What should be done with Germany after the war? The problem of how to handle a defeated Germany spawned intense and bitter debate within the highest levels of American government. The divisions only intensified as victory came into view. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s plan was to remove all heavy manufacturing capabilities from the defeated nation. The Germans had launched two world wars, and it was time to ensure that they could never trouble their neighbors again. But given the widespread food shortages expected to come after the war, stripping the country of its factories and machinery would almost certainly lead to mass starvation, and everyone knew it. Morgenthau’s plan could only seem cruel. It was a modern-day version of a Carthaginian peace, and at the Treasury Secretary’s urging, President Roosevelt signed on. The problem was that most other members of the administration opposed Morgenthau’s plan, and they launched a rear-guard action to defeat it.

After seemingly endless and bitter infighting over postwar policy, Roosevelt clearly needed his administration heads to come together. Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 would become the ultimate document to govern American occupation policy. Thanks to his relentless plotting, wrangling, and badgering, Morgenthau had succeeded in bending it to his will. The consequences would prove disastrous. This chapter tries to understand how Morgenthau succeeded in outmaneuvering the majority within FDR’s administration.

Hoover’s famine relief mission had helped to stave off starvation for millions in Europe and Asia, but Germany posed a special problem. The world food crisis hit Germany especially hard, not simply because the war’s destruction had shattered its ability to produce and transport food to cities. Germany’s situation was compounded by JCS 1067, the directive governing American occupation. Because of Morgenthau’s insistence, the directive prevented American occupiers from revitalizing German industry, which greatly exacerbated already grim conditions. Caloric intake plummeted from an average of 2,445 calories per day to a paltry 860. It was becoming painfully apparent to American policy makers that if something did not change soon, the death toll would be unconscionable. This chapter probes the ways in which Americans came to undo the harshest aspects of German occupation policy and lay the groundwork for the Marshall Plan.

The narrative of the shared tradition of European law, the idea that the legal heritage of Europe was an inherent source of unity and was traceable all the way back to antiquity and Roman law took shape in a long process, beginning from the 1930s. This book was the story of that process.

The sixth chapter approaches the reconfiguring of the legal tradition through the work of Helmut Coing and his idea of the tradition of rights as a jurisprudential construct. This is contextualized through the rise of the rights tradition in human rights scholarship and the central role that human rights came to have in the initial stages of the European project. This emphasis, resulting in the creation of the European Convention of Human Rights, was mirrored by the commitment of the new German state to democracy and rights. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the spread of the European narrative about the role of Roman law and its greatest proponents, among them Reinhard Zimmermann.

The introduction sketches the scope and nature of Allied internment and outlines the key questions that internment raises. It situates internment within the history and historiography of postwar Germany and the broader study of the history of camps. It shows that internment, especially by the western powers, has often been overlooked. Even studies of post-Nazi transitional justice often neglect it, focusing instead on trials of Nazi and war criminals and on professional and civil sanctions against Nazi Party members and fellow travellers. The introduction argues that including internment reveals post-Nazi transitional justice to have been more severe than has long been believed and that Allied measures did not rest on undifferentiated accusations of German collective guilt, but on a more nuanced approach. The introduction identifies multiple meanings of terms such as ‘denazification’ that are crucial for understanding internment. It also discusses the existing literature on internment and the controversial question of the comparability of the Soviet and western cases. It argues that comparison is legitimate and that black-and-white depictions of brutal, arbitrary Soviets and fair, friendly westerners oversimplify a more complex reality. Finally, the introduction outlines the book’s structure, sources, and scope, which includes some comparison with Austria.