simple answer was to view such areas as liberated war zones until enemy action was pacified. But subjecting allied peoples to martial rule was contrary to the liberationist aims of the war. In the Judge Advocate General (JAG) office’s Law of Belligerent Occupation from June 1944, the writers took pains to show how occupation of such “neutral” space could be legitimate under existing international law. They also concluded that it was easier to presume that if MG existed, then so did a state of war. For the purposes of martial law, liberated Allies were to effectively be treated the same as occupied enemies.39
Harris acknowledged the institutional resistance that drove such counterintuitive conclusions in his class at Charlottesville and forced the extended four-phase concept of MG into the existing binary civil-military division, telling students: “Another classification, which may be more logical, is to divide military government into two phases: 1) the phase in which military considerations are paramount; and 2) the phase in which military considerations are no longer paramount.”40 Such reasoning allowed MG to exist during the transition from combat to liberation and also during the restoration of the former status quo in liberated, non-enemy states. It was a difference without real distinction for the trainees, beyond paying deference to the prevailing wisdom that continued to shape MG strategies. MG existed where war and danger remained, and the same principles of pacification and control were paramount.41
The attempt to confine MG to the period before the restoration of civilian control and also tailor it to a total occupation of Nazi Germany led to quixotic contradictions in the instructions for MGOs. These were subtle, yet apparent, in the 1943 edition of FM 27-5, which for instance obtusely states: “Military government may extend beyond [military] operations until it achieves the ends of national policy towards which the operations are directed.”42 The manual predicted that officers would likely face more difficult postconflict conditions than previously expected but advised that they rely on existing strategies for implementing control, which included retaining “local laws, customs, and institutions of government … except where they conflict with the aims of military government or are inimical to its best interests.”43 This meant that “so far as is practicable … subordinate officials and employees of the local government” were to be retained, which in Germany nearly always meant former Nazis of some stripe.44
The contradictions were more glaring in handbooks dealing explicitly with Nazi Germany. In the preamble to the Public Safety Manual of Procedures, Lieutenant General A. E. Grasett, the assistant chief of staff for SHAEF, tried to straddle the competing problems of a limited scope for MG and the annihilation of Nazism. On the one hand he wrote, “The maintenance of law and order is the keystone to the whole problem of an efficient Military Government, and it is therefore desirable that as early as possible, the civil public safety agencies should be reorganized and controlled so that they will cooperate fully.”Yet on the other hand he continued, “Since, however, the Nazi Party have made the German police their main instrument for imposing their will upon the German people, the responsibilities of Military Government Public Safety Officers for purging, reorganizing, and controlling the German police will be particularly heavy.” There was no provision for how an MGO was to rectify these seemingly contradictory demands.45
The manual’s attempts to balance competing demands had particular import for law enforcement. The War Department recognized that denazification would diminish the police force and create gaps in other important government agencies. It therefore instructed MGOs that “police vacancies must be filled at once” to ensure good order. “Responsibility” for staffing was to go to the German “temporary head of the police force,” who would presumably avoid hiring former Nazis.46 The writers recognized that finding politically untainted German police officers would be nearly impossible given that government positions in the Nazi state mostly required party membership. Yet a reconstituted German police force was necessary to achieve law and order and, in keeping with a strategy of indirect rule, would “be responsible for the day to day maintenance of civilian law and order” including “the detection and investigation of crime.” Decisions about the ideological corruption of each police officer would therefore have to be made on a case-by-case basis and were also subordinated to ensuring occupation security. By retaining the final decision, MGOs and the German police they selected were thus vested with virtually unfettered control over the extent and progress of political transformation.47
This conflict over policing extended to contradictions between manuals. The German Police Handbook painted an insidious image of Nazi corruption of the entire police force.48 While recognizing the potential danger posed by police, the Public Safety Manual explained that “a policy of decentralization of command and democratic control [could not] be put into complete operation in the early stages of occupation.” It described the existing “German police machine” as “efficient” and therefore useful. Police units were to be “left unchanged except as necessary to remove Nazi adjuncts and influences or to facilitate the imposition of Military Government control.”49
Other manuals also incorporated this contradiction between the requirements of denazification and ensuring security. The opening chapter of the Handbook for Military Government in Germany outlines seven objectives for MG, starting with “imposition of the will of the Allies upon occupied Germany” and the “elimination of Nazism, fascism, German militarism, the Nazi hierarchy, and their collaborators.” “Restoration and maintenance of law and order” was ostensibly secondary and only important “insofar as the military situation [permitted].” The handbook goes on to order a punitive regime for Germany, “always [to] be treated as a defeated country and not as a liberated [one].” MGOs were even meant to refrain from “steps … toward economic rehabilitation,” and “no relief supplies [were to be] imported or distributed for the German population.” Moreover, “under no circumstances [were] active Nazis or ardent sympathizers [to] be retained in office for the purpose of administrative convenience or expediency.”Yet the very next line equivocated: “Although the Nazi Party and all subsidiary organizations will be dissolved, administrative machinery of certain dissolved organizations may be used when necessary to provide essential functions, such as relief, health, and sanitation, with non-Nazi personnel and facilities.” Left unspecified was where the people and facilities to operate these resurrected organizations would come from, as were the conditions under which punitive measures were to be overridden in favor of “relief” efforts.50
The ambiguity in the instructions that MGOs received ultimately vested them with extensive discretion in governance. Clearly they were to pursue prescribed objectives such as arresting Nazis, shutting down German courts, suspending Nazi law, and restoring basic infrastructure and governmental administration; but they could also decide