The Art of Occupation. Thomas J. Kehoe

      4 Order and Disorder

      The first two weeks for MG Detachment H4 B3 in rural district Kulmbach were bookended by major train disasters. The first occurred on 1 June 1945, the day the officers arrived in the bucolic, sparsely populated country area in northeastern Bavaria. The district had fallen to American forces nearly seven weeks earlier without a shot fired, and it was unscathed by war, at least physically. The area comprised some thirty villages and communities that centered on the small Kulmbach township, set in a valley on a slow-moving river overlooked by the sixteenth-century castle Plassenburg. But the idyllic setting masked profound problems, and that first day was hardly peaceful for the new MGOs. The previous American occupying unit had known their tenure was temporary and had done little more than keep the peace. Many of the villages still had Nazi mayors and administrators, in clear violation of denazification orders, and the new MGOs were concerned about resistance. An MG court had not been established; the backlog of cases meant people were languishing in district jails. There were severe shortages of vital resources including coal, rye, and penicillin. And then, as the new MGOs tried to make sense of the situation, two trains collided, injuring thirty-five Russian DPs, five seriously, and overwhelming the local hospital.¹

      The new MGOs worked diligently over the next two weeks to restore administrative order, but they were for all intents and purposes alone. A summary court was established to try the backlogged cases, and village mayors were ordered to tally stocks of coal and other supplies. Some of the overt Nazis that remained in government were replaced with popular members of the local communities. Refugees moved through the district virtually every day, straining limited resources and local security. But acquiring supplies was the most pressing issue, and conferences were arranged with neighboring detachments to exchange sugar for rye and grain for penicillin.² Coal, which was vital to nearly every aspect of local infrastructure from health care to food processing, proved impossible to source.³ On 11 June, after numerous failed attempts to barter for more with other American detachments, detachment officers took a train 175 kilometers north to Altenburg in the Soviet Zone to acquire some by trade or theft. Their cover was a claim to be seeking 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