GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence Ed. by Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr. and Detlef Junker (review)

Scholars examining the American advance into Germany during the latter stages of World War II frequently mention the non-fraternization order through which military leaders sought to prohibit US troops from close contact with local residents. After years of bitter conflict, the fact that authorities issued this order is in many ways less telling than the decision to rescind it in the fall of 1945. Thomas W. Maulucci and Detlef Junker’s thought-provoking and very readable volume describes this revocation as one step toward a broader range of formal and informal interactions between Americans and Germans in the wake of the war. As Maulucci emphasizes in his introduction, the resulting encounters were shaped by both policy from above and initiatives from below. Profoundly influenced by Cold War considerations as well as local circumstances, the overarching tenor of these interactions changed over time. The book explores developments related to the US military presence in Germany not only from multiple perspectives but also over the course of several crucial postwar decades. Indeed, because the volume moves beyond the more heavily scrutinized periods of Military Government and High Commission for Occupied Germany, it is able to “deal with an American military that is no longer an occupier per se but instead one element in a complex relationship between two sovereign states” (2–4).

Taken together, the fifteen well-researched essays succeed remarkably in illuminating much of the complexity to which Maulucci refers. The contributions begin by probing key aspects of the broader framework within which these German-American relations developed. Bruno Thoß, for example, deftly locates West German deliberations regarding the Bundeswehr within rearmament debates in the early Federal Republic, NATO disagreements about defense strategy, and the overarching concern that Washington would redeploy a sizeable portion of American forces. Hubert Zimmermann offers an astute take on how political and economic factors played into the decisions by successive US administrations to maintain troop strength in Europe despite strong domestic pressure for reductions. The essays then explore the many implications following from the US decision to bring the spouses and children of service members to Germany. Thomas Leuerer perceptively notes that, while largely intended to curb troop behavior, American families’ presence fundamentally transformed the character of the occupation. Military communities helped stabilize the new Federal Republic by symbolizing the degree of “U.S. commitment to the common defense of the West” (133). Yet as he also explains, the resulting housing areas, or “Little Americas,” periodically generated substantial concern for nearby communities—such as in 1972 when “a large group of American teenagers, the children of military personnel, fought a street battle with local police in Wiesbaden” (132).

In one of several essays investigating frictions that derived from the American military presence in Germany, Gerhard Fürmetz charts “the public order crisis caused by GIs” until the late 1950s (196). Constraints placed on the German police by the Allies, he argues, not only prevented them from addressing GI delinquency but also impeded “their efforts to regain authority in a shattered postwar society” (211). Jennifer V. Evans draws on courts-martial cases in Berlin from 1945 to 1948, in particular those involving allegations of violence between American soldiers and German women, to illustrate the extent to which “the American military government found itself having to deal with its own forces in its struggle to contain the disorder that followed Germany’s political and social collapse” (232). Focusing on the 1970s, Alexander Vazansky notes that “much of the attention given to the social problems in the army by the government and the national press” moved to Germany from Vietnam (273). While the racial tensions and drug-abuse problems described meticulously by Vazansky persisted at the end of the decade, he cites the example of General Michael S...