Occupation 1 of 3
I have never forgotten the moment in which I read the first proclamations of the occupying power at the town hall: […] This lifted an enormous weight off my mind.
Marie Baum
On 29 March, US troops advancing from the Palatinate occupied Mannheim, and subsequently the commanding General William A. Beiderlinden arranged for contact to be made with the Heidelberg city administration to bring about its nonviolent takeover. This was negotiated at the American Division Command Post in Mannheim-Käfertal by a German delegation consisting of three physicians (from Heidelberg’s army hospital) and a lieutenant. On 30 March (Good Friday) the first battalion crossed the Neckar, and later in the day the 63rd Infantry Division occupied the whole city. Apart from individual exchanges of fire with scattered SS men and Hitler youth, the occupation took place without bloodshed. Why Heidelberg was not destroyed was something that people asked themselves long after the end of the war. They speculated that leading US actors had had personal links with Heidelberg, that its cultural significance as the city of Romanticism and scholarship had served as protection, or that it had been chosen as the headquarters of the occupation authority. Unlike the retrospective statements of some persons involved suggest, such as Lord Mayor Carl Neinhaus, who claimed to be the savior of the city, a major military attack was not averted by a miracle at the last minute. Rather, the taking of the city was normal for the American strategy in this phase of the war: with no use of force against the civilian population and sufficient guarantees of a peaceful handover.
When the war ended, it was unforeseeable how long the US military would remain in Heidelberg. That the city was to have a prominent place within the occupation authority was soon apparent, however. As early as in 1945, Heidelberg hosted the various military headquarters; in 1948 the European Command was established there, which in 1952 became Headquarters, United States Army Europe where the commander-in-chief was based. The number of soldiers stationed in Heidelberg and of US civilian employees also rapidly rose to about 10,000 due to the arrival of family members. Numerous buildings were confiscated to house them and public institutions were used for occupation purposes. The New University accommodated an American school and a theater, and courses could not be held there for several years. How many members of the US military were in Heidelberg for a short or relatively long time is hard to estimate. One of the most prominent among them was the German actress and Hollywood icon Marlene Dietrich, who had taken United States citizenship in 1939 and, from 1943, travelled round various European war sites in a program to entertain the troops. How long she stayed in Heidelberg is not known; at any rate, the snapshot on the Castle Terrace was taken a few days after the city was occupied in April 1945 and shows her in the company of General Anthony McAuliffe.
During the war years, the head of the National Socialist university was historian Paul Schmitthenner. From 1938 he had held the office of Rector and from 1940 directed the Baden education ministry, which had oversight over the university. Shortly before the arrival of the American troops Schmitthenner fled Heidelberg – along with high-ranking regional Nazi party officials or the local Gestapo staff. He was detained in Tirol in June 1945 and spent three years interned in different camps and hospitals. In 1951 the denazification case against him was dropped. The university was reorganized by a group of professors with little or no political misconduct on their record; in a thirteen-person committee, they started preparing to renew the staff and reopen the university as early as the beginning of April. On 8 August elections were held for the university leadership. The surgeon Karl Heinrich Bauer became Rector with historian Fritz Ernst as Vice-Rector. Philosopher Karl Jaspers played a crucial role in the reconstruction as a moral authority; he had been pushed out of his professorship by the National Socialists because his wife was Jewish. Teaching was resumed in stages: it started in mid-August with a refresher course for doctors and in November lectures resumed in the Medical and Theological Faculties.
