Focusing on the unique circumstances of the American-controlled port in the British Zone of occupied Germany, Bianka Adams uses Allied denazification policy to examine relations among the two occupation forces, local German authorities, and the local population. Although her work does not offer major conceptual departures from previous studies of denazification at the grass roots, it illuminates the unusually chaotic circumstances accompanying implementation of this most ambitious part of the Allied agenda in the Bremen area. She locates the roots of this chaos in the impact of incompatible British and American concepts of denazification on Bremen's unusual jurisdictional situation. While not holding the city's experience as representative of broader German trends, the book enhances our understanding of the fundamental conflict between reconstruction and ideological consistency that characterized the entire occupation.

Even after the Nazi capitulation, the final disposition of Bremen remained the subject of controversy at the highest levels of British and American postwar planning. While conceding northwest Germany to the British, the Americans held out for a port of their own to connect the landlocked U.S. Zone directly with the global American logistical system. Bremen (and its port facilities in the exclave of Bremerhaven further down the Weser river) thus became an enclave, to be run by American political and administrative priorities significantly different from those in the surrounding British Zone.

Lutz Niethammer and Timothy Vogt have helped us better understand how fears of alienating large chunks of German society and slowing recovery combined with growing Cold-War tensions to blunt the initial rigor of denazification on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Alongside such tendencies, other factors emerged to make denazification in Bremen particularly chaotic and frustrating to Germans and occupiers alike. A fundamental inconsistency existed between British and American concepts of denazification. The British worried more about the political dangers of wholesale punishment of minor Nazi involvement and accepted the indispensability of technocrats with less-than-spotless political pasts for pressing tasks of reconstruction and stabilization. The Americans held on longer to an ideological commitment to a thorough political purging of the population, as a prerequisite for a viable liberal-democratic political system.

In Bremen, these differences in emphasis got mapped onto the arbitrary and shifting jurisdictional boundaries between the U.S.-controlled city and its British-controlled hinterland. Until the end of 1946, these differences made almost impossible any consistency in denazification practice in the area. The relatively strict regime of cross-border travel between the British Zone and the southern U.S. Zone could not be imposed on a much smaller jurisdiction such as Bremen without rendering the city unviable. Both commuting workers and Bremen residents quickly learned to exploit the discrepancy between the relatively lenient British standard and the more stringent American one to secure the certifications of political health needed for many aspects of daily life.

Adams effectively documents the Bremen occupation bureaucracy's long series of policy reversals and administrative expedients between 1946 and 1948, including an unsuccessful year-long experiment with applying British rules in American jurisdictions. In a relatively short work, Adams manages to include vignettes of American denazification's mixed impact on, among other institutions, Bremen's lawyers, railway system, civil administration, and private business. She sketches the convoluted development of the various Allied and German tribunals (Spruchkammern) and appeals boards, all trying to comply with arbitrary deadlines in an environment of administrative confusion. She devotes a whole chapter to a case study of denazification's impact on Bremen's school system, a main target of the American emphasis on political reeducation. She makes good use of the relevant documents and official publications of the U.S. occupation and (to a lesser degree) Bremen's municipal authorities, although one wishes that the work in the U.S. National and Bremen Archives was matched by coverage of the relevant all-German and British records.

The overall impression is one of constant dithering and demoralizing inefficiency, as the Americans tried to cope with the reality of having a non-captive population under their control subject to different rules than a nearby hinterland. Their efforts did result in removing a good number of the most egregious Nazis from public life, however, at the price of widespread popular cynicism and the perception that too many people were being pointlessly persecuted. By the end of the occupation, a reorientation away from reeducation to anticommunism combined with looming deadlines to drive the Americans to liquidate the significant denazification backlog by simple fiat—downgrading most cases into innocuousness.

The concision of Adams's achievement is even more impressive when we note that in this short book of about 170 pages, the material of greatest interest to scholars of postwar Germany tends to be concentrated in the education chapter and in another relatively large omnibus chapter entitled “Denazifying Bremen.” This suggests the need for a more careful rebalancing of the whole book. Much of its first half consists of perhaps overly detailed descriptions of the initial American and British high-level planning for the overall occupation, and of the formation, training, and internal dynamics of the denazification cadres of the occupation bureaucracy. This material might be justifiable in view of the author's twin interpretive communities: academic historians of Germany, and serving military intellectuals in the market for usable case studies (Adams is staff historian at the Defense Department's Threat Reduction Agency, where “interest in depoliticizing old classes of administrators affiliated with dictatorial regimes is being increasingly fuelled by contemporary world events,” as the book's cover blurb coyly puts it). Nevertheless, this somewhat America-centric perspective comes at the expense of sufficient coverage of denazification's deeper cultural and political impact on a complex urban society. More attention to the German perspective, and engagement with relevant issues of German localism and reeducation raised in the work of Rebecca Boehling, Steve Remy, Benita Blessing, Toby Thacker, and James Tent, could be reasonably expected from a more definitive account of Bremen's denazification—which remains to be written.