NUREMBERG WAS OCCUPIED BY American troops in April of 1945. For almost half a century it was part of the American zone of occupation, which included most of southern Germany. Immediately after the occupation of Nuremberg, the American army began using the vast spaces of the Nazi rally grounds for its own purposes. The Große Strasse became a runway for American aircraft, and the former SS barracks now housed American soldiers. The Zeppelin field remained a parade ground, filled now with American, not with Nazi troops. On 22 April 1945, after staging a victory parade at the Zeppelin field, the U.S. Army symbolically blew up the massive swastika that had loomed over the Zeppelin tribune. This was a message to the entire world that Nazism had been destroyed. On the same day Richard J. H. Johnston reported in The New York Times that “there is no more hideous spot in Europe today than Nuremberg, shrine city of the Nazis.” “After five days and nights of the roar and clatter of battle,” he noted, “a deathly silence was holding this irregular pile of debris in its grasp today.” Nuremberg's residents, meanwhile, were “like timid ground creatures” coming “up from their shelters, caves, and cellars … to blink in strong sunlight and stare unbelieving at the awful mess that was their town.” A day earlier, Johnston had announced on the front page of the Times that “Nuremberg no longer exists as a city. It is a scene of desolation. This pile of wreckage is the Nazis’ birthday gift to Hitler and it is Hitler's gift to the world.” The front-page article featured a picture of Harold L. Hershey of the U.S. Seventh Army standing “where once the Fuehrer stood” on the Zeppelin tribune, “using a comb as a mustache” and giving “his impression of Adolf Hitler making a speech,” complete with the Nazi salute.

The task facing the United States was immense. It not only had to cope with the conquered Germans and the logistics of supporting its own troops; it also had to cooperate with the three other conquering Allies, Great Britain, France, and — most problematic of all — the Soviet Union in the establishment of a postwar German order.