New Beginnings, but no Zero Hour
After the surrender of the Wehrmacht on 8 May 1945 the Allied Forces took over police powers in Germany. In the period of reconstruction, the Western Allies soon resorted for pragmatic reasons to employing a good part of the former police personnel. In the Soviet occupation zone, by contrast, only a few policemen were able get their jobs back.
In the three Western zones the Allies organized the police according to federal principles and placed them under constitutional control. Based on what happened under the Nazi dictatorship, the responsibilities of the police and the intelligence agencies were strictly separated in the Federal Republic of Germany.
The four Allied Powers convicted the major war criminals in Nuremberg, but most of the police crimes went unpunished. It was the trials beginning at the end of the 1950s in the Federal Republic of Germany that first made public the degree to which the police had been involved in Nazi crimes. Court investigations were often directed against people who were now back working for the police. Through collusion and false testimony they often distorted the findings of the criminal investigations. Most policemen never had to face trial for the crimes they committed during the Nazi period.
