The Bobby's Empire: British Police Missions in Occupied Europe, 1945 - 1948

My paper studies the failed effort of British police to export their model of policing to Germany and other occupied countries after the Second World War. As far as the conference theme of "resilience" is concerned, the paper discusses the re-commitment to continental style policing by occupied countries despite the legacy of policing atrocities in the interwar period and the Second World War.

The immediate postwar period found Britain attempting to build upon and take advantage of wartime developments regarding security. The destruction or weakening of many foreign police forces during the war seemed to offer an opportunity for British police to remake global security in their own image. Officers from metropolitan Britain and the Empire staffed a set of police missions in occupied Austria, Germany, Greece, and Italy. These missions were not altruistic pursuits, but instead represented a form of imperialism based upon the assumed superiority of the British model of policing (e.g. unarmed, nonviolent, focused on police work rather than general civil service). By using their colonial and domestic police as missionaries for civilian policing, the British state hoped to build a postwar world that resembled and depended upon Britain with regard to security. In this work, Britain relied heavily upon their prewar experience of educating and training police from throughout the British world at the Metropolitan Police College at Hendon.