"Germany is our problem," wrote Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau in 1945. The measures to curb German power were many and they seemed justified: military government and an unlimited period of occupation; abolition of the German armed forces and elimination of the country’s industrial war potential; de-Nazification and punishment of all Germans involved in Nazi crimes; reparations to the Soviet Union on a gigantic scale as well as to the Western countries in order to restore - at least partly - the damages caused by Germany. In addition to occupation and security controls, radical structural changes seemed necessary. All sorts of recipes were on the table: "dismemberment" of the German Reich that, since its founding by Bismarck, in 1866 and 1871, had played a semi-hegemonic role in Europe and had ruled
Europe from 1940 to 1944; the annexation of large portions of eastern and western Germany; a sharp reduction in the economic potential of this industrial giant; international control of the Ruhr; deep, perhaps revolutionary, reforms in many realms of economy, society, and administration; elimination of the economic, cultural, and administrative "old" elites that had joined up with Hitler’s party; reeducation.
Yet, upon closer inspection, it was much easier to draw up a list of draconian policies than to agree upon them. The joint occupation of a defeated, still potentially powerful great nation by a coalition of victorious but heterogeneous great powers was a unique historical experiment. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see why the system of joint occupation was doomed to fail.
This failure of joint occupation had a multitude of causes. Five primary factors can be singled out: the breakup of Germany into zones of occupation; the power vacuum in Central Europe; the ideological incompatibility of the wartime Grand Alliance; the controversies over reparations; and the interdependence of the German economy with the economies of continental Western Europe.
For practical reasons, each of the four powers had to appoint a military governor to supervise its own zone of occupation and to act as the highest authority in his zone. Yet in order to ensure coordination "in matters affecting Germany as a whole," the commanders-in-chief were supposed to act "jointly" in the Allied Control Council (ACC), established in Berlin.184 Decisions of the ACC would require unanimity. Thus the concept of the joint occupation of Germany that was agreed upon in the winter, spring, and summer of 1945 was based on a contradictory dualism. The ACC could evolve into the nucleus of a joint administration of Germany in order to ensure the necessary economic and political unity, or it could degenerate into a cumbersome multilateral body. In the latter case a bureaucratic nightmare as well as an inherent tendency to postpone common decisions was inevitable. By agreeing that each military governor should have a veto in the Allied Control Council, the occupying powers had made clear that in case of nonagreement their own national policies should prevail in their respective zone. More or less insoluble conflicts were unavoidable. In the case of the Allied Control Council, it took only a year for the attempts at joint decisionmaking to come to an effective standstill.
The second factor was also more or less natural. The collapse of Germany had created a power vacuum in Central Europe. "Germany is no longer the dominating power of Europe, Russia is," wrote Britain’s chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke, on July 27, 1944, when the defeat of Germany was already a certainty. And he continued: "Therefore foster Germany, gradually build her up, and bring her into a federation of Western Europe. Unfortunately this must all be done under the cloak of a holy alliance between England, Russia and America."185 Such a hard-nosed analysis of the postwar world was not only confined to British decisionmakers. Everywhere, in London, Moscow, Washington, and Paris, it was no secret that the policies toward Germany would determine the structure of the new international system that would emerge from the rubble of devastated Europe.
In addition to the tensions engendered by the vacuum of power, these uncertainties led to the third factor. In Europe, a deep ideological schism had existed since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. It had been patched up by the Grand Alliance. During the war, in Western eyes, Germany was much more frightening than Iosif Stalin’s Soviet Union; by the same token, in Soviet eyes, Fascist Germany was perceived as a much greater danger than the capitalist democracies. But how long could this strange alliance endure? When the hostilities ended on May 8, 1945, the joint occupation had to be made operative. In the beginning, there were compelling reasons for each of the Allied victors to make it a success. But the revival of ideological conflict between Western democracies and the Soviet Union made cooperation difficult. The Western democracies, sooner rather than later, had to decide whether they could attempt to build democratic structures and, if so, when and together with which German political parties. And the Soviet Union, for its part, had to work out policies to thwart the attractiveness of Western pluralism and freedom.
One of the most divisive factors relating to the treatment of Germany concerned reparations. For victorious powers, it is always tempting to compensate for wartime damage by imposing heavy reparations on the conquered adversary through dismantling existing industrial plants or taking the goods produced. The Soviet Union, in particular, whose industrial regions to the west of Moscow were destroyed by the German armies, was determined not only to bring about a massive dismantlement of German factories in the Soviet zone of occupation, but also to secure large quantities of reparations from the western zones. Yet American and British planners knew that the densely populated and highly industrialized zones of western Germany even before World War II had had to import roughly 20 percent of their food. This requirement significantly increased when large parts of agrarian eastern Germany were transferred to Poland. Western occupation authorities then faced a dilemma: allow millions of West Germans to starve or spend large sums for food imports; or, alternatively, permit the reconstruction of west German industry and the export of industrial commodities to pay for the food and other indispensable raw materials. In any case, London and Washington did not want indirectly to finance German reparations to the Soviet Union.
A final factor making cooperation difficult related to the restoration of the shattered economies of Europe. Among Western economists, businessmen, and diplomats, it was common knowledge that the economies of Western Europe were indissolubly linked not only to the coal and steel industries ofthe Ruhr, but also to the chemical, electrical, and machine-tool industries of Germany. Economic interdependence, in fact, had been reinforced during the war, when Germany ruled all of continental Western Europe. It seemed unlikely that the shattered economies of France and the Benelux countries could be rebuilt without resuscitating the industrial life of occupied Germany. To Soviet planners, the Western insistence on a certain amount of German industrial recovery for the sake of the economies of Western Europe smacked of a silent cooperation between the capitalists of the Western powers and those of western Germany. Thus, the contradiction between Soviet demands for reparations and US and UK desires for a reasonable level of industry in their zones was a great impediment to the joint administration of Germany.
To defeat Germany had been a difficult task. But to administer the destroyed country and to incorporate it into a viable peace structure seemed even more difficult. One may rightly speak of two quite different divisions of Germany. The first occurred in 1945, when the four occupying powers built up their respective zones of occupation as autonomous units with sharply divergent policies regarding politics, economics, education, and culture. In the spring of 1946, a second phase began. Two factors shaped events. The dramatic worsening of the economic situation called for a rapid economic merger of the zones. At the same time, the growing mistrust between the Anglo-Saxon powers and the Soviet Union poisoned attempts to agree on a German peace treaty. Germany was regarded as a pawn in the evolving Cold
War, vividly illustrated by the failures to reach an agreement on a peace treaty at the Moscow and London conferences of the Council of Foreign Ministers in 1947. Then, fTom the winter of 1947/48 until the fall of 1949, came the last phase. The three western zones were merged into a viable economic and political entity, a demarcation line arose between the western and eastern zones, two German states emerged, symbolizing a divided Europe, and Berlin became a powder keg in the center of Europe that might ignite a third world war. During subsequent decades, the failed attempts to achieve a cooperative joint occupation haunted East-West diplomacy until Germany was reunified in 1990.
Who was to blame for partition? While Germany was divided, this question engendered endless political and historical controversies. To address it in the aftermath of the Cold War, it is best to examine why and how the four powers pursued divergent policies, policies that had their roots in wartime planning.
World History
