Denazification 3 of 3
Sympathies for Americans fell considerably at the beginning of the month. They charge us with a general lack of interest and inertia. (…) However, we also benefit from the fact that the image of the Russians has fallen sharply.
US-amerikanischer Stimmungsbericht (31 July) (our translation from a German collection of American reports on the mood)
The new, decentralized organization of the German police went ahead amid tension between the goals of demilitarization and maintaining law and order. Already two weeks after taking over the city, City Commander Haskell ordered Lord Mayor Amberger to provide 200 German police officers. They were expected to keep watch – apparently unarmed - over places at risk of being plundered and so relieve American soldiers. Helmut Hillengass speedily set up a civic police force. It replaced the old Baden state police department and received new, bilingual identity cards. As early as 27 July, the new director of police, who had been sacked by the Nazis in 1933, was able to present an interim report: he had hired 341 individuals, including 220 traffic police and regular officers, and 15 criminal investigators. “Only a quarter” were “old hands”, three quarters were “newcomers” of differing aptitude. Equipping and clothing them was a great challenge: three police officers on the photo are wearing different uniforms. On 6 November 1945 the Allied Control Authority decided to rearm them with “firearms of non-German origin”. German weapons production remained prohibited. Arming the police was a proof of trust on the part of the occupiers and an increase in German powers, but also placed a great burden on civic budgets.
The photo is not only evidence of the raw materials shortage but also of the control over information by the occupying power. It shows a central figure in post-war local politics − SPD member and unionist Adolf Rausch. On the eve of the capitulation and by order of the military government, Lord Mayor Amberger had appointed a 12-person city council, at first a merely consultative body. Rausch was doubly legitimized for his membership. He was one of the six experienced city councilors from the Weimar period and had been persecuted by the Nazi regime through dismissal, Gestapo surveillance and detention in a concentration camp. With a license received on 11 November 1945 he founded the “Adolf Rausch Verlag”, in which he published a treatise by the resistance fighter Emil Henk on the Hitler plot of 20 July 1944. From 1946 Rausch was also a member of the first elected city council and from 1954 devoted himself to social issues in the city as mayor.
The smiling lady suggests the scene is either posed or a harmless routine. The mood was different when the occupation started. At the time the Americans were apprehensive about the activities of the Nazi underground organization Werwolf. Consequently, City Commander Haskell called on the Heidelberg population to hand in their weapons at police stations by noon on 5 April. By way of deterrence, the military court sentenced a Heidelberg man for “non-permitted possession of two pistols” to three years imprisonment and a fine of an inconceivable 50,000 Reichsmark. The scene in the photo plays out at a track of the old Heidelberg main station (an area occupied today by the Carré shopping arcade). The train station building and the tracks were hardly damaged so that, after only a few weeks, the Americans were able to use the station for their own material and food supplies. The German civilian population was permitted to enter the station again from mid-July. Owing to safety concerns and a lack of coal, passenger transportation was resumed only gradually.
