Sunday, November 15, 2009
15 Nov
I want to talk about what our discussion was about on friday of last week about anti-fraternization. I remember one of the questions raised was why this policy was instituted in the first place. The reasons to me are both military reasons as well as political. For the first reason, military seems to be obvious to me. Wehrmacht POWs were returning home to an absolutely destroyed home. These POWs never got the chance to be debriefed, or had time to be demobilized. These are still trained killers thath have not had a chance to calm down. When they were returning to their homes and saw their women hanging out and in bed with the occupied soldiers, this is just yet another thorn in the side. The occupying Allies did not want to aggravate an already tense situation. For any occupying army, the goal is to pacify civilians and keep them calm and under control. The Allies needed the German POWs to come back home to something. If they came back to nothing, a violent insurgency could be expected as these war-torn veterans felt they had nothing to lose and a vehement and violent attitude towards the victors. Plus, the POWs felt that they had been betrayed by their women as they galavanted out with American and Allied soldiers. This is one of the reasons the Americans tried to get families out as quickly as possible. This I know because my grandfather was a WW2 vet, he was on the outskirts of the Austrian-German border after liberating Dachau on the day Berlin fell. He ended up being part of the Occupied Forces in Germany and became the mayor of Marburg. My grandmother and my father (who was very young at the time) moved out a couple of months after the war was concluded, and the Army took care of the transportation. This shows me the commitment the Armed Forces were to keeping to the anti-fraternization policy. So finishing up, I believe originally the anti-fraternization policy in the beginning was of more of a military purpose. It was one of the policies the Allies were using to pacify the occupied Germans, and prevent an insurgency. The Allies truly were trying to help rebuild Germany as quickly as possible after the war, and rubbing salt in the wounds of the Germans by then taking their women, definitely could have sowed the seeds of hate and violence to troops that had not been demobilized.
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You made a very interesting point about the American policy against fraternization. The example that you gave was, of course, excellent. And I think that you brought up a good point when you said that the Allied forces maintained this policy (originally) to placate the invaded territories. But I wonder just how true this is. Did the Allies really care all that much what the Germans thought? It seems to be more of a discipline thing within the army rather than a lets-make-this-easier-for-the-germans..
ReplyDeleteYou raise good points about why such a policy benefits not only the German men but also the occupying army. By prohibiting relationships between American soldiers and German women, the US Army recognized the potential for conflict ad friction between the two sides. As Biddiscombe points out, the defeated German men often sought to reassert some degree of power and authority by forbidding these relationships since the domestic sphere was the one area in which they did not have to reconize defeat. However, while the Army may have acknowledged the likelihood that fraternization would complicate things, they also intervened in order to prevent plotting and conspiracies by Germans to stop the problems themselves. Such vigilante justice was unacceptable in an occupied nation.
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