The Allied Powers of WW2 all had their own conflicting ideologies, and visions for a
post-war Europe. So then how did they manage to come to consensus on the way to govern
their defeated enemy? Just how was the occupation, and eventually the division, of Germany decided?
Well, the leaders of the US (Franklin Roosevelt followed by Harry Truman) the UK
(Winston Churchill followed by Clement Attlee), and the USSR ( Stalin) met at
three international summits towards the end of the war and after Germany’s defeat.
Obviously, diplomats from all the Allied countries were also in near
constant communication with each other, but the conferences at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam
were more or less where the borders of the eventual Allied occupation zones were drawn.
As for why the Allies decided to split the country into East and West…
well, that actually wasn’t the plan, more of a Cold War accident.
So firstly the Tehran Conference, held in Anglo-Soviet occupied Iran in 1943:
in Tehran, it was agreed, on principle, that once Germany was beaten, it would be
occupied by the Allies jointly, though who exactly would get what, and for how long,
was still up for debate. The Free French, under General Charles de Gaulle,
weren’t even invited, all though to be fair they didn’t actually control their country at the time.
All four Allies were united on one thing though:
Germany, in no form, could ever be allowed to make war on them again.
In particular, the Soviet Union (which had suffered millions of
civilian casualties to the German invasion)
and France (which had been invaded by them no less than three times in the previous 70 years)
were eager to punish the Germans, to the point of even completely disassembling Germany.
But it wasn’t until the February 1945 Yalta Conference in the Crimea
that the Allies (really just the so-called “Big Three” as De Gaulle,
again, wasn’t invited) properly began to put pen to paper to draw borders.
Originally, Britain, the Americans, and the Soviets afforded nothing to the French at Yalta,
much to de Gaulle’s chagrin. But, by then, France had been liberated,
and he gained quite a bit of negotiating leverage by contributing hundreds of thousands of French
troops to the invasion of western Germany. He also really, really, wanted an occupation zone,
seeing it as critical to restoring French pride.
Which to the ears of Roosevelt and Churchill wasn’t a bad point.
It helped that Churchill was a lifelong Francophile, and throw in that the
French doing some of the work meant that they didn’t have to spend the resources doing it,
and the US and Britain were sold. Stalin largely didn’t care either way,
on the condition that a potential French zone came out of formerly British and US areas.
What Stalin did care about, a lot, was Poland.
In 1939, Germany wasn’t the only country that attacked the Poles; two weeks after
their invasion, the Soviet Union marched in from the east, having previously, secretly, agreed to
split the country with the Germans. Stalin wanted to keep land in Poland’s east and to install a
Communist puppet in Poland along with the rest of the Eastern European states that he would occupy.
In what has since been called the “Western Betrayal”,
Stalin was allowed to have what he wanted.
As meagre compensation, and also to punish the Germans, that wasn’t the only change to
Poland’s borders though: the Allies agreed to cede all of pre-war Germany’s land east of a
line formed by the Oder and Neisse rivers—nearly 25% of Germany’s total territory—to the Poles,
excluding the city of Konigsberg (renamed Kaliningrad) which went to the Soviets.
In exchange, the Western Allies managed to get a promise from Stalin that he would allow for free
and fair elections in regions under Soviet occupation. That, obviously, didn’t happen.
With far Eastern Germany no longer Germany,
the question of occupation became centered on the rest.
The Nazi regime officially surrendered in May 1945,
and in July, in a suburb of Berlin, the Potsdam Conference began,
only briefly being interrupted when Clement Attlee replaced Churchill following a general election.
Roosevelt had passed away a month before the surrender,
and the US was represented by Harry Truman.
The Germans had unconditionally surrendered to the Allies; they were totally and completely beaten.
So as with the conferences before the end of the war,
no German representatives were invited to Potsdam.
Germany’s fate was to be dictated to them, not negotiated.
Three key principles for the occupation were set out at Potsdam by the Big Three:
the demilitarisation, denazification, and the democratisation of Germany.
As agreed at Yalta, there would be four occupation zones,
each under the control of a different power’s military.
The capital, Berlin, though it was, fully within the Soviet zone,
would be divided up in the same way.
Each of the Allies then further subdivided their zones into different,
semi-autonomous states, or länder, that could act
as go-betweens for the occupied German people and Allied commanders-in-chief.
At the Potsdam Conference, the Allies called specifically for cooperation in governing
Germany through the Allied Control Council, a board of senior military
figures from each nation that acted as Germany’s highest level of government.
The German economy was also supposed to be kept cohesive.
Did that happen? No. First of all, the Soviets, understandably,
were eager to extract reparations from their occupied German territory.
More so than the other Allies, they took ‘demilitarisation’ to mean ‘deindustrialisation.’
Stalin also immediately began to set up a strict Marxist-Leninist state-controlled economy in
the East, and obviously, that didn’t gel well with the free-market orientated western powers.
Foremost among them, the US, launched the Marshall Plan in 1948, which sent billions of dollars of
aid to rebuild ruined European economies, and some undamaged ones as well. Soviet-occupied Germany,
as with the rest of the states under the Soviets’ influence, was barred by Stalin,
through his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, from accepting the funds. Molotov being the same
guy who back in 1939 made the deal to split Poland with the Germans, so that’s lovely.
It didn’t help the German economy that Allied airforces had been working to flatten Germany
for years before the surrender, and that the Nazis had fought to the bitter end,
even conscripting the young and elderly in defense of their doomed regime.
Starvation was a serious concern for the first few years after Germany’s defeat, the currency was
basically worthless, and on top of all that, the Control Council had to figure out what to do with
some 12 million German refugees expelled from the east. But economic fracturing and new, Cold War,
ideological divides weren’t the only reason that Germany ended up being broken in two. Here, de
Gaulle becomes much more important to the story: having not been invited to any of the summits,
he retaliated by opting to pick and choose what Allied resolutions France would implement.
The French, perhaps even more so than the Soviets who at least on paper agreed that
Germany should remain whole, wanted the country split into as many weaker states as possible.
Ideally, for them, the lander might’ve become fully separate countries. In particular,
though, the French wanted control over the economically vital Saarland and the Ruhr valley,
which contained much of Germany’s industry and coal reserves.
Paris (again, not without good reason) still saw Germany as the world’s greatest threat to peace,
but in Washington and in London it was the Soviets, not the Germans who were the new
boogeyman, and without them on board, France wasn’t going to get to dissolve Germany entirely.
But that didn’t stop them from making every effort to sow division in their zone.
In contrast, the US and Britain cooperated closely to rebuild their portions of Germany
in their image, going so far as to merge their occupation zones effective January 1st, 1947.
The Ruhr was in that zone, but France did have the Saarland to itself and,
in 1946, it was made into the Saar Protectorate;
a nominally separate state from Germany, not under the Allied Control Council.
Border controls were set up between the Saarland and the rest of Germany,
and the French language was mandated in schools.
It was only when the Cold War began in earnest, and when it became increasingly apparent that the
Saar people had no interest in becoming French, that France signed on to reuniting the country.
June 1948, saw the first crisis of the Cold War:
in response to the unification of the British and American zones, and their creation of a
new currency the Deutschmark, the Soviet Union blockaded the Western-occupied parts of Berlin
in a thinly veiled attempt to starve the city into submission.
From that point onwards it was clear, if it hadn’t been before,
that the former Allies' hostility to one another was going to be too much to overcome.
The blockade didn’t work out for Stalin as the US
and Britain flew in supplies around the clock to West Berlin for over a year,
but it did see the joint Allied Control Council be effectively abolished;
by then the Iron Curtain had very much descended.
In that context, the French relented and allowed their Länder to join with the American and
British ones first economically in 1948 to form Trizonia, and then in 1949 to form the Federal
Republic of Germany. Each of the now Bundesländer of West Germany retained partial sovereignty, in
a similar fashion to, say, the states of the US. In response, the Soviets set up their own country
in the east: the German Democratic Republic, under the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.
Both Germanies claimed to be the legitimate government of the whole country though,
and neither formally recognized the existence of the other.
Contrary to its name, the GDR, or East Germany. was a Communist one-party state
that took marching orders from Moscow. It described itself as a “workers and
peasant’s state,” which meant that its economy was centrally planned, autocratic,
and inefficient; it was incredibly common for East Germans to flee west. Why? Well
because West Germany and West Berlin became a democracy at both the state and federal levels.
West Germans elected Konrad Adenauer as their first Chancellor, and in 1951 the West became
a founding member of the European Coal and Steel Community, a predecessor of the modern
EU. It reincorporated the Saarland in 1957 when the French finally gave up on the place.
But even as the two Germanies diverged,
no one really thought that the country would remain split for the next forty years.
West and East Germans were still, Germans.
Surely a compromise could be made, and a neutral state created?
Not in the context of the Cold War.
It would take until the people of Eastern Europe’s widespread rejection of Communism
and Soviet domination in the late 80s for the German nation to become whole once again.
Still, today though there remain stark economic and cultural differences between the former halves
of the country, but Germany used to be a lot more divided even than it was during the Cold War;
if you want to find out how the German state came into being in the first place,
you should check out the video on the Franco-Prussian War to the left,
and as always, I’ve been James and I’ll see you there.