Dismembered Policing in Postwar Berlin

The Limits of Four-Power Government

Mark Fenemore

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781350334199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Assessing the impact of Germany's defeat on the policing of Berlin, this book addresses the reconstruction of the police force as a crucial component of four-power government. As Mark Fenemore shows, getting four nationalities to work together to administer a complex major city was a unique undertaking, never before attempted. The situation was made even more difficult by the conditions of hunger and desperation that caused a spike in crime. The stage was a city in ruins, the capital of a defeated, divided, prostrate, occupied country. The audience the administrations were playing to was a population deeply scarred by Nazism, total war, cold, hunger and mass rape. Dismembered Policing explores postwar Berlin from the perspective of all four occupiers and of ordinary Berliners. Fenemore discusses how each occupation government sought to act as an advertisement for its country's respective cultural values, mores and system of governance. As an international, multi-archival study, the book draws on evidence in French and German as well as in English. Using law enforcement as a lens, it examines issues like mass rape, the black market, interracial sex and political violence. With hunger, sexually motivated assault and dismembered body parts featuring prominently, it is reminiscent of Ian McEwen's novel The Innocent, but based on real police files.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Mentalities as revealed by the history of policing
• Part I Policing the messy, painful aftermath of defeat. The special conditions and circumstances of policing a post-conflict city, occupied by foreign troops
• Part II Cutting the Gordian knot of overlapping, entangled jurisdictions. The policing implications of ripping a town in two in the opening battles of the ‘cold war’
• Part III Cases of continued cross-border crime amid divided policing. Stopping cross-border crime sprees in their tracks, despite limits on police cooperation
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright