Jose Raymond Canoy begins his account of Bavaria's post-1945 rural police (Landpolizei) at Munich's Odeonsplatz. Although we first encounter the square during a 1996 commemoration of the post-World War II Bavarian police force, Canoy proceeds to take us back to 1923 when a young police lieutenant, Baron Michael von Godin, ordered Munich police to fire on Adolf Hitler and his fellow putschists. In 1946, the American occupation tapped that same lieutenant to head the new Landpolizei. The iconic moment that halted Hitler's abortive attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic served to validate Godin's credentials for Americans looking to construct an anti-Nazi police force after 1945. American occupiers naively assumed that anti-Nazi meant democratic, but Canoy sees in Godin a representative of a longer tradition of authoritarian policing in Bavaria that continued well after 1945.

For Canoy, it is not the war's end in 1945 or even the 1948 currency reform that brings an end to authoritarian efforts to manage Bavarian society. Rather, a late 1950s “sociopolitical caesura” (p. 19) rendered such control measures ineffective in a transformed, mobile, and increasingly suburbanized Bavaria. Far from a stumbling block for the evolution of a democratic West Germany, the police in Canoy's account ultimately act as a benevolent force. The police authoritarianism Canoy finds in the practices of the Landpolizei comprised a broadly framed commitment to maintaining social and political order that entailed the police's regular observation and paternalist intervention in people's daily lives in defense of public morality and cultural tradition. They also included political surveillance and repression based at times on military models. In the end, though, all these untidy or even uncomfortable vestiges of an older police state tradition served as a “temporary scaffolding” (p. 301) that facilitated the successful construction of West German democracy. For Canoy, the comfort most Bavarians felt with this type of policing allowed them to transition to a political system (democracy) that was at least initially less palatable than familiar authoritarian regimes. But that interpretation also conceals the extent to which they, too, were important participants in making the authoritarian structures with which they lived. Even as Canoy seeks to explain the “relationship between social experience and public authority in modern German development” (p. 18), he, too, effectively brackets off the Nazi period from the conclusions he draws. His evidence underscores its important place in the historical continuity he rightly puts at the core of his argument.

After an introduction that locates Bavaria's policing tradition in a broader European and German (but pre-1933) context, the book's eight chapters address three interrelated themes in its investigation of this particular iteration of a broadly conceived police state. Three chapters (one, two, and four) investigate Godin's personal story and his battle to defend the Landpolizei's autonomy in the face of American occupation authority and an emerging Bavarian state in Konrad Adenauer's West Germany. The last two chapters investigate the changing face of postwar Bavaria which rendered obsolete the individual foot patrols and daily police interaction with rural and small town populations on which this model of authoritarian policing depended.

At the heart of this study, however, are three chapters (three, five, and six) that explore the practice and rhetoric of Landpolizei efforts to defend but also to define public order during the late 1940s and 1950s. Drawing on the archival records of the Bavarian police and the American military occupation, these chapters consider how factors as diverse as rhetoric—the “foreignization” of occupation crime—and police methodology—especially the Stimmungsbericht, the summary report on the popular mood—served to link the social, criminal, and political tasks the Landpolizei appropriated. These three chapters all begin quite effectively with specific incidents—a 1948 police raid on suspected black marketeers at a provincial train station, a 1952 request by a fifteen-year-old girl for a temporary identity card, and a police report on political comments made during a wedding later that same year—that model the administrative and regulatory practices that undergirded the emerging Landpolizei.

Canoy's account of post-1945 policing explains it in large part as an “expediency-driven method of maintaining public order” (p. 210) that also depended on the popular and official understanding of an ongoing socioeconomic crisis that required police management. The fact that this crisis predated the end of World War II helps to explain the persistence of practices that also operated during wartime and under the Third Reich. Even as Canoy rejects a mythic 1945 “zero hour,” his account seems to inoculate postwar West German democracy from the need to confront a Nazi past that remains present in postwar police practices by privileging their links to longer strands of authoritarian policing.

In its pursuit of black marketeers, the police deployed its criminal investigative and administrative resources against people behaving in a “Gypsy-like manner” (p. 128). While the legal framework for such ethnicizing of criminal behavior may have lain in a 1926 Bavarian statute, the practices of the Nazi period cannot be excluded from this trajectory. The fact that the police raid (Razzia) that begins chapter three was carried out by an Einsatzgruppe (p. 103) or that one local police official complained to Landpolizei leaders that efforts to combat the supposed crime wave perpetrated by foreigners in the countryside needed a police “special action [Sonderaktion] to conduct a ‘combing out’ [Auskämmung] of the area for which the local population would be ‘most grateful’” (p. 117) seem to merit more than passing mention. Canoy rightly challenges repeated contemporary claims about a string of violent crimes perpetrated by foreigners, displaced persons, and former concentration camp inmates (to cite groups that regularly appear in popular and police discourse), but the persistent “normalcy” of these descriptions suggest that authoritarian policing's lines of continuity extend not just from the 1920s to the 1950s but through the Nazi period as well.