In an Occupying Army
	Frederick Painton on the slow corruption he witnessed serving in Germany after the war
	By FREDERICK PAINTON

Posted Sunday, May 23, 2004
For many years I rarely mentioned that I was a soldier in World War II, if only because it was a long time ago and my role was not particularly glorious. I enlisted at 18, was given basic training as an infantryman, then, because I had learned some German in high school, was transferred to military intelligence. There I was given a crash course in how to glean information from documents captured on the battlefield including those on enemy corpses. Happily for me and my buddies, we arrived in Germany well after combat had ended. We became part of the uneasy occupying force in a devastated country whose surviving people were so stunned by the enormity of defeat you could see it in their eyes. None of us had much sympathy for the Germans then, but I remember feeling shocked at seeing the pale, bent figures, mainly of women, living day to day on the edge of starvation among ruins.

I believe it was National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice who first linked the occupations of Germany and Iraq, thereby giving my old experience a new relevance. She said that in postwar Germany, as in Iraq today, we had faced a stiff resistance movement that killed American soldiers and attacked the country's infrastructure, and mentioned former SS officers calling themselves werewolves who attacked allied forces. In my own experience from the Rhineland to Bavaria nothing like that happened. The most animosity I observed was in a newly-released German prisoner of war who angrily refused to give way to an American soldier as they met on a narrow sidewalk in the small town of Oberursel where I was stationed. The American was armed and in that environment could have killed the German with impunity. But in an unlikely gesture of sympathy, the American stepped down and let the cocky Germany pass.

More often, though, it was the Americans who started what trouble there was. As the occupation wore on, the combat troops who had led the way into Germany gradually were rotated home. These veterans were remarkable for their reserved and dignified behavior. They even appeared to be obeying General Dwight Eisenhower's quixotic non-fraternization rule, forbidding all relations between occupier and occupee, which was promptly disregarded by most everyone else. To replace the combat forces came a flood of mainly younger G.I.'s, ready to party in a place where cigarettes became the major currency, making them all virtual millionaires. Looted liquor and wine were plentiful and so were desperate, lonely women.

Under these conditions, soldierly behavior declined and the black market ballooned into a major mafia organization. One evening on a street in Oberursel I was watching an old German couple walking together with a small dog on a leash. Two paratroopers from the 82nd Division came along and snatched the dog away. When the old man reached down to retrieve it, one of the paratroopers kneed him in the stomach. The old man fell and lay still, his wife whimpered, the paratroopers laughed and walked away. I shouted at them, but, to be honest, I didn't dare do much more. This was the arrogance of the victor by two men who had missed the fighting.

As for the black market, I heard that a major in my outfit sent a jeep with a trailer full of penicillin to Vienna and it came back loaded with gold. An unnamed general shipped a thoroughbred stallion back to the U.S. The market grew to the point where the army started limiting the amount of money any one soldier could send home to little more than his monthly pay. But ways quickly were found around that too. I was offered veiled invitations to particpate in some mysterious deals, in other words to become one of the boys. A master sergeant assured me that if I had any amount of money in excess of $17,000 — a staggering sum for a 19-year-old — he could help send it to the U.S.

I believe that my refusals had serious consequences. Weeks later my buddy Warren Moore and I threw a small party in our office where we edited mangled interrogation reports on distinguished Nazi prisoners. Among the dozen co-workers was a very tall German Countess, sans Count, who was the girlfriend of a American lieutenant. She drank heavily, and after the the party I dropped her off at her quarters nearby and then returned to my barracks. The next morning I was arrested in my room by two MP's who marched me to a cell in the jail facility where we kept the Nazi elite.

Days passed. I learned the charge against me was rape of the tall countess. Realizing that I was being railroaded by the local command, my friend Moore rushed to the army's judge advocate headquarters in Frankfurt and brought back a lawyer. When pressed, the Countess admitted that I hadn't raped her but, she said, I had poisoned the liquor and made her sick. These charges were dropped. But the prosecution did find a chipped telephone in my office and found me guilty of destroying government property. I was demoted from Sergeant to Corporal. Nothing of all this appears on my discharge papers where all the standard medals appear. Why did all this happen? I suspect it was the long hand of the black market and the slow corruption that comes with a military occupation.

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