In May 1945, United States Military Government (MG) detachments arrived in assigned areas of Bavaria to launch the occupation. By the summer of 1945, the US occupiers became the ironical combination of stern victor and watchful master. Absolute control gave way to the "direction" of German authority. For this process to succeed, MG officials had to establish a stable, clearly defined and fundamentally strict environment in which German officials would begin to exercise token control. The early occupation was a highly unstable stage of chaos, fear and confusing objectives. MG detachments and the reconstituted German authorities performed complex tasks with many opportunities for failure. In this environment, a crucial MG obligation was to help secure law and order for the defeated and dependent German populace whose previously existing authorities had been removed. Germans themselves remained largely peaceful, yet unforeseen actors such as liberated "Displaced Persons" rose to menace law and order. The threat of criminal disorder and widespread black market activity posed great risks in the early occupation. This thesis demonstrates how US MG established its own authority in the Munich area in 1945, and how that authority was applied and challenged in the realm of criminal law and order. This study explores themes not much researched. Thorough description of local police reestablishment or characteristic crime issues hardly exists. There is no substantial local examination of the relationship between such issues and the early establishment of MG authority. Local MG records housed in the Bayertsches Hauptstaatsarchiv (Bavarian Main State Archives) provide most of the primacy sources. This study also relies heavily on German-language secondary sources.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Bonn, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-230).

Both after World War I and during World War II Franz L. Neumann confronted the question of how to bring about a genuine democratization of Germany. In both instances he advocated an economic and social revolution in theory but in practice he acquiesced in the failure of the revolutionary forces. The inconsistencies in Neumann's theoretical works, his double emigration and his passage through the Office of Strategic Services witness the German-Jewish socialist's revolutionary dilemma and the cycle of repetition-displacement that both sustained and trapped him in his troubled position. The trademark of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, which was to misrecognize a stylistic "neutrality" for an institutional one, suited Neumann's emigration tactic of fighting a political battle under the cover of scholarly discourse. At the same time, with that he accepted a neutralization of his "radical" agenda for post-war German de-nazification and re-democratization.