Why was there seemingly no resistance to the allied occupation of Germany ?

I always assumed it was because the Germans were utterly exhausted and realised that a guerilla warfare attempt would be a futile fight against combined American, British, French and Soviet forces, but were there any other reasons ?
 
There's the mass collective guilt and trigger-happy arrests used by the western allies, and the brutal unrelenting slaughter of anyone even questioning soviet rule in the east(this includes not only germans, but pretty much everyone in their new territory).

Besides, by then, german civilians had pretty much zero morale. The war ended at the gates of Berlin, it didn't end in a peace treaty which could have preserved some semblance of morale. That's total war for ya.
 
After the surrender, there were plenty of weapons cached all over Germany, in preparation for an insurgency, but the Germans didn't dare use them. All the Allied occupation armies dealt harshly with any instances of post VE-Day resistance, making our campaign of counterinsurgency in Iraq appear gentle in comparison, the French and Soviets being perhaps the sternest of all; the summary execution of anyone caught using arms or explosives, or providing them with assistance, was the rule. The Soviets even arrested boys found playing with unloaded and unuseable guns. http://hjandvolksturm.devhub.com/blog/59206-last-ditch-resistance-of-germans-in-wwii/, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jKlwNsW5T3I
I once read about an occasion in 1945 (before May 8th) when an advancing American unit took fire upon entering a German town, whose people had conspicuously displayed white flags from their windows. Our soldiers immediately withdrew from the town, and called in artillery fire. American howitzers shelled the town for three days straight, ignoring all appeals, before accepting its submission.
 
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There is some argument that Werewolf and othe such plans amounted to something in the way of resistance. If Perry Biddiscombe is to be believed, there were some 700 post V-E casualties due to partisan activity.

As to why it didn't go anywhere, that the Allies put in sufficient forces to maintain control was a huge factor (and one of the grotesqueries of the Bush administration trying to hold up Germany as a model for the occupation of Iraq, seeing as they refused to put up anywhere near the sufficient numbers). Also, the Allies were quick to react with arrests and even retaliations. The Soviets executed few thousand "werewolves" and sent about 10,000 to camps on such charges (it seems most were simply denounced arbitrarily or even vindictively).
 
After the surrender, there were plenty of weapons cached all over Germany, in preparation for an insurgency, but the Germans didn't dare use them. All the Allied occupation armies dealt harshly with any instances of post VE-Day resistance, making our campaign of counterinsurgency in Iraq appear gentle in comparison, the French and Soviets being perhaps the sternest of all; the summary execution of anyone caught using arms or explosives, or providing them with assistance, was the rule. The Soviets even arrested boys found playing with unloaded and unuseable guns. http://hjandvolksturm.devhub.com/blog/59206-last-ditch-resistance-of-germans-in-wwii/, <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/jKlwNsW5T3I?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I once read about an occasion in 1945 (before May 8th) when an advancing American unit took fire upon entering a German town, whose people had conspicuously displayed white flags from their windows. Our soldiers immediately withdrew from the town, and called in artillery fire. American howitzers shelled the town for three days straight, ignoring all appeals, before accepting its submission.

SHAFE apparently borrowed quite a bit from German techniques used for dealing with resistance activities.
 
1) The German people were exhausted. They had been decisively defeated and knew it. They wanted to get on with their lives.

2) The Allies and Soviet Union weren't going to bother winning the German people's hearts and minds. Any violence was going to be dealt with swiftly and lethally, and there would be zero sympathy for the Germans. It's amazing how swiftly insurgencies can be crushed when you don't care how many people you kill or needing to work within any kind of legal or political constraints.

3) The German landscape does not work well for guerilla warfare. The Bavarian and Austrian alps are the only things that would provide cover. Guerillas needs places to hide, i.e. mountains (Afghansitan), jungle (Vietnam) or swamps (like the Pripet Marshes).

4) As time went on, it became obvious in the western part of Germany that they needed the US to stay in Germany to prevent a possible Soviet occupation. If you were a patriotic German, you wanted to work with the Western Allies, not fight them.
 
After 20 million dead on the Eastern Front resistance to the Soviets would have been the fast track to suicide.



jacobus is correct, by the way. German communities that surrendered and then opened fire on the Allies were handled in that manner.
 
1) The German people were exhausted. They had been decisively defeated and knew it. They wanted to get on with their lives.

2) The Allies and Soviet Union weren't going to bother winning the German people's hearts and minds. Any violence was going to be dealt with swiftly and lethally, and there would be zero sympathy for the Germans. It's amazing how swiftly insurgencies can be crushed when you don't care how many people you kill or needing to work within any kind of legal or political constraints.

3) The German landscape does not work well for guerilla warfare. The Bavarian and Austrian alps are the only things that would provide cover. Guerillas needs places to hide, i.e. mountains (Afghansitan), jungle (Vietnam) or swamps (like the Pripet Marshes).

4) As time went on, it became obvious in the western part of Germany that they needed the US to stay in Germany to prevent a possible Soviet occupation. If you were a patriotic German, you wanted to work with the Western Allies, not fight them.

The biggie you forgot, althought it sort of comes under 2, is having sufficient forces to maintain control. (2 per 1000 population for peacetime police forces, around 10 for occupation, 20+ for active insurgencies. Note that's population, not opposition forces.) IIRC, the US had about 10:1000 dueing the early part of the occupation, and much higher in the immedate aftermath.
 
After 20 million dead on the Eastern Front resistance to the Soviets would have been the fast track to suicide.



jacobus is correct, by the way. German communities that surrendered and then opened fire on the Allies were handled in that manner.

The Soviets were out and out criminal about it to the point of outbreaks of mass suicides, the US and French pretty brutal (on the level of borderline to outright war crimes), and the Brits managed to pull it off rather less harshly.
 
2) The Allies and Soviet Union weren't going to bother winning the German people's hearts and minds. Any violence was going to be dealt with swiftly and lethally, and there would be zero sympathy for the Germans. It's amazing how swiftly insurgencies can be crushed when you don't care how many people you kill or needing to work within any kind of legal or political constraints..

Not like that worked well in the Baltics or Ukraine, the NKVD had to end up going for the 'hearts and minds' route to pacify those areas.
 
Because they knew the WAllies weren't going to smash the Hell out of them regardless from mutual fear of the USSR and the USSR *had* smashed the everloving Hell out of Germany and would do so again. The Soviets in particular would have responded to insurrections the same way they did to every single time one happened in the Eastern Front: mass gunfire. To some extent the bloody, violent rampage the USSR went on in 1945 was a major deterrent in its own right.
 
Actually it did work for a number of decades until Glasnost.

In the Baltics the USSR had to sign all sorts of peace and cease-fire agreements with Partisans in order to divide them and also they had to allow a general amnesty for "Forest Brothers" a few years later to persuade them to surrender. In Western Ukraine the NKVD had to get rid of the officials who emphasized brutal responses to partisan warfare as the Ukrainian partisans would do the same, and emphasize concessions to the Ukrainian population as well as again, amnesties and social assistance to stop their support. That and doing more intelligence work/finesse/tactful things to break the UPA/OUN apart.
 

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There was resistance. It wasn't as wide spread as you might see in other, less thoroughly occupied nations (Iraq comes to mind), but it was there. It was just muted due to a number of factors.

The Powers had well over 2 MILLION soldiers on the ground in Germany.

The USSR alone had THREE Guards Tank Armies (1,800 tanks, 9 divisions per Army, 27 Divisions total), THREE Shock Armies (27 motor rifle division in total), one Guards Army (9 divisions) and 47th Army (9 infantry divisions, 1st Guards Tank Corps (three tank divisions) and 25th Tank Corps (three tank divisions) or SEVENTY SEVEN divisions in the Soviet Zone. Even accounting for empty files due to combat losses, on July 1, 1945 the Red Army numbered at least 1.2 million troops on occupation duty. The NKVD also had a substantial force in the Soviet Zone, part of the Cheka's empire was a series of 10 "special camps" that held between 120,000 & 180,000 detainees that the Soviets thought to be troublesome (largely local Nazi leadership and SS, but also anyone the NKVD though would cause trouble). Roughly a third of these detainees died in custody. This does not include the roughly 2.8 million PoW held by the Soviets or the 350,000-1,000,000 of these men who died in Soviet custody.

While the WAllies had slightly fewer troops than the Soviets dedicated to Occupation (the U.S. had 614,000 troops in Germany on January 1, 1946) they also interned around 100,000 Germans (suspected Nazi leaders and SS made up the bulk of these detainees), a highly debated number of these detainees and of PoW retained in France and Britain as forced labor died before release (best estimates are around 1% of those in U.S./UK control and 2.6% in French control, other, vastly higher estimates have been fairly well debunked).

When you look at the detainee profile and the huge number of PoW retained (in the case of the USSR for up to 10 years, for the British and French until 1948) it is clear that the main potential resistors, young men, were not in any position to resist (millions were, in fact, not even in Germany).

A second, not to be ignored, factor is the food situation in Germany. A combination of Nazi resource allocations, infrastructure damage, and Allied neglect (some, sadly, quite intentional) combined to put Germany on starvation rations in the months immediately following the war as calories dropped on average to around 1,000 daily. When one is barely getting enough food to survive it is difficult to be part of an active resistance.

You also have the morale issue among most Germans by the end of the war. They were utterly defeated, not just on the battlefield, but inside their own heads. They had been bombed, strafed, lost many of the young men in their families to combat deaths, had troops billeted in their homes, been treated with anything from indifference to hostility to utter brutality by the occupying forces. They were done with war, done with fighting.
 
Even in the early 1950's the Germans were on rations . The cities were still digging out .
Germany was beaten and they had there nose rubbed in it . With the occupation Troops liveing better then the average German
 
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