Alwine Moeslinger was an unlikely heroine. A pianist and cymbalist, she had a national and international reputation, and students who had gone on to careers around the world. Shortly after the end of World War II, the US Army requisitioned her home on a leafy street in the northern part of Heidelberg. In October 1956, and despite the construction of massive American housing facilities in a now-sovereign Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Moeslinger's home remained in American control.

She wrote letters to American authorities. Colleagues in the United States petitioned President Eisenhower. When this failed, the small and unassuming musician took a folding chair and sat in front of the gate to her house holding a sign reading “German Authorities and the US Army—I demand an immediate decision regarding my house at Bergstrasse 99. I need it urgently! Alwine Moeslinger, Pianist.” She sat for five days, warmed by a thermos of tea she kept next to her. Moeslinger's plight attracted local and national media attention. Facing the embarrassing prospect of an elderly woman sitting outside in the October chill, American authorities relented. Along with Heidelberg's Mayor Carl Neihaus, they announced that her home would be vacated immediately, with the American personnel living there relocating to the soon-to-be-completed Patrick Henry Village complex outside the city.Footnote ¹

The story of Frau Moeslinger's house reminds us of the central importance of real estate in German history and the history of German-American relations during the early years of the Cold War and the transition from occupation to sovereignty. During this period, real property was probably the most contentious issue between Germans and Americans, particularly at the local level. The problem of how to house American military and civilian personnel was a persistent one. If anything, this issue actually became more acute because of the changing strategic calculus of the early 1950s.

In this article, I argue that the conflict over real estate was critical not just because it helped to determine the footprint of the American military presence in Germany for much of the rest of the Cold War, but because these drawn-out conflicts can tell us much about the history of postwar Germany.Footnote ² Real property rights became a site of contestation where ordinary Germans and government officials could push back against the Americans as they transitioned from occupier to ally. The complicated legal structure through which the Americans exercised and asserted control over German real estate served as a constant and tangible reminder of the limits of German sovereignty. By consistently contesting American power over German real estate, Germans staked a claim to sovereign rights. The requisitioning question elicited strong and sometimes deeply nationalist responses from the German Right and created space on the Left for vituperative critiques of the American occupiers. The increasing capacity of the FRG and its component states to manage property issues ultimately served to contain these more radical responses to requisitioning. This performance of sovereignty helped bolster an emerging democratic culture in the Federal Republic.

Historians have recognized the importance of property in contemporary debates about the reemergence of civil society and the German state, particularly with regard to that which the Nazi regime expropriated from its victims.Footnote ³ In her study of the contest over German archival material seized by the Allies, Astrid M. Eckert explicitly connects German efforts to recover the documentary record of the German state with “an attempt at regaining that lost sovereignty.”Footnote ⁴ As this article demonstrates, the question of real estate was an everyday site of conflict and negotiation between occupiers and occupied and one that generated considerable attention among officials, the press, and the general public.

Remarkably, the issue of property has not been explored in great depth in the academic historiography. To be sure, descriptions of requisitioning (Beschlagnahmen) are ubiquitous in the plethora of local histories of the American military presence, many of which were produced in the 1990s as the foreign military footprint in Germany shrank and a mist of nostalgia settled over the period.Footnote ⁵ The study of requisitioning, when expanded across the area of most intense engagement between Germans and Americans, can tell us a great deal today about the relationship between American policy, German sovereignty, and everyday life during the tumultuous decade following 1945.

This leads to a broader argument that historians need to better integrate the history of foreign military forces, and particularly the Americans, into the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Over the forty years of the Cold War (1947–1990), about 22 million Americans lived and worked in the Federal Republic as military personnel, dependents, or civilian employees.Footnote ⁶ Given the extraordinary size and durability of the American presence, it is all the more surprising that comprehensive histories of the FRG and the public presentation of German history at venues like the German Historical Museum in Berlin and the House of History in Bonn all but ignore what was a daily reality for millions of Americans and Germans. There is a great deal of discussion of alliance politics, American foreign policy and its impact on the FRG, and on the cultural changes that came with what is variously called “Americanization” or “Westernization.”Footnote ⁷ There is no doubt that American policy and American popular culture played a large role in what Konrad Jarausch has termed the collective “learning process” that took place in the FRG.Footnote ⁸ What is largely missing here is a sociocultural history of the physical presence of Americans in the Federal Republic.Footnote ⁹

Such a history would begin in the immediate aftermath of World War II and continue through the withdrawal of much of the American presence in the 1990s. Doing so would reveal just how important the Americans and other foreign armies were in the creation of West Germany. The US military, primarily the United States Army, was part of German society for over five decades. The military communities that emerged in the 1950s proved durable, even in the face of political and economic pressure, because they were more than just sites of military activity. They were, as John Lemza calls them, “deliberate conduits for a directed American identity.”Footnote ¹⁰ Just as critically, they existed within German “host communities” that faced the challenge of political, cultural, and social change in the decades after World War II.Footnote ¹¹ American military personnel, dependents, and other civilians interacted consistently with endogenous institutions, local communities, and ordinary Germans.

This interaction happened in two broad ways. First, the Americans acted as a vector for a new set of norms and practices around consumption, popular culture, and social relations. Second, and the focus of this article, is that the Americans were a catalyst for a profound shift in political culture. Day-to-day interactions between Germans and Americans were mediated by a dramatic imbalance in sovereignty. Germans from across the political spectrum developed a pattern of challenging that imbalance that, in turn, ended up affirming and strengthening the postwar democratic order. By challenging, but not necessarily rejecting, American hegemony, citizens of the Federal Republic articulated a conception of a new, self-actualized political community.

To understand this, we have to approach the American presence as a history of entanglement (Verflechtungsgeschichte or histoire croisée), at the core of which was a set of parallel developments: the emergence of a postwar Federal Republic and the growth of the Cold War US Army into a global power. These two developments occurred at the same time and in the same place. We need to understand the long-term entanglement of Germans and Americans along a continuum of engagement and estrangement, at once keeping in mind the vast differentials in power and influence and acknowledging the dynamic interactivity at the levels of state policy, local authority, and everyday life. This is what Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon call a “multilayered” approach to understanding the dynamic between the US military and civilian populations.Footnote ¹²

Alwine Moeslinger's story is complicated in part because she lived in complicated times. The requisition of her home straddled three different legal regimes, each of which had direct bearing on the issue of property. When the Americans requisitioned her home, they administered their zone as occupiers who were subject to the generally understood rules of military occupation and to the agreements made with their allies at Yalta and Potsdam. In 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany emerged as a semisovereign state under the Occupation Statute.Footnote ¹³ The brief text of the statute does not specifically mention the issue of property, but does include the remarkable circumlocution that the federal government and states (Länder) have the authority “to legislate and act in the fields reserved to those authorities, except as the occupation authorities specifically direct, or as such legislation or action would be inconsistent with decisions or actions taken by the occupation authorities themselves.”Footnote ¹⁴ The Occupation Statute lapsed in 1955, by which time the American presence in Germany had expanded massively in the wake of the Korean War. While the most contentious debates around real estate concluded between 1956 and 1957, legal wrangling continued for years. It was not until 1963 that the Federal Republic reached a long-term Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with NATO, and even that agreement left considerable room for debate. As Detlef Junker has observed, the sovereignty of the Federal Republic was “partly fiction and, if interpreted as wishful thinking, it was a promise that went unfulfilled until 1990.”Footnote ¹⁵

The upshot of all of this legal complexity was that large chunks of territory in the Federal Republic existed in a legal limbo, caught between the rights asserted by the Americans as one-time occupiers and German concerns about “extraterritoriality” and loss of sovereign rights. This tension between Germans and Americans took place over relatively small pieces of property, like Alwine Moeslinger's house, but also much larger ones. The American presence developed along a spectrum of intensity. Requisitioning directly and dramatically affected some areas, while leaving others relatively untouched. In the 1950s, about 1.7% of the state of Rhineland-Pfalz was used for military purposes. In Regierungsbezirk Pfalz, however, this figure included almost twenty percent of all farmland.Footnote ¹⁶

Requisitioning was the de facto method for housing American troops and was essentially ubiquitous in 1945. Exact numbers for requisitioned properties are not easy to compile since records often listed property belonging to the German state (and particularly the military) separately from private property. Legally, the Allies confiscated state property instead of requisitioning it, but this distinction caused considerable administrative confusion. According to one fairly reliable estimation, a year after the end of the war, the US Army requisitioned 30,146 properties, of which 81% were private homes.Footnote ¹⁷ During the next two years, the Army substantially altered the physical geography of its presence in Germany. As troops went home, posts consolidated in regiment-sized garrisons, mostly in small and medium-sized cities and towns. This meant that about 42% of properties across the occupation zone were released by mid-1947, many of which were single-family houses.Footnote ¹⁸ In towns and cities designated for garrisons, however, requisitioning remained a fact of life and, in some cases, actually intensified as American troops arrived from elsewhere in the zone. In Heidelberg, more than 1,700 properties remained in American hands in 1949. This number dipped slightly as more American construction came online, but as late as the mid-1950s, about 1,100 properties in the city, including Alwine Moeslinger's home, were still under requisition.Footnote ¹⁹

Four points need to be emphasized. First, it is critical to keep in mind the military context of the early requisitioning regime. American planners were not thinking about a long-term occupation of Germany. When the war ended, there were approximately 1.62 million American troops in Germany. By 1950, the total number of American military and civilian personnel in the country had fallen to about 88,000.Footnote ²⁰ Under those circumstances, it was not unreasonable to assume that requisitioning could meet the needs of the American presence for some time. Less than 5% of the engineering work administered by United States Forces, European Theater (USFET) between 1945 and 1947 involved new construction. The remaining 95% went toward rehabilitating requisitioned and confiscated facilities.Footnote ²¹

Second, the system of requisitioning that developed in the wake of war, largely through improvisation, became one of the first areas of competency handed over to postwar German authorities. Fritz Schäffer, the first minister-president of postwar Bavaria, addressed the issue in a letter to various local officials on June 15, 1945. He called on them to immediately begin setting up mechanisms to process and manage the requisitioning of real estate and other goods.Footnote ²² Those civilians who had real estate requisitioned were entitled to small but critical rent payments. These payments, part of the byzantine financial management system in occupied Germany, came from the mark-denominated occupation costs that the Allies imposed on German authorities.Footnote ²³ German homeowners thus went to local authorities for payment in German currency. This had two important consequences. First, it connected Germans directly with state and local institutions that contributed to the rebuilding of legitimate government in the occupied zone.Footnote ²⁴ Second, it kept marks in circulation and at least partially bound Germans to a cash economy. In an economy increasingly dominated by barter, the survival of cash payment schemes helped to maintain the fragile functioning of a traditional payment structure.

Third, discussions of requisitioning and property took place in the context of a severe housing crisis in postwar Germany. Local conditions varied, but the majority of urban areas in Germany had extensive damage from bombing and the sometimes-fierce ground combat in the last six months of the war. Cologne, for example, lost 98% of the homes in the city center and 70% of all residential buildings across the city.Footnote ²⁵ Germans displaced from urban areas (Evakuierte) often found themselves in small towns and rural communities, which many hoped to leave once cities were habitable again. In some cities, American authorities barred whole groups of people, usually the elderly or the very young, from returning to the city center because they would not be able to assist with clean up.Footnote ²⁶ There were some notable exceptions to this grim tally. Heidelberg, which quickly became one of the most important centers of American military power in Germany and remained so until 2013, ended the war nearly undamaged. Locals proffer any number of explanations for this remarkable state of affairs, typically focused on a nameless American officer who supposedly either loved the opera The Student Prince or who thought that Heidelberg would be a lovely place to have a headquarters someday and so spared the city.Footnote ²⁷ There is no evidence for either of these. A number of midsized German cities, like Würzburg and Hildesheim, were still standing as late as March and April, 1945. Had the war gone on, Heidelberg might have shared their fate.

Finally, the problem of requisitioning in western Germany was not unique to the American zone. The British dealt with many of the same logistical and legal concerns as the Americans. The British occupation zone had a proportionally higher number of ethnic German expellees than the Americans, which substantially exacerbated the housing problem. Like Heidelberg, the British Army of the Rhine's (BAOR) headquarters in Bad Oeynhausen had the benefit of suffering only minimal wartime damage. More than 10,000 residents of “Baddo” lost their homes to requisitioning, many of them until 1954.Footnote ²⁸

In the immediate aftermath of the war, local American commanders requisitioned property based on local needs, the availability of housing stock, and more or less in the absence of any clear strategic directives about the nature of the occupation. Franklin Davis tells the story of an American company commander in a midsized town who responded to the local mayor's query about how long the occupation and requisitioning might last with, “That is military information, Herr Muller. But I might remind you that the Romans occupied England for three hundred years.”Footnote ²⁹

Homes, apartment buildings, and industrial facilities frequently caught American eyes. In Munich, the American presence centered on the Prinzregentenstrasse, which was partially closed to German foot traffic. By December 1945, 1,100 public buildings remained confiscated and, according to city estimates, something like 5,000 residents lost their homes to requisitioning.Footnote ³⁰ This put Munich's new city government in an incredibly difficult position. At one level, it had very little ability to slow the pace of requisitioning or to limit the impact of the policy. At the same time, it had to appear to be pushing back or lose legitimacy with its own residents. In November, Oberbürgermeister Karl Scharnagl gave a radio address where he tried to split the difference:

At the same time, Scharnagl regularly wrote letters to American authorities, asking them to ease requisitioning. At a city council meeting in December that focused almost entirely on requisitioning, Scharnagl framed the problem in terms of both public health and morality. He warned of epidemic diseases like typhus and tuberculosis in crowded and squalid dwellings:

Requisitioning emerged as the central point of contention between Americans and Germans in the Bavarian capital. At one point, USFET Commanding General Joseph McNarney made a visit to Munich to try to calm tensions over requisitions. Some of the earliest civil society organizations to emerge after the war existed entirely or largely to protest against requisitioning. With men still interned or political marginalized, women often took the lead in these efforts. In Munich, Weimar-era peace activist and writer Sibylle Schoepf-Witting organized a group to protest against the dispossession of families in the Grünwald district. In Würzburg in northern Bavaria, the first political demonstration of any kind after the war was a march of hundreds of women through the ruined old city in June, 1946, to demand the return of the few surviving apartment buildings.Footnote ³³

The arrival of American dependents in April 1946 increased American demand for decent housing and forced an expansion of requisitioning.Footnote ³⁴ A reporter for American Magazine covered the arrival of one group of American dependents in Berlin. The article provides a sense of the ambivalence of American attitudes toward German property, and Germans, in the wake of the war. “House hunting in Germany is no problem for the soldier's family. In the first place, the Army Engineers have looked around and found some of the best standing areas of Berlin …” The newly arrived American wives seemed to have little concern for the Germans who faced removal from their homes. When asked, one wife remarked, “Why should we mind? … We've been separated from our husbands for two or three years due to a war that the Germans and Japs started.” At the same time, the reporter witnessed the spectacle of a German mother, alone with her children, crying when she learned of her pending eviction, for which she had two days to prepare. These were “the fortunes of a lost war.” At the same time, the writer took pains to emphasize, “Uncle Sam is being pretty fair” by arranging for payments to be made to ousted families.Footnote ³⁵

The repositioning and concentration of American troops in late 1946 and early 1947 further strained relations between occupier and occupied. As troops left smaller communities and relocated to larger garrisons, they often neglected to go through the bureaucratic process of returning homes to their German owners. This was likely a combination of inertia and lack of pressure from their own superiors, but their behavior infuriated community leaders. The mayor of the Upper Bavarian hamlet of Oberaudorf wrote to the County Commissioner (Landrat) in 1948 to complain that eleven of the town's most modern houses, along with a once-popular café, sat vacant while still under requisition.Footnote ³⁶

German owners sometimes found their homes in terrible condition when they did finally return. A 1948 letter from an attorney in Erlangen sought help from the Bavarian Ministry of Finance to rehabilitate a recently returned home from which the Americans had removed all light sockets and heaters. The enclosed copy of an army-issued “Inventory and Conditioning Report” phlegmatically noted that the home was in “poor condition.” How, the attorney asked, were ordinary people supposed to repair requisition-damaged homes at a time of cash shortages and scarcity of building material?Footnote ³⁷

The American force structure in Germany was complicated and inefficient, which hampered efforts to consolidate military facilities and release property to the Germans. The Office of Military Government (OMGUS) under General Lucius D. Clay depended a great deal on the tactical troops under USFET command, which had a far larger presence in Germany. Clay complained that, in some areas, the number of requisitioned houses rose at the same time that troop numbers declined. After some investigation, it became clear that the increase reflected lag time in filing requisitioning paperwork. Tactical troops had requisitioned homes months or years before and only now were getting around to completing the formalities and legally taking possession. After some negotiation between the American commands, OMGUS assumed the right to protect the homes of Germans who were working with the Americans and those Germans who had substantially refurbished their damaged homes.Footnote ³⁸

German communities also felt squeezed by the housing needs of several different categories of refugees. American officials recorded, with some surprise, that locals in many communities fiercely resisted having to share their homes with ethnic German expellees. In Rosenheim, a December 1946 report cited “daily complaints” about housing, particularly directed toward German officials tasked with finding homes for expellees. This left expellees in a very vulnerable position, caught between American occupation officials who regarded them as a German problem and German officials who often regarded them as a nuisance.Footnote ³⁹

Displaced Persons (DPs), on the other hand, were clearly the responsibility of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and its successor, the International Refugee Organization (IRO). Since both organizations depended largely on the goodwill and power of the Americans to operate, many DPs found themselves living in properties requisitioned by the Americans. A sizable number of Germans deeply resented the presence of foreigners made homeless by the war, many of them because of German wartime policy.Footnote ⁴⁰ A German observer reported to Munich's military government in September 1946 on rumors that the Americans planned to turn over requisitioned homes to “the migrating Jewish population.” The local suggested that such a move would not be well received by the community. “If this is only a rumor, this might be a very good time to take an official position to that effect.”Footnote ⁴¹ The Bavarian resort town of Prien am Chiemsee, whose population more than doubled after the war, lost several of its hotels to requisitioning. The hotels subsequently became homes for Baltic DPs. Balts, like many other DP groups from the Soviet Union who feared reprisals, tended not to return home in large numbers by the late 1940s. When locals applied to start a building society in 1949, a Prien banker lamented that the town's DP population “probably will not emigrate.”Footnote ⁴²

After the transition to semisovereignty in 1949, the rationale for continued requisitioning became an even thornier issue between Americans and Germans. Requisitions did several things. First, they created economic uncertainty. As the economy of the Federal Republic accelerated after the 1948 Currency Reform, lack of clarity regarding the status of commercial property acted as a brake on investment. Second, they were, in many ways, a continuation of the occupation period, so they reminded Germans of the very real limits of German sovereignty. Third, they seemed to indicate hypocrisy on the part of the Allies, who claimed to be defending democratic rights. In July 1951, the magazine Die Tat published a cartoon showing a jeep with American soldiers parked outside of a Bavarian farmhouse. A soldier tells the farmer, “This house has to go. We are building an airfield to defend freedom and private property.”Footnote ⁴³

Americans on the ground in semisovereign Germany expressed a range of emotions about living in requisitioned homes. In 1953, Cosmopolitan magazine featured the Logan family, then living in Frankfurt. The father, Welby Logan, had lived in Germany for much of the postwar period. He arrived in 1945, shortly after the end of hostilities, and sold insurance to military personnel. After briefly returning to his native California, he came back to Germany as a mid-level executive. Along with his wife and teenage sons, Welby lived on Annastrasse in Frankfurt, in the comfort of the “American colony.” The Logans brought a variety of household goods (including a television for which there was essentially no programming), had servants, and generally enjoyed a lifestyle far above what they could afford in California on his $13,000-per-year salary. The house they lived in was a “normal requisition,” which the Logans had access to because, while they were not government employees, his employment depended on the military presence. Welby told the writer, “We aren't ever allowed to forget that we live in an army ‘billet.’ And we're never sure that we won't be moved out if some general decides he likes our house.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Neither the Logans nor the article's author mention the house's German owners, who presumably also wanted to move back into their home.

The Logans aside, many Americans were keenly aware that the terms under which they were living in Germany were untenable, or at least they sent the wrong message to their emerging Cold War ally. Alice Blankfort, the Munich-born Jewish wife of an occupation official, wrote a deeply sardonic essay about her time living in the devastated country of her birth. She described the lives of “Mr. and Mrs. Conqueror” as they effortlessly move into a requisitioned home, acquire servants, and engage in some black-market dealing to supplement their paychecks. “Any American, soldier or civilian, arriving in the Zone quickly latches on to the privileges to which he is entitled.”Footnote ⁴⁵

German officials often expressed frustration with the uncertainties created by requisitioning. At a time when the broader economy began to accelerate toward the “economic miracle” of the 1950s, areas around American facilities struggled to attract investment because of the possibility of land being claimed for military use. Unhappiness with American policy united political parties that otherwise had little to do with each other. At a 1951 city council meeting in Mannheim, Oberbürgermeister Hermann Heimerich (SPD) found himself backed by the Communists in his attacks on requisitioning. “German property owners simply don't know where they stand,” Heimerich said, adding with some exasperation “this should not be possible in the seventh year of occupation.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Between 1949 and 1952, Germans increasingly organized to protest against requisitioning. State-level Associations for Victims of the Occupation (Landesverbände der Besatzungsgeschädigten) organized into a national movement in late 1949. While the moment was relatively brief, antirequisitioning organizations on the state and federal level channeled the resentments of ordinary Germans into a broad critique of occupation policy. The organizations existed in both American and British areas of occupation, although groups under different occupation regimes did not cooperate closely.Footnote ⁴⁷

Above all, these groups argued that the FRG should assert its sovereign rights and work to limit or eliminate requisitioning. While these protests included radical and sometimes racist voices, there is little doubt that they also captured the frustrations of people representing a range of political opinions. The groups were deliberately vague about their membership numbers, preferring to claim that they spoke “in the interests of those affected by requisitioning.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Like the housing protests of the immediate postwar period, women played a critical role as antirequisition speakers and organizers. The movement portrayed itself as defending the traditional principles of house and home, while also asserting the need for German sovereignty and broad support for the rights of private property. Many of the prominent women in the movement also played roles in other public campaigns on moral or social causes. Dr. Elisabeth Meyer-Spreckels, one of the most visible female leaders of the antirequisition campaign nationally, was also a leading member of a Lutheran women's group (Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenverband) and led a national antiprostitution campaign. Since many contemporary observers connected the occupation forces with prostitution, the two campaigns were clearly related, though distinct.

The groups repeatedly stressed that they were not opposed to the presence of foreign forces in the country. At the same time, they demanded speedy return of requisitioned properties, higher compensation levels for property damage, recognition of their status as victims and, increasingly, an “equalization of burdens” (Lastenausgleich) that would put them on the same legal footing as other groups that had lost their homes in the wake of the war.Footnote ⁴⁹ The organizations repeatedly invited state and federal officials to address their events, but they seldom managed to get anyone in a senior post to attend. At best, representatives from the Finance Ministry might come to provide anodyne updates on the progress of property negotiations.Footnote ⁵⁰

The Landesverbände were more successful at organizing public demonstrations in front of, and sometimes inside, requisitioned property. During the summer and fall of 1951, substantial demonstrations took place in cities across the FRG. Major demonstrations in Höchst and Munich included confrontations with American MPs or German police, as protestors tried to enter requisitioned homes.Footnote ⁵¹ Protests grew in size and intensity, with demonstrators consistently asserting that German sovereignty and occupation rights could not be compatible. In the fall of 1951, a series of demonstrations in Mannheim led to concerns among some members of the press that a new breed of German demagoguery might be emerging. A demonstration on October 30 drew the largest crowd in the city since the end of the war. Friedrich Wacker of the Württemberg-Baden Landesverband bluntly expressed the public reaction to continued requisitioning. No state, he told the crowd, “under two sets of laws can be called democratic … Injustice cannot become justice if it is protected and defended by so many bayonets.”Footnote ⁵²

In Heidelberg, a group of female demonstrators marched in front of Army headquarters carrying signs that read “Give us human rights, not the law of the plains” and (in English) “My home is your castle.” When they attempted to enter the base to hand flyers to American women, American MPs stopped them and confiscated the pamphlets as Communist propaganda.Footnote ⁵³ Elsa Beck spoke to the crowd, whom she hoped to be an audience of American women living in the city as dependents:

The antirequisition movement also contained more ominous elements. The chapter in Höchst appears to have been a particularly radical one. Letters from the chapter's leaders to various government departments include descriptions of the Americans as “internazis,” descriptions of life in the FRG as a “concentration camp—US Zone,” and no small share of antisemitism. The 1951 corruption case against Philipp Auerbach of the Central Council of Jews in Germany led to letters angrily criticizing “small minorities” that received special treatment. For the antirequisitioning movement, the demand for recognition as victims could readily blend into resentment and anger.Footnote ⁵⁵

The rhetoric of antirequisitioning protests developed along lines that paralleled other debates then going on in German society. Demonstrators began to describe requisitioning as “expulsion” (Vertreibung). One petition, presented to American officials in Heidelberg, referred to those “chosen at random, deprived of all rights, assuming the worst financial sacrifices, and suffering unbearable mental burdens as a result of the total expulsion from our homes.” This would have been familiar language to Germans who at the time were debating how to compensate millions of expellees (Heimatvertriebene) from Central and Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁵⁶ Demonstrators also talked about the end of requisitioning as an opportunity for German homeowners and shopkeepers to “return home” (heimkehren). This term was also in common usage in the early 1950s, referring, in particular, to the thousands of German soldiers captured and still held in the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁵⁷ While this should not be surprising, it is remarkable that the complaints about requisitioning merged into a whole set of broader concerns about the reconstruction of German society after World War II. This development also reflects the growing sense of German victimhood that increasingly shaped discussions of the war in the Federal Republic.

The antirequisitioning movement flourished at the beginning of the 1950s, but was more or less moribund after 1952. While activists could be disruptive at the local level, they never managed to develop a coherent national movement. Their organization suffered from a paucity of national leadership and German officials kept their distance for fear of antagonizing the Americans. More fundamentally, antirequisitioning campaigners found themselves badly outpaced by events. The changing geopolitical system in Germany and the world, as well as the increasing efforts of the German state to deal with the problems of real estate, ultimately limited the effectiveness of the movement.

The beginning of the 1950s saw a series of seismic shifts in the long-term relationship between the FRG and the United States, which had profound implications at the local level. In 1950, there were two critical policy developments. In June, the invasion of South Korea and the beginning of the Korean War focused American attention on the inter-German border. This led, in relatively short order, to a massive increase in foreign troops in the FRG. When the Korean War began, there was one weak US division in Germany. Two years later, there were five divisions and 230,000 men. Now faced with a potentially long-term presence in Germany, United States European Command (EUCOM) produced a five-year budget explicitly directed toward the construction of new base facilities and the refurbishment of unused German military properties. For the first time, the Americans put forth a plan designed to decrease, and eventually end, the existing system of requisitioning by explicitly funding the construction of new facilities for American troops. By the end of 1953, the Americans fully or partially constructed almost sixty “community areas,” creating large American living areas in cities and towns across the Federal Republic. By the time this massive construction project wrapped up in 1957, the Americans had spent about four billion DM, 65 percent of which went toward housing for troops and dependents.Footnote ⁵⁸

American base construction put German communities in a very difficult position. The consolidation of American personnel meant the return of widely-dispersed properties to their owners. At the same time, American planners typically targeted farmland on the edge of existing communities for the new facilities. This land had to be requisitioned as well. The effect of rural requisitioning varied widely by region. In some cases, proposed facilities threatened to make continued agriculture all but impossible. In the mountain valley around Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the requisition of forty hectares to build housing for American personnel posed an existential challenge to cattle farmers who relied on alpine meadows for hay and grazing.Footnote ⁵⁹ An unusually complete collection of requisition forms in the Hanau Municipal Archives traces a complicated series of negotiations in which the army, local officials, and farmers tried to minimize the loss to any individual family by taking smaller parcels from lots of area farms.Footnote ⁶⁰

The federal government quickly realized that it needed to seek solutions to the problem of requisitioning, particularly given the number of NATO troops now pouring into the country. In 1950, a Bundestag committee charged with studying the problem stressed that requisitioning was fast becoming an impediment to German society's ability to recover from the war. “We know that these burdens must be borne,” their report concluded, “but all parties concerned should strive to resolve avoidable hardships.” The report recommended encouraging occupation forces to share requisitioned homes with Germans (which the Americans refused to countenance) and that Germany needed an energetic program of new home construction.Footnote ⁶¹ Beginning in August 1951, the Finance Ministry communicated to the Allied High Commission that it was willing to use federal funds (Bundeshaushalt) to support efforts to release requisitioned property. At the time, about 34,000 properties across the FRG remained under requisition.Footnote ⁶² This effort marked a major shift in the federal government's attitude toward the requisitioning problem. Over the next several years, a series of initiatives emerged from this partnership between Bonn and Washington that began to address the real-estate issue directly.

Debates about requisitioning at the state and federal level reveal the dilemma in which many German political figures found themselves. The Center-Right and Center-Left tended to avoid criticizing NATO allies, and particularly the Americans, too harshly. At the same time, they were under substantial pressure from constituents to do something about requisitioning. Many of the official requests for information from the government (Anfrage) came from delegates from the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) or the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), but much of the fiery rhetoric on the issue emerged from the nationalist Right or from the Communists. A Bundestag debate in September 1952 saw both the Adenauer government and the SPD offer limited praise to the Americans for their willingness to be flexible on requisitioning. When Communist Party (KPD) delegate Otto Niebergall demanded in strident terms that the FRG stop paying for the occupation and put an end to requisitioning, he was met with shouts of “What about the East?” from the rest of the house.Footnote ⁶³

On the other end of the political spectrum, the particularist Bayernpartei made great political hay from the requisitioning problem. Georg Knott from Rosenheim, a town in the middle of a rural region with a substantial American presence, told the Bavarian Landtag, “Since Bavaria and the Federal Republic are democracies, and so is the occupying power, it is in my opinion no longer possible to simply confiscate land without giving the owners recourse to the law.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Observers noted this strange alliance of interests between the political extremes, which only highlighted the apparent inability of the more moderate political parties to tackle the requisitioning issue directly.Footnote ⁶⁵

In addition to the problem of requisitioning, the building of American bases and training areas meant that Germans, and particularly farmers, had to learn to get accustomed to the problems associated with being neighbors of the military. These included noise, destruction of fields by heavy vehicles, and the dangers of weapons training.Footnote ⁶⁶ Local politicians and newspapers regularly railed against the inconveniences caused by American activities, although it is worth keeping in mind that many American facilities sat atop bases built during the Nazi or even imperial periods.

At the same time, communities often benefited enormously when US Army Europe (USAREUR) planners built bases nearby. In 1951, US forces employed 228,000 Germans, making them the sixth largest employment sector in the Federal Republic and the leading employer in the five states (Hessen, Württemberg-Baden, Bavaria, Bremen, and Rhineland-Pfalz) where they were most concentrated.Footnote ⁶⁷ In his study of Heidelberg, Theodor Scharnholz has provided a fascinating case study in which local officials and the Americans colluded to give the appearance that the city government fought hard to keep the Americans from building, while at the same time actually working together closely to make it happen.Footnote ⁶⁸ After 1955, some rural communities advocated enthusiastically to host garrisons of the new Bundeswehr. Military bases, whether German or foreign, played an important role in the broader transformation of social and economic structures in the early Federal Republic.Footnote ⁶⁹

These new facilities existed in an oddly suspended state, both part of and yet distinct from the communities around them. In Heidelberg, a journalist observing the construction of a Klein-Amerika south of the city expressed his fascination with the extraordinary efficiency, scale, and modernity of the American project. “The fields become American. Tempo—that is the impression that observers will take away. Now there are fruit trees and flower beds, a lovely view over garden fences. In few days, the garden lands will be stripped of flowers. A tumult of people, machines, and noise replacing peace and quiet.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In press accounts from the period, one term appears repeatedly. “The construction project looks like a Gold Rush Town (Goldgräberstadt),” wrote the Main-Echo about construction in Aschaffenburg.Footnote ⁷¹

As Philipp Gassert has pointed out, there was a certain irony in the German reaction to the foreignness of the American building program. The physical design of American bases’ buildings had been profoundly influenced by the clean lines and functional utilitarianism of interwar late modernism. Many of that movement's leading architects became influential in American design because they fled from Nazism in Germany. The so-called “American style” was more of a reimport than an exotic novelty.Footnote ⁷²

The Americans were not blind to the fundamental oddness of their presence in Germany. The expression “little America” was in use in English as well, as were terms like “GI-ville” and “Golden Ghetto.” The State Department, more receptive to the public diplomacy problem than the Army, warned its personnel to “recognize the contradiction between the American policy of soliciting a German alliance and the lingering ‘occupationitis’ of some Americans.”Footnote ⁷³ A particularly self-reflective young draftee named Harley Sachs, who worked as a clerk at USAREUR headquarters in the early 1950s, later wrote a series of unpublished novels about his experience. In one, he described life in Heidelberg as “a room where the air has been removed… . Life was unreal, a limbo, cut off from US and German society.”Footnote ⁷⁴

American commanders were very aware of the public relations impact of continued requisitioning. In dealing with the media, they repeatedly emphasized that construction meant the end of the policy of housing Americans in German dwellings. When announcing the construction of 17 new housing units for 144 American military families in 1952, the commander of the Augsburg Military Post stressed that, while the new construction would not lead to the release of requisitioned homes right away, “additional housing requirements for Augsburg Post are being met with new construction rather than additional requisitioning… . Present plans do not call for any new requisitioning, but rather for releasing property as rapidly as possible.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The following year, discussions between the US High Commission and the Federal Ministry of Finance resulted in the creation of a “replacement housing construction program” (Austauschwohnungsbauprogramm) intended to match, on a one-for-one basis, the building of living quarters for American personnel with the return of requisitioned property. This was every bit as much a political statement on behalf of the federal government as it was a practical matter, since it paired a very voter-friendly effort to roll back requisitioning with the much less palatable reality that the FRG was paying for much of the American base construction effort. The first round, completed in 1953, saw 1,506 properties across the American zone returned, of which two thirds were in Bavaria or Hessen.Footnote ⁷⁶

Both American and German officials loudly touted the successes of the program, which eventually went through three rounds of construction. The completion of a new apartment block on Ludwig Jolly Strasse in Mannheim allowed the city's last “bunker dwellers” to move from decrepit housing into modern facilities in October 1954. The local German-American Women's Club helped arrange for American military trucks to assist with the move, which coincided with the opening of another phase of American housing in the Benjamin Franklin Village.Footnote ⁷⁷

In addition to this careful attention to the link between requisitioning and new construction, American officials made a genuine effort to convince Germans that construction benefited them as well. American engineers started the Helping Hands Program, which took American labor and equipment to underserved rural areas and engaged in projects like building sports facilities and improving drainage.Footnote ⁷⁸ In areas around American facilities, German and American bureaucracies worked together to build projects that benefited both sides. In Augsburg, the two communities publicly celebrated the construction of a new playground on Warndtstrasse built on land donated by the Lutheran church by municipal laborers paid for with American youth activities funds.Footnote ⁷⁹

Far more important than any public relations campaign, requisitioning policy began to change dramatically. It is clear that USAREUR recognized that the Federal Republic would soon gain expanded sovereignty and that the command needed to develop new procedures to avoid political problems as much as possible. In August 1953, USAREUR issued new guidelines on the utilization of German real estate by American forces. Local commanders were to use easements (Grunddienstbarkeitrechte) or short-term negotiated arrangements. High explosives could no longer be used outside of permanent training areas, and “Consideration will be given to suggestions made by the German officials regarding suitable alternative areas.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Easements, particularly those that involved forest land or territory belonging to German states, avoided the complex and drawn out negotiations required for requisitioning. The Americans were willing to concede on a range of issues, including limiting hunting by American personnel in some areas and, crucially, allowing German forestry officials to have input on the location of temporary camp sites or designating forest areas as off limits.Footnote ⁸¹

American officials grudgingly began to enter into genuine negotiations with German interlocutors over the size and scope of the projects being undertaken. USAREUR established a special board in 1954 to consider humanitarian concerns in requisitioning, though they kept the existence of the board on a “need-to-know basis only” to keep requests to a minimum.Footnote ⁸²

In northern Bavaria, an unexpectedly ferocious debate erupted over American plans to build a major training area near Hammelburg. The area housed a dense settlement of expellees from Silesia and Romania. Briefly, it appeared that an important block of Center-Right politicians might abandon the Bavarian state government and potentially cause a crisis in the Landtag. Surprisingly, the Americans substantially modified their plans. Dr. Maria Probst, one of the leaders of the movement against the training area, called the decision “a victory for democracy.”Footnote ⁸³

Local communities won small victories across the FRG. Some of these struggles presaged conflicts that endured for decades. In Mannheim, protests led to the abandonment of plans to build a munitions depot in Käfertaler Wald, an area that included one of the city's primary sources of drinking water. The fight over the American presence in that part of the city continued into the 1980s.Footnote ⁸⁴ In other cases, like the Circle Hotel in Berlin-Zehlendorf, American troops left requisitioned properties more quickly than anticipated in order to expedite the return of commercial property now needed for the fast-emerging German economy.Footnote ⁸⁵ In the end, the project in Heidelberg-Rohrbach only required about a quarter of the land originally envisioned, which locals claimed as a victory. Decades later, resistance by local farmers was still remembered as the “Rohrbach Farmers’ Uprising” (Rohrbacher Bauernaufstand). One farmer hung a sign from an apple tree that read simply, “This land remains German.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Those farmers who still faced loss of land for American military facilities now could focus their anger at the ostensibly fully sovereign Federal Republic. When a new round of requisitions for the construction of Benjamin Franklin Village in Mannheim became public, a lawyer for local farmers bluntly objected to what he saw as a violation of the spirit of the recent Paris Agreements. “The law in West Germany is on the side of the occupier and a subservient Federal Government” (hörigen Bundesregierung). Ultimately, farmers received 2.5 marks per square meter, far less than they had asked for. Several farmers at a public meeting expressed shock that the Americans would spend 100,000 DM to build one single-family home.Footnote ⁸⁷

The resumption of full German sovereignty in 1955 ended the right of American forces to requisition new property, though the Federal Republic committed to assisting the Americans in securing land needed for defense purposes. If historians can draw a line under this period of transition and transience, it came in the summer of 1956 when Colonel Rogers, commander of a regiment of the 2nd Armored Division stationed in Mannheim, held a press conference for the German media where he announced what locals quickly dubbed the “Rogers Plan.” This initiative intended to help American soldiers lead “a normal life” while living in Germany. He reminded his German audience that his soldiers spent 800,000 DM each month at local businesses, helped with natural disasters and other social problems, and that most were short-service soldiers who only wanted to serve honorably and go home. He asked Germans to help show young Americans a “German way life” that didn't involve bars or “a certain kind of girl.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In short, Rogers called on his audience to begin to accept Americans as part of their community. The Americans, now living in Benjamin Franklin Village and specially built compounds like it across the Federal Republic, had become part of the landscape.

The Americans recognized that the release of large numbers of German properties not only contributed to economic development, but also to the well-being of home and business owners. An official history of the construction program suggested that this:

The next year, under continuing pressure from the Federal government, USAREUR moved to formally end the era of requisitioning. Chief of Staff General John Uncles ordered an end to the use of the term. In its place, he substituted “rent-free properties.”Footnote ⁹⁰ This was semantic, but also important. Requisitioning was no longer defensible. The cost of retaining this reminder of the unequal relationship between the United States and the Federal Republic now outweighed any benefits that the policy might have accrued. In actuality, several hundred properties across the Federal Republic remained in American hands after 1957. Despite some last-minute negotiations, the US Army retained 537 residential properties, mostly as family housing for officers. In the end, the federal government assumed full financial responsibility for finding new homes for the now-former owners of those properties.Footnote ⁹¹

The era of requisitioning transcended the changing legal status of western Germany during the decade after the end of World War II. Requisitioning began as a military necessity, then became a part of daily life for millions of Germans and a shrinking American military presence. Relatively quickly, as the withdrawal of American forces stopped and then reversed, the policy of requisitioning both intensified and changed to reflect the new American force posture. This stance, with some modifications, remained in place for more than four decades. The history of requisitioning thus reflects the broader history of engagement between Germany and the United States as the relationship shifted from conqueror to occupier to protector. This process was never easy or free from controversy.

In many ways, the massive reduction of the American presence after 1989 mirrored the growth of the American footprint in 1940s and 1950s. During the first five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Americans alone returned property equivalent in size to the federal state of Bremen to the German government.Footnote ⁹² Urban planners and civil society groups expressed optimism that this windfall of real estate might lower housing costs, create new and accessible residential areas in and around German cities, and foster opportunities for economic development. The process proved far more difficult than expected. Federal, state, and local officials in the FRG have struggled with the cost of environmental cleanup and renovation needed to convert former American properties for civilian use.

Despite these challenges, conversion projects are ongoing. In 2016, new residents began to move into apartments in the old Mark Twain Village/Campbell Barracks complex in southern Heidelberg. Patrick Henry Village, into which the soldiers who once occupied Alwine Moeslinger's house subsequently moved, is today a temporary facility for refugees administered by the state government of Baden-Württemberg.Footnote ⁹³ In nearby Mannheim, developers hope to turn Benjamin Franklin Village into a trendy, environmentally sustainable neighborhood called Franklin. The project's website optimistically proclaims that “The transformation=conversion [Umwandlung=Konversion] of five million square meters of property, which was made free by the withdrawal of the US military, is an extraordinary opportunity for our city. It should be used in such a way as to benefit everyone in Mannheim.”Footnote ⁹⁴

As I have argued here, the story of how the American military managed the political, social, and legal challenges of building its base network in the FRG during the decade after 1945 helps us better understand the intersection between policy and implementation at the local level. The seizure and retention of private German property for military use constantly reminded Germans of the limits of sovereignty in the new Federal Republic. As that notional sovereignty grew, the disjuncture between German rights and the actions of the Americans expanded as well. By consistently asserting German sovereignty, even when such assertions did not succeed in rolling back requisitioning, German communities, groups, and individuals ultimately expanded the terms of that sovereignty. This helped to lay the groundwork, not just for the long-term relationship with the foreign armies that served on German soil, but for the extraordinary political experiment that was and is the Federal Republic.