In one of the greatest dragnet roundups of all time, the U.S. Army in Germany arrested 80,000 Germans last week. To prevent alarm-spreading, a half-million G.I.s first isolated the target communities by cutting their outside communications, then searched all houses in the U.S. zone, stopped every person moving on the streets and roads. Some 15,000,000 Germans were sifted through the screen.
The raid had multiple purposes: to ferret out illegal material such as weapons, ammunition, radio transmitters, U.S. uniforms and rations, gasoline; to catch Nazis; to turn up U.S. AWOLs (only a handful); to inhibit black-market operations. A secondary purpose...
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