Liberating the Germans: The US Army and Looting in Germany during the Second World War

I. Understanding What the GI Took and Why

On 3 April 1945 the US Army’s 317th Regiment of the 80th Infantry Division arrived in Wahlershausen, a borough of Kassel, Germany. Part of Patton’s Third Army, the regiment had come into the line the previous August and had since thrust into the heart of the Reich. Upon entering the town, the Americans did as they had with every German community they entered. Soldiers searched the homes and evicted some families in order to billet troops for the night. ¹¹ Civilians milled around, unsure what the Americans wanted them to do until Andrew Adkins, a mortar platoon leader, ordered the townspeople to take whatever belongings they needed for the night and go to their cellars within 30 minutes. ¹² This American procedure had actually begun during operations in Belgium. In an attempt to ensure civilians did not interfere with Allied military operations, V Corps enacted a plan to evacuate a 5 by 10 mile grid in the Eupen-Malmédy area during October 1944. ¹³ The operation targeted German-speaking Belgians, and was meant to counter any civilian attempt to frustrate operations in the area. The policy proved unrealistic and unmanageable, and the US Army eventually discarded it for the simpler protocol of controlling the population from their homes. ¹⁴ By March and April, when the US Army advanced into the heart of Germany and swallowed up quaint villages and metropolitan areas alike, commanders feared civilians would conduct a resistance movement with the help of military units. Eisenhower particularly expected difficulties in Bavaria, where the Nazi plan for an Alpenfestung was well-publicized. ¹⁵ GIs conducted house-to-house searches for weapons, equipment, radios, cameras, or harboured German soldiers. Although the resistance never materialized, American units inspected all houses for any equipment that German ‘Werewolf’ units might use to disrupt the Allied advance. ¹⁶

Nearly constantly on the advance since June 1944, front-line soldiers had been deprived of the luxuries found in the German homes they searched. In a letter to his parents 101st Airborne paratrooper Pfc. David Kenyon Webster commented, ‘ever since we entered this country, we have been living in private houses complete with electricity and hot and cold running water … Physically speaking, it’s just like home.’ ¹⁷ It was vestiges of civilized life like these that were in short supply while the soldier was huddled in a water-filled foxhole or stretched out on loose straw in a French farmer’s hayloft, and German homes finally offered comforts long forgotten. American servicemen matter-of-factly told themselves, ‘“[b]etter them than us.” They’d started the war and we had spent too many nights out in the open in Holland, Bastogne, and in Alsace.’ ¹⁸ No matter whether the house was occupied or vacant, the surprise a bedroom’s bureau drawers contained or what a GI could find in a corner cupboard were all part of the mystique of searching and staying in homes.

In the early stages of operations in Germany, troops tended to steal necessities to stay alive and keep warm. ¹⁹ After the bitter and taxing battle of Hürtgen Forest that began in September 1944, and the Ardennes offensive in late December, the Allies attempted to push quickly into Germany, but record-breaking cold weather bogged down the advance. ²⁰ Both Americans and Germans tried to remain in homes when they could, sheltered from the snow and wind. ²¹ Soldiers’ priorities turned to acquiring objects that could keep them warm, be it clothes or kindling, and GIs found creative ways to remain so. In one home, paratrooper Donald Burgett took a fur collar he

ripped from a woman’s cloth coat hanging on the wall near the front door. As we rode I took the small sewing kit from my musette bag and sewed the fur to the collar of my combat jacket. With the collar turned up, the fur kept the cold wind from my face and neck. ²²

Units began to take on comedic appearances, and for a short time columns of troops could be seen wearing white lace as well as brightly coloured scarves. Lace might have been popular for camouflage, but the soldiers’ dabbling in technicolor scarves was ‘in revulsion from wearing khaki so long’ just as much as it kept soldiers warm. ²³ If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, soldiers’ actions were no exception.

Aside from keeping warm, the American serviceman was on a continuous search for fresh food. Although GIs had military rations on hand, they ‘rejected the Army’s contention that C-, D-, and K-rations constituted a balanced diet’. ²⁴ Discontented with army food, troops had no qualms about taking from German civilians. ‘We would acquire a sheep or a small animal, a calf, and butcher it for our own purposes, for our own meal, just as something to get away from the rations,’ combat engineer Irwin Gordon remembered. ²⁵ GIs raided chicken coops across Germany, which resulted in what must have been a severe deficit of the fowl for some time. Andrew Adkins, Jr, summed up the frequency for which he raided chickens, observing: ‘I had been eating so many eggs lately that I began to cackle.’ ²⁶ The average soldier would do anything ‘to take the dust out of our throats and the edge of our hunger’, and fresh food was one of the creature comforts that transcended the military and the war. ²⁷

The struggle to survive trumped feelings of remorse that soldiers might have had. Herchel Thompson of the 1st Infantry Division reasoned a

soldier wouldn’t be in his right mind if he didn’t take food … That’s war. You don’t go out and shoot somebody unless you’re mad at him or don’t like him, so it goes down to getting the food off of him. You’d steal his food out of his mouth if you could … Anything to survive – survival comes first. ²⁸

Richard M. Hale of the 86th Infantry Division asserted, ‘Once you get in on the front, in competition, it’s sort of a no-holds-barred thing, and you contend with whatever are in the elements and the locality with what you can, and you make it work.’ That meant ‘it’s not all SOP [standard operating procedure], the way we learned all of this stuff in basic training or Officer Candidate School. You have to make things what we called “field expedient.”’ ²⁹ Necessity, therefore, was a driving force behind soldiers’ stealing food in Germany.

Apart from food, most soldiers searched for alcohol while in homes. John Keegan argues that soldiers drinking in war is an ‘inseparable part both of preparation for battle and of combat itself’, since the reality of death shakes men’s anxieties. ³⁰ Alcohol was an escape for soldiers, and their chances of acquiring drink of any sort were frequent. David Webster recounted that ‘Wine, beer, and all blends and ages of hard liquor were available for the asking in almost every house and Bierstube within short driving range.’ ³¹ The US Army’s offensive into Europe took units through famous alcohol-producing regions. The Rhine and Mosel valleys offered up Germany’s best wines, and though short on grains to make large quantities of beer, southern Germany’s beer culture was still intact.

Lulls in fighting meant the ‘soldier’s time-honored prerogative of eat, drink, and be merry took precedence’, historian Peter Kindsvatter posits. ³² GIs searched tirelessly for hidden bottles of cognac, schnapps, champagne, and wine. The easiest way to acquire alcohol, however, was to go to the source. ‘Every time you went into a town, the first thing everybody started looking for was the local distillery or brewery,’ infantryman Harry Van Zandt remembered. ³³ Most soldiers were not so fortunate as to procure their drink so effortlessly. Civilians went to great pains to conceal their valuables, alcohol included, in hidden niches. Their efforts were often for naught. Much like a game they would have played as children, GIs made seeking out alcohol from the civilian’s hiding spot a sporting challenge. ³⁴ Soldiers often reasoned that, if Germans had possessions worth retaining, they would go to great pains to hide them safely away. Owing to this belief, many GIs searched for bottles and flasks that simply did not exist.

This slow reaction time meant the prevalence of alcohol created unwanted situations between GIs and Germans, particularly with troops behind the front lines. The soldier’s constant quest for beer and liquor made it difficult for officers between the combat units and the rear-echelon to control their men at night, and when troops did find drinks the probability of crime skyrocketed. When Sergeant Gantter mentioned in his letter home that ‘damn few virgins’ remained where his unit had been, he touched upon a subject about which few soldiers spoke. Rape and looting had always been commonplace in war, but during the Second World War the US Army tried hard to quash the illegal acts. The problem of GIs and rape was not confined to enemy territory. In the United Kingdom, through which approximately 1.5 million American troops passed, the US Army convicted 36 soldiers of rape. ³⁵ In France, where GIs held stereotypical views of French women having liberal sexual mores, the US judge advocate general (JAG) convicted 116 soldiers of rape between 14 June 1944 and 19 June 1945. ³⁶

It was in Germany, though, where women were most vulnerable to Allied soldiers. The leading scholar on GIs and rape in Europe, J. Robert Lilly, argues that ‘the Germany rape victim’s character was maligned with guilt by association with Nazism’. ³⁷ Though the US Army had ‘moderate success’ preventing sexual assaults in Allied countries, living conditions in Germany and a ‘highly ideological context of victors and vanquished’ meant the country’s women were more vulnerable than their British and French counterparts. ³⁸ The first reported rape in Germany occurred on 7 January 1945; from that date until the last report the JAG reviewed on 23 September 1945, the US Army tried and convicted 284 soldiers in 187 cases. ³⁹

To be sure, Germans did not report every instance of rape, just as they did not report all occasions of looting. ⁴⁰ Despite the lack of concrete numbers of rapes in Germany, the evidence available from the JAG’s Board of Review trial transcripts suggests claiming one crime was the corollary of the other is unsubstantiated: the soldier who raped was not automatically given to looting, and vice versa. Of the 187 rape cases in Germany, only 12 involved looting, with five soldiers being charged and eventually found guilty of theft. ⁴¹ In the instances where both rape and looting were involved, the offending GI was often looking for alcohol or already intoxicated and used the excuse of searching for weapons or German soldiers as a way to enter homes. The thefts were often petty and represented more of a symbolic gesture of domination after the rape than any desire for useless Reichsmarks, a pocket knife, or a wall clock, as was the case in three instances. ⁴² The trial transcripts also suggest that the US Army was more concerned with rape than looting. Of the five GIs who were convicted of those crimes, their charges of theft did not add extra punishment to the sentences. Both were criminal acts in military law, but the JAG, when given the opportunity to make an example of soldiers who looted, concentrated on rape and disregard looting, with all 12 cases ending in the soldiers receiving confinement to hard labour for life. In the end, when the two crimes were presented alongside each other, punishments for rape had precedent while the sentences for looting seemed to be less well-defined.

The US Army’s illegal activities, be it rape or looting, became more complicated after the Rhine river crossing: far more soldiers were in Germany, the frequency of civilian interaction rose, and the success of Allied combat operations left Germans vulnerable. While taking clothing and food was stealing because of necessity, the GIs’ tendency to confiscate cameras, watches, and jewellery was different. ‘Don’t ever let anybody ever tell you that we didn’t loot. The American Army [men] were great looters,’ 13th Armored Division veteran Alexander Gordeuk affirmed. ‘We looted what you could turn into cash and carry easy. We really did – there was no stopping it.’ ⁴³ Gordeuk’s statement strikes at the core of the second motivation for troops to steal civilian possessions. After the Wehrmacht collapsed in front of the Allied advance in the spring, and the decidedly weak Volkssturm dissipated, troops no longer had to steal to stay alive. The war had fully turned, and so did the motivations to loot. More than in the winter months, stealing for profit became standard practice.

By March, GIs were granted passes to visit Paris, Metz, Nancy, and Brussels, and soldiers desired objects outside what the army had issued them. As a consequence, cameras became a big-ticket item. ‘Everybody was most interested in getting a good German Leica camera,’ Harry Van Zandt remembered. ⁴⁴ The German Leica was world-renowned, and one of the most expensive on the market, making it a must-have for soldiers. The GI’s desire for cameras was as high as for Lugers, and by spring 1945 the US soldier whom Germans saw had a Luger on his hip and a camera around his neck.

Watches were also highly prized, and a common joke spread throughout Germany that ‘USA’ was actually an acronym for Uhren stehlen auch, or ‘They steal watches, too.’ ⁴⁵ By the time the US and Red armies began to meet up across Germany, the market for watches had grown from being self-contained within the US Army to selling timepieces to Soviet soldiers for a handsome profit. As 4th Armored Division veteran Alexander Phillips put it, ‘They came with the money and we came with the merchandise.’ ⁴⁶ To the Red Army soldier, the paper money he was issued was useless in the Soviet Union, but he could trade a watch for a cow or other necessities when he returned home. ⁴⁷ Americans could then take the money and exchange it for greenbacks. When infantryman Roscoe Blunt went to Berlin during the final days of the war, Red Army soldiers immediately approached him at the Soviet side of the Brandenburg Gate. The soldiers were

bartering for watches, cigarettes, anything they could bring back to Mother Russia. Beforehand, I had set the hands to the correct time on my Telegram & Gazette $2 Ingersall [sic] carrier’s watch that hadn’t worked in months, and sold it instantly to a Russian soldier for $75, and a carton of American cigarettes for $100. ⁴⁸

Alexander Phillips, like Roscoe Blunt, took the opportunity while in Berlin to sell watches to Soviet soldiers. ‘I had two wristwatches, one ran and the other one didn’t,’ he remembered. ‘I sold them for two hundred dollars.’ ⁴⁹

Besides cameras and watches, civilian pistols and other weapons garnered the GI’s attention. The units that searched homes for illegal items collected a myriad of firearms, ranging from antiques to ornate hunting pieces. As Lloyd Kalugin conceded, ‘When we took a town’s surrender, we would insist that they all bring out their cameras, their guns, and knives, and swords. In that sense, yes, the GIs would help themselves.’ ⁵⁰ Soldiers rarely showed restraint, since they took the opportunity to pick up items they may had been wanting for some time. ⁵¹ GIs often sold what they took out of these piles of civilian weapons. ‘I retrieved a beautiful chrome-plated, pearl-handled .25 caliber automatic,’ Pvt. Blunt remembered. ‘It was a masterpiece of beauty and I now regret having sold it on the ship coming home for $65.’ ⁵² For the average American soldier, then, the spring of 1945 was a perfect time to augment his monthly pay.

The collection of watches, cameras, and guns was certainly one way to make profit in a war zone, but there were more direct routes. From Belgium to Germany, American soldiers cracked, broke into, and blasted bank safes. ⁵³ Though most would-be bank robbers were often unsuccessful, Bürgermeister filed enough reports to suggest it was a common occurrence. ⁵⁴ Soldiers’ attempts to abscond with banks’ contents were the height of schemes to get rich quickly, and GIs reasoned that if they did not take the money, someone else would. In the end, these get-rich-quick ventures were merely wishful thinking, as townspeople were wise enough to anticipate American troops’ bank robberies, and moved all valuables elsewhere.

For all the occurrences of stealing for profit, a good portion of GIs took objects as keepsakes. Though looting for keepsakes was a frequent occurrence, it is difficult to extrapolate comprehensively because of the countless possibilities of what might be in any given home. Just as there was an endless array of objects from which the GI could choose, there were limitless reasons why each soldier took what he did. Perhaps it was something he thought a family member would like, or even something that reminded him of his own home. Certainly, those soldiers who had spent time in Allied towns during the push east had lacked the freedom to explore. Now troops had the opportunity to peruse homes and see how German civilians lived. ⁵⁵ What the average soldier saw in German urban centres was an illustration of the middle-class affluence that the country had built up before the war. The random nature of civilian keepsakes that soldiers took is embodied in anecdotes of troops selecting books from destroyed libraries or taking trinkets from houses, or even medieval weapons from collections. ⁵⁶

Acquiring mementoes was generally a form of tourism. More often than not, being shipped to the European theatre of operations was the soldier’s first venture out of the United States. ⁵⁷ Therefore, like travellers returning home with keepsakes of their visits to foreign countries, GIs brought back items that proved to their family and friends they had seen the war first-hand, participated in it, and survived to tell the stories. Keepsakes from the battlefield served to elicit a specific reaction from those at home. Upon seeing a Luger, helmet, or flag, family members and friends could immediately recognize the objects as souvenirs from the battlefield. Keepsakes from homes, however, could be unassuming, and thereby served to be a personal memento for the soldier, rather than an outward display of their time at war.

Keepsakes could also be quite illustrious and include priceless works of art, though these cases were infrequent. Many galleries and museums in Germany had disseminated their collections throughout the countryside in order to escape Allied bombing. Some GIs stumbled upon these objects while exploring cellars and mine shafts, but the Monument, Fine Arts, and Archives Division (MFAA) of the US Army, specifically created to protect against such instances, often took control of these areas before mass looting could occur. Still, the MFAA had an incredible responsibility to ensure the protection of Europe’s cultural treasures. ⁵⁸ With only 350 men and women, the division had to rely on good information from museum curators about hidden collections and rely on the cooperation of combat units to protect artefacts and works of art. Priceless souvenirs, hypothetically, were just as liable to disappear as something inexpensive and easily replaceable. Yet, despite GIs being aware of hidden treasures, the MFAA did a superb job in protecting artefacts from would-be thieves. Some writers, primarily Kenneth D. Alford, have repeatedly pointed to instances of art theft to prove GI rapacity ⁵⁹ The dearth of these instances relative to the number of German objects that were hidden away proves the success of the MFAA more than its failure. Since the examples of high theft were low, the occurrences should be contextualized by examining the particular people and circumstances in which the acts occurred.

Apart from stealing for necessity, profit, and keepsakes, ransacking and plundering abandoned homes became the GI’s way to punish faceless Germans in absentia. Word of atrocities convinced soldiers of the need to carry out justice against ardent Nazis, and the discovery of camps hardened their resolve even more. ⁶⁰ For the most part, American troops did not actively seek revenge against all German citizens. Rather, they looted unoccupied homes as symbolic punishment against the Germans responsible for Nazism’s crimes. This stealing for revenge was meant to convince die-hard Nazis they truly were defeated, and to mete out justice to those Germans who were associated with prison, labour, or extermination camps.

While GIs thought it was enjoyable to pillage every Nazi party member’s home, it was even better to get a chance to steal from the highest-ranking officials. When on 4 May 1945 American units reached Berchtesgaden, the symbolic retreat for the Nazi elites, commanders declared open season on plundering it. As Pfc. David Webster recounted, his company commander made a speech upon entering the town, saying:

We’re going to live in these houses … They were built as apartments for the families of the Gestapo police that used to guard Hitler, so we don’t care what you do to them or take from them as long as you keep them neat. ⁶¹

The American occupation of Berchtesgaden, because of its reputation as the Nazi Party’s retreat, represented the most thoroughly looted town in all of Germany. In the bustle to take the last prize of the war, French and American units raced to Berchtesgaden, descending upon the small town on the Obersalzberg and proceeding to strip it of anything that resembled a souvenir while coming to blows with one another. American photographer Lee Miller, who witnessed the mass looting of Hitler’s Berghof, commented there ‘isn’t even a piece left for a museum on the great war criminal’. ⁶²

For the average civilian who lived in a small town far from Berchtesgaden, their experience with American servicemen was not as shocking. To be sure, GIs stole on a vast scale from abandoned and Nazi homes, but they only occasionally forced themselves upon average Germans. By and large, American soldiers divided the way they treated German property from the way they treated the civilians themselves. Historian Stephen Fritz argues that the relationship between Americans and Germans was, when compared with the other Allies, seamless because GIs best identified culturally with the enemy out of all Europeans they had encountered. ⁶³ This meant the ‘deep-seated desire for vengeance or to humiliate the Germans, which characterized much of Russian and French behavior, was not part of the GI’s character’, Fritz argues. ⁶⁴

These beliefs meant confusion for GIs when General Eisenhower sent down his non-fraternization order of 12 September 1944. The nine-page directive specified that GIs were to avoid ‘mingling with Germans upon terms of friendliness, familiarity or intimacy, whether individually or in groups, in official or unofficial dealings’. ⁶⁵ Lieutenant Daniel Lerner toured Cologne after the fight for the city was over and afterwards sent a report outlining his conclusions about the situation to the chief of intelligence, Psychological Warfare Division. Lerner concluded that ‘Sometimes GIs get the idea that non-fraternization means that they must be “mean” to the Germans. This expresses itself mainly in the form of increased looting and purposeless destruction of property.’ However, despite soldiers’ rough handling of German property, ‘Cases of mishandling of German civilians by soldiers seem to be very rare.’ ⁶⁶

Conversely, the Red Army earned the reputation of being a ruthless conqueror. Claiming recompense for damage the Germans had done on the Eastern Front, Red Army soldiers helped themselves to the complete dismantling of their conquered foe’s country, from the state infrastructure down to the humble peasant. Clothes, furs, food, alcohol, toilets, wash basins, and eventually entire factories became fair game for the victors from the east. ‘On paper’, Catherine Merridale has written, ‘the last phase of the war marked the final triumph of Communism’, and with that came the spoils of war. Since ‘the Red Army did everything on a monumental scale’, it is difficult to put the looting US and British armies did in the same category with the Soviets. ⁶⁷ Primarily this is due to the differences in how each command structure dealt with its soldiers’ stealing and the frequency and scale of the looting. While the US Army saw looting as illegal under military law, the Soviet command allowed a systematic plundering of Germany.

In 1944 the Red Army produced a set of regulations that allowed for its soldiers to capture and send home ‘trophies’. ⁶⁸ Each soldier was permitted to mail an 11-pound parcel of looted goods per month, while officers were allowed 32 pounds. ⁶⁹ Despite the allowance, some officers complained it was too restricting a limit on the goods they desired, complaining ‘you could hardly send an accordion’. ⁷⁰ Officers’ looting reached a scale so large they requisitioned cars and stuffed them with items to send back to the Soviet Union. In short order, trains loaded with loot steamed away from Germany. ⁷¹ Since Moscow had declared the packages were ‘of exclusive political importance’, any delays or pilfering was a crime against the state. In January 1945, when the Red Army was set to cross into Germany proper, 300 parcels arrived in Kursk. By May, when Germany finally fell, Soviet soldiers sent 50,000 packages of loot to the Kursk railhead in one month. ⁷² So large was the upsurge in war trophies that arrived in the Soviet Union that the postal service could not handle the flood of packages.

Ostensibly, Red Army soldiers looted for revenge, but there was also pragmatism involved. In the wake of the complete devastation of their own country, Soviets saw taking German furnishings as a necessity to rebuild their nation and a virtual warehouse to obtain usable items for everyday life back in a country that produced little to none of the sort. Since the highly industrialized German state produced goods and technology many Soviets did not know existed, Red Army soldiers wondered why such an advanced country would invade the USSR. In the end it is difficult even to estimate the amount of loot or value of objects that Red Army soldiers took throughout Eastern Germany in 1945. The scale of looting was monumental, leading historian Norman Naimark to approximate it simply as ‘staggering’. ⁷³

When comparing British looting with American soldiers’ actions, the motivations and objects stolen more closely align than when contrasted against the Red Army. ‘Looting was a part of war, all sides did it, and without doubt the British army enjoyed the perks afforded to the victors,’ author Sean Longden acknowledged. ⁷⁴ The British and Canadians acted much like the American troops: they looted the same things, they were generally not a dangerous victor, and neither group dismantled entire cities. What typified the US and UK soldiers, as compared with the Red Army, was almost a childlike mischief – like schoolyard bullies who attempted to show their authority by taking what they wanted, yet seldom resorting to physical violence.

Looting became a problem for the British army once the Allies expanded the Normandy beachhead. The British Military Police attempted to stem the rising tide, and one half of the 49th Division Provost was tasked with anti-looting patrols in France by June. ⁷⁵ As in the US Army, it was difficult to do anything about French complaints since soldiers were often on their way to the front when they committed crimes. The British army’s attempt to quell soldiers’ infractions evolved into a hopeless enterprise, and Civil Affairs commanders ordered their detachments to report instances but not investigate them. ⁷⁶ With little ability to actually prevent looting in Allied countries, even though they remained stalwart to combat it, the British turned to strictly doling out monetary compensation for their troops’ infractions. The Claims and Hirings Directorate, created to handle reimbursing civilians for the damage done to their property at the hands of the British soldiers, gave out £60,731 strictly for looting in France alone. ⁷⁷

British and Canadian behaviour in enemy territory was much like the American. In March 1945 Lieutenant Colonel Webb, the SHAEF adviser to the MFAA division, toured the 21st Army Group in northern Germany. The army group, led by British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, consisted of the British Second Army, the Canadian First Army, and the US Ninth Army. Webb reported that pillaging and destruction were not contained to just one army, but were equally prevalent in all three. Despite 21st Army Group’s anti-looting orders in Germany, between 1944 and 1945 only 72 men were punished for stealing, compared with 2,792 charges for soldiers being improperly dressed. ⁷⁸

II. The US Army Reacts

Despite the American soldier’s complex motivations to loot, SHAEF viewed the acts as inexcusable, regardless of the reasons behind them. Headquarters’ drive to stop looting was as complex as the GIs’ reasons to steal. By the time American troops broke the Siegfried Line, SHAEF had more experience dealing with its soldiers stealing civilian property than it would have liked. Throughout Allied countries, reports flooded into headquarters about troops looting. Too much time on servicemen’s hands coupled with too much alcohol meant discipline fell and infractions rose. The scale of looting in France prompted General Marie Pierre Koenig, commanding officer of the Free French Forces in London, to write a letter to Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, General Eisenhower’s chief of staff, outlining the problems and urging SHAEF to fix the misbehaviour. On 16 August 1944 Lieutenant General Smith sent his reply. ‘I am deeply grateful for your bringing to my attention the matter of plundering by Allied troops in France, and particularly for the way in which you dealt with this shameful matter,’ Smith wrote. Attempting to allay any fears of inaction, the chief of staff assured Koenig that he had spoken to General Eisenhower about the issue. The reports shocked Eisenhower, and he pledged to issue a general order that would end looting in France. ⁷⁹

Though SHAEF reacted quickly to the situation, much of the damage had already been done. GI looting in Allied countries threatened political relationships, as civilians had just endured German occupation and expected liberation to be better. Yet, as historian William Hitchcock posits, liberation brought ‘millions of armed soldiers, with enormous power and few constraints’, unsettling the local inhabitants and inviting criminal misbehaviour. ⁸⁰ Lawlessness of American troops became so unbridled in France that the Journal de Cherbourg ran an editorial in November 1944 about the situation. ‘Scenes of savagery and of bestiality actually desolate our countryside,’ the piece began. ‘Plunder, rape, murder: all security has disappeared … The law of the jungle will be a necessity since the authorities prove to be powerless. Sympathies that were growing firmer are disappearing. It’s too bad.’ ⁸¹ In response the US Army’s provost marshal launched investigations, the deputy chief of staff drafted memos for army group commanders, and the Civil Affairs Division attempted to smooth over relations with the public. ⁸²

In Belgium the stalemate between the German and American armies during the winter of 1944 forced soldiers who lacked proper winter attire to steal objects. Captain T. Jennings, an intelligence officer, toured the front lines for three days directly after the Battle of the Bulge. In his report he noted that front-line GIs had looted on a considerable scale. He concluded that certain

acts officially attributed to US soldiers exhibit a perverse and unnatural spirit which can only be described as vandalistic. Even when one makes due allowance for the fact that nerves were keyed to an abnormal pitch in such a bloody and tremendous struggle, it is not easy for civilians to excuse troops’ behaviour in some cases. ⁸³

Communities throughout the Ardennes had witnessed some sort of looting and destruction, and soldiers left in their wake demolished cupboards and floorboards that had been pried up in search of valuables and firewood.

The lessons learned while in France and Belgium taught every level of the US Army the importance of dealing with looting before they entered Germany. In autumn 1944 SHAEF took this knowledge and made plans to prevent large-scale looting in the Reich, though Military Government planners were convinced stealing would actually increase from what had occurred in Allied countries. The army suggested the key to containing looting lay ‘in the judicious use of preventive, deterrent, and detective methods, close cooperation being established between Public Safety Officers, Military Police and civil police’. According to the manual, Public Safety officers travelling with combat units were to coordinate with local police to locate and assess what goods and places were most vulnerable to looting. ⁸⁴ In practice, however, the procedures for dealing with towns in Germany never fully came to fruition.

While Military Government planners expected there would be looting, SHAEF held a firm, preventative stance. Eisenhower placed considerable importance on the prevention of looting, worrying lawlessness could derail a successful occupation. In a report titled ‘Memorandum of Behavior of U.S. Troops in Germany’, SHAEF made it clear that there was to be no looting, as the ‘behavior of US troops in Germany, from the time of first entry throughout the occupation, will have great significance and lasting effect upon the German people’. ⁸⁵ The importance of soldiers’ good conduct had historical precedence. Looking to the occupation after the First World War, the military stressed its failure to sufficiently prevent Germany from seeking war again. The officers and men of the Allied forces, then, were to ‘establish a course of conduct which will help to prevent the necessity for a third such entry’ into Germany. ⁸⁶ Soldiers were to be educators, not conquerors, and SHAEF planned to teach Germans ‘a positive lesson’. ⁸⁷ American troops, through their good behaviour, were to cultivate a respectful relationship with the German populace, leading the nation to realize that their support of militaristic leaders and their acceptance of racial hatreds and discriminations had brought only suffering and defeat. To avoid actions that would foment German nationalism or solidarity, soldiers were to not ‘indulge to excess in intoxicating liquors, or commit any acts of pillage or violence’. ⁸⁸ In the eyes of SHAEF, the American soldier was instrumental in the success of the occupation and a reformed Germany.

The construction of anti-looting orders was a difficult proposition, but the implementation of these directives was an even more monumental undertaking. To ensure American troops maintained discipline, SHAEF ordered the officer corps to govern closely its soldiers’ conduct and threatened harsh punishment for offenders as well as commanding officers. ⁸⁹ The threat, however, would prove hollow. The reasons for the hollowness lay in an ineffectual circle of army bureaucracy. Before entering Germany, SHAEF sent its anti-looting edicts to army group commanders, expecting the message to reach the GI. Each level of the US Army forwarded the message to its subordinate command, with only the date on the paper being the differentiating factor. When reports reached SHAEF that American soldiers were indeed looting in Germany on a scale larger than in Allied countries, planners and commanders merely discussed the same shortfalls and issued the same orders. ⁹⁰

When instructions reached divisional and regimental commanders, officers had to actually curb looting instead of passing orders down to subordinates. Many commanders used the ‘Rules of Land Warfare’ to explain why stealing civilian property was unacceptable. Regiments tasked their battalion information and education non-commissioned officers with outlining the rules regarding stealing objects. ‘We were advised very sternly,’ remembered veteran Alexander Gordeuk:

Our company appeared before the battalion people and told them about the Geneva rules of warfare … We reviewed [the rules], that looting is not to be done, unless it’s war material or war related, then you can steal it. But you’re not supposed to go into a civilian house and steal his bathtub, or his dishes, or whatever. ⁹¹

Regiments also threatened courts martial if GIs were caught looting. In a 6 March 1945 memo to all officers of the US 1st Infantry Division’s Regimental Combat Team 16, the commander addressed the subject of troops’ stealing. ‘Since crossing the Roer River’, the memorandum began, ‘there has been an increased amount of looting and vandalism on the part of members of CT [Combat Team] 16.’ ⁹² Immediate ‘steps will be taken by all organization commanders, all officers, and non-commissioned officers of the 16th Infantry to see that vandalism, looting, and souvenir hunting ceases immediately’. If the regiment’s actions continued, the commander threatened the use of summary courts. Thus, it was at the regimental level that Eisenhower’s orders were turned into a workable system of dealing with looters.

Despite the specificity anti-looting orders finally took at the regimental level, subordinate commands rarely enforced the edicts. It is clear from memoirs and reports that most company commanders thought nothing of allowing their troops to loot what they liked. ⁹³ Company commanders were well aware of regimental and battalion orders, but more often than not viewed looting the same way as John P. Irwin’s captain, who, after securing a small German town, told his men:

‘The colonel reminds us all that there is to be no more looting. Seems some people have complained about things being taken from their homes. The rule is no looting!’ Then, half under his breath: ‘And if you do any, see that you don’t get caught.’ ⁹⁴

For the junior officers whom Eisenhower expected to enforce his anti-looting orders, there was obvious irony in prescribing stricter controls in Germany than there had been in Allied countries. The supreme commander interpreted the looting in friendly territory as simply lieutenants and captains not truly appreciating their responsibilities, and he saw much the same problem in Germany. ⁹⁵ SHAEF’s expectation that junior commanders would increase discipline in Germany did not account for the officers’ reluctance to report and punish soldiers for looting. Officers in platoons and companies, after all, experienced the same terrifying rigours of combat as did their men, and they stole for the same reasons. To believe that rank and an officer’s duty would trump the bonding experiences that can only come from the battlefield was unreasonable, and the responsibility of enforcing anti-looting orders in Germany then fell upon the small minority of Military Government men attached to units.

Civil Affairs officers kept SHAEF well abreast of the lack of troop discipline. It was the Public Safety and Military Government officers – those units attached to the assistant chief of staff of Civil Affairs or, in army parlance, the G-5 – who were the most successful in discovering and handling instances of looting in Germany. Only when these men brought cases of looting to regimental and company commanders did majors, captains, and lieutenants enforce SHAEF’s orders. On 6 March 1945, while a Military Government officer was inspecting the town of Weilerswist, 20 kilometres south of Cologne, he discovered four GIs in the process of looting a home. The officer turned the GIs over to the regimental executive officer and confiscated the loot. A summary court tried and punished the four soldiers, though the punishment was never outlined, and the Military Government officer returned the objects to their rightful owners. ⁹⁶ Two days after the Weilerswist incident, a Civil Affairs officer responded to a Bürgermeister’s report in Bornheim, due east of Weilerswist. In short order, a lieutenant of the 654th Tank Destroyer Battalion brought one of his men to the Military Government officer and accused the soldier of vandalizing and looting the Bürgermeister’s home. Upon returning two cameras, a writing folder, and decks of playing cards, the GI was ordered to report to his commanding officer for disciplinary action. ⁹⁷ Overwhelmingly, soldiers caught looting escaped serious punishment, as prosecution depended upon the commanding officer’s view of the act.

Despite Military Government officers’ efforts to combat looting, they fought an uphill battle when trying to adhere to the Public Safety Manual of Procedures that SHAEF had published in September 1944. The small number of these men meant it was impossible to conduct their primary mission while combating looting. Towns first had to be rid of weapons, cameras, and radios, food supplies had to be taken stock of, and the local government needed to be thoroughly screened to ensure all Nazi officials were purged before G-5 could concentrate on looting. Fighting in cities was even more difficult for these teams, as the remaining population had to be evacuated and debriefed. ⁹⁸ Civil Affairs officers, then, had to prioritize their many responsibilities, and investigating looting cases was often relegated to the bottom of their list. Moreover, German civilians feared accusing soldiers of their crimes, unlike in Allied countries where civilians reported GI lawlessness to authorities. Ultimately, the G-5 officers’ biggest enemy was the pace of operations in Germany. With the speed of the Allied advance, the majority of crimes were generally well in the past before Civil Affairs officers could investigate the units involved. As a result, theft continued relatively unabated during combat operations in Germany. The Military Government man in spring 1945 could not manage a situation that was so out of control and had made portions of the Public Safety Manual of Procedures thoroughly obsolete before it was even able to get off the ground.

SHAEF orders also lacked contingencies for the types of looting that occurred in Germany. Little thought was put into the situations in which GIs could loot, or even what type of soldier was perpetrating the crime. Planners who constructed all orders for the prevention of looting did not understand that it was difficult to control both support and combat troops with the same orders. Despite the different reasons why Eisenhower and his generals did not want US soldiers looting, be it friendship in Allied areas or the threat of sabotaging a successful occupation in Germany, they viewed all stealing as unacceptable. The average GI saw shades of grey in his motivations for looting, and often did not see his actions as looting at all. Headquarters also believed, quite wrongly, that front-line soldiers were those most likely to steal civilian and state possessions while in Germany. SHAEF did not expect that systematic looting would occurr behind the Combat Zone. While the front-line GIs looted in great numbers, they could only steal what they were able to carry, as even a relatively light combat load could weigh 30 to 40 pounds. ⁹⁹ Thus, support troops in the Communications Zone were those most responsible for mass looting in Germany, as they had the time and ability to search homes and sell or send home the objects they stole. In the end SHAEF’s orders could not overpower combat officers’ reluctance to enforce rules that spoke of a moral high ground and losing a post-war occupation that had not even begun, nor did they allow for preventing Communications Zone rapacity. The convergence of these difficulties and miscalculations meant that all attempts from SHAEF to thwart American troops looting in the European theatre failed.

III. Conclusion

American soldiers’ souvenir hunting in Germany during 1945 was nothing new to warfare, nor was it new within the Second World War. However, it is something that has not been seen on the same scale since the cessation of hostilities on 8 May 1945. Indeed, the American soldier in the Korean and Vietnam Wars faced significant restrictions on mailing war trophies, and today sending items taken from civilians is non-existent. ¹⁰⁰ The looting that the US Army undertook while in Germany, then, was the closing chapter of a Western way of war that witnessed soldiers’ attempts to seek recompense from civilians for the sacrifices they were asked to make.

Studying GI looting in Germany goes beyond marking the end of a bygone era of war’s traditions; it is more than cataloguing American soldiers’ illegal actions during conflicts, or dispelling the belief that the disappearance of cultural treasures was extensive. Instead, it is an examination of the initial contact between Americans and Germans, a case study of relationship dynamics before the occupation changed the ways in which victor and vanquished interacted. It analyses how soldiers behave in war and why, and seeks to place into context the US Army’s behaviour when compared with that of its Allies. It attempts to look for the moments in war that are not filled with rifle cracks or the crump of mortar shells and to ask how war has changed.

This study has also sought to balance soldiers’ motivations to steal with SHAEF’s motivations to stop such actions. Within that story is a complex web of reasons, a complication of the murky narrative which historians have presented thus far. SHAEF continually feared the loss of moral high ground, yet morality was an amorphous concept in such a bitter war. Ultimately, its motivations went beyond keeping discipline in the ranks to maintain combat effectiveness. Politics, both local and international, lurked on the edges of the debate about looting within SHAEF’s structures. Its orders, and the subsequent lack of directions in how to see them through, showed how inflexible the Allied command could be with issues regarding civil-military interaction. ‘People don’t understand looting,’ the American editorialist and war correspondent Andy Rooney once wrote. ‘It’s a crime all its own,’ he argued, ‘different from robbery or theft … Most of the people who loot wouldn’t think of stealing.’ When GIs took objects, a ‘looter mentality’ was at play. It was a logic that reasoned ‘if [loot] was lying there and if they didn’t take it, someone else would’. ¹⁰¹ This explanation was lost upon SHAEF and thus tells a story about a military that could do little to prevent one of war’s ever-present realities.

We are left with several questions, inquiries that delve into today’s popular memory. What is the legacy of looting? Why does American collective memory, when it replicates looting in recent films or TV series such as HBO’s Band of Brothers, align with one soldier’s assertion that ‘to us it was a funny part of war’? ¹⁰² Perhaps it is because of the scale and brutal nature of the war or the particular enemy the Allies faced or even youthful indiscretion. Whatever the answers, it is a shared memory that resides alongside the violence of the war, yet is distinctively in its own category, retold in an altogether different way from stories about the terror of war. With a growing number of veterans who have in recent years begun to return the items they took, the story of looting has received an epilogue. The men’s motivations to return the items are proof that the topic of GIs looting in Germany during the Second World War has yet to be fully closed.