Germany: Postwar Germany

Postwar Germany

Hitler's successor, Admiral Karl Doenitz, signed (May 7–8, 1945) an unconditional surrender to the Allies, whose military commanders assumed the functions of government in Germany. The agreements of the Yalta Conference (Feb., 1945) were implemented at the Potsdam Conference (July–Aug., 1945). These agreements were to be tentative, pending a peace conference, but as no peace conference was held, they tended to shape the course of German history after 1945.

A line formed mostly by the Oder and Neisse rivers was made the eastern boundary of Germany, as East Prussia and Upper and Lower Silesia were placed under Polish administration (except N East Prussia, which was awarded to the USSR). In the west, the Saarland was occupied by French military forces. What remained of Germany was divided into four zones, occupied separately by the armies of Great Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR. Berlin, similarly divided although situated well within the Soviet zone, was made the seat of the four-power Allied Control Council, authorized to make economic and administrative decisions for Germany as a whole. However, the council failed to agree on how to implement the often imprecise Potsdam decisions, and separate governments were soon established in each of the four zones.

The National Socialist party and affiliated organizations were outlawed, and many leading Nazis were tried, convicted, and executed for war crimes; other leaders, including von Papen and Schacht, were acquitted. Some Germans (including the philosopher Karl Jaspers and the historian Friedrich Meinecke) called for moral regeneration, but as Germany became a battleground of the cold war, concern with the guilt for the past receded.

During 1945–47 there was a serious shortage of food, caused by the crippled state of the German economy and by poor harvests; this situation was intensified in W Germany by the arrival of about 10 million ethnic German refugees from the Soviet zone and the former German territories of E central Europe. In the Soviet zone, a military administration under Zhukov was established in June, 1945. In 1946, politics there were brought under the control of the Communist-dominated Socialist Unity party (SED), led by Wilhelm Pieck, Otto Grotewohl, and Walter Ulbricht. At the same time, a major program of nationalization and collectivization was carried out. As reparations, the Soviets took much of E Germany's industrial equipment for use in rebuilding their own industry.

The Western Allies rejected a plan by Henry Morgenthau, Jr. to center the German economy around agriculture. Industrial machinery was restored to use, restrictions against the German cartels went largely unenforced, and West Germany's remarkable recovery and reindustrialization soon began. The rebuilding process was facilitated by the Marshall Plan. By 1947, the Western occupation zones were increasingly coordinating their policies (especially in economics), whereas the Soviet zone followed an increasingly divergent policy. The split between the three Western Allies and the USSR became complete in 1948. After the Western powers had planned steps toward establishing a West German constitution and had instituted a currency reform, the Soviet authorities unsuccessfully blockaded (1948–49) West Berlin as part of the cold war (see Berlin airlift). In 1949, Germany was divided into the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The precise legal status of West Berlin remained unclear; however, West Berlin was intimately tied to West Germany in many ways (see Berlin).

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