American Jewish Chaplains and the Shearit Hapletah

With the penetration of the Siegfried Line in March 1945, the United States Army moved rapidly into southern and central Germany, advancing as far as the Alps and the Elbe River. As the war ended, the United States Military Government established in Germany gradually assumed responsibility for implementing policy in the American zone of occupation. That policy included a broad range of goals: among them, denazification and demilitarization of Germany; the rapid economic rehabilitation of Germany and Europe, thus ensuring “the continuance of free enterprise”; and halting the growth of communism, or at least “to contain the Soviet Union in central Europe.” ¹ Nevertheless, these goals had to yield to more immediate problems created by the devastation of war, problems exacerbated by the presence of over 10,000,000 displaced persons in Germany—a group including concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war, slave laborers, voluntary workers, and foreign volunteers who had been transported to the Third Reich during the last months of the war.