Allied-occupied Germany

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Allied-occupied Germany begins not with peace but with erasure. On the 5th of June 1945, the Berlin Declaration extinguished Germany as a sovereign state and placed every square kilometer of it under foreign control. The country that had launched the deadliest war in history was stripped of its government, its authority, and its future. Roughly 80 percent of its infrastructure needed repair or reconstruction. The phrase that Germans themselves reached for was "Stunde Null" , zero hour. A civilisation in rubble, waiting to be remade by four powers with very different ideas of what that remade Germany should look like. How did four wartime allies carve up a nation? How did their conflicting visions turn a temporary occupation into two separate countries? And what happened to the millions of people caught between those competing plans?

• 2. Drawing the Lines

  ›

  The Potsdam Agreement, signed on the 2nd of August 1945, was the document that physically divided Germany into new shapes. It gave Poland and the Soviet Union all German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line , eastern Pomerania, Neumark, Posen-West Prussia, East Prussia, and most of Silesia. The remaining Germany was then cut into four occupation zones, one for each of the victorious powers: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and France.

  Before Potsdam was even signed, the boundaries were already being tested. In the closing weeks of fighting, US forces had pushed beyond agreed lines by as much as 200 miles in some places. The so-called line of contact between Soviet and American forces lay east of where the inner German border would eventually be drawn. American troops held Soviet-designated territory for two months before withdrawing in the first days of July 1945. Some historians have argued this withdrawal was what persuaded the Soviet Union to allow American, British, and French forces into their assigned sectors of Berlin. Operation Paperclip , intelligence gathering on German scientific expertise , may also have motivated the move.

  France had not been invited to the Potsdam Conference at all, which shaped every decision it made afterward. The French 1st Army had captured Karlsruhe and Stuttgart in April and May of 1945, reaching as far as Hitler's Eagle's Nest. But in July, France relinquished Stuttgart to the Americans and received in exchange control over cities west of the Rhine, including Mainz and Koblenz. The result was a French zone in two barely connected pieces, touching the rest of Germany at just one point along the Rhine. The excluded French then rejected the Potsdam decisions that inconvenienced them , particularly the plan to absorb millions of expelled Germans from the east.

• 3. Four Zones, Four Visions

  ›

  Henry Morgenthau Jr., Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, proposed the most drastic American vision: a Germany broken into four autonomous states and stripped of its industry entirely, reduced to an agrarian economy. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and War Secretary Henry L. Stimson opposed the plan. Roosevelt himself distanced himself after major American newspapers reported on it. The approach that prevailed was organized around four goals: denazification, demilitarization, democratization, and the dismantling of war-making capacity.

  In practical terms, denazification in the American zone meant shutting down all Nazi-era media. New publications could only be licensed to Germans with clean records. Newspapers that emerged from this process included the Frankfurter Rundschau in August 1945, Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin in September 1945, and the Suddeutsche Zeitung in Munich in October 1945. Radio began with the American Forces Network , stations in Munich, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart , before the German-operated Hessischer Rundfunk, Bayerischer Rundfunk, and Suddeutscher Rundfunk eventually joined them.

  The British zone contained the Ruhr industrial region, which had been bombed most heavily and faced the worst shortages of housing and food. British policy placed a strong emphasis on local democracy modeled on the UK system. The British introduced a non-political civic role similar to the English town clerk , a "city director" , to replace elected mayors, believing that building a culture of public service was the path to re-educating Germany toward democracy. They prioritized rebuilding schools and universities before almost anything else.

  The French were focused on a single thing: ensuring Germany could never again threaten France. Their occupation policy was deliberately decentralizing , they wanted Germany fragmented, not reunified. On the economic side, they extracted coal and steel from the Saar region, integrating it into a customs and currency union with France and developing export industries there. The French zone actually ran a surplus, unlike the British and American zones, which became financial burdens on their occupying powers.

  Soviet aims resembled the French in one respect: extract reparations and prevent future German aggression. But the Soviet Military Administration went further, executing a rigorous land reform program, expropriating large estates, closing major banks and insurance companies in July 1945, and seizing property formerly belonging to the Wehrmacht and Nazi organizations. Key posts in local administration , especially those touching security , went to Communist party members.

• 4. Smaller Presences, Larger Complications

  ›

  Inside the British zone, several smaller nations sent their own forces, each bringing different pressures and purposes. Jean-Baptiste Piron commanded the Belgian army of occupation, which formed a 200-kilometer strip from the Belgian-German border through the cities of Cologne and Aachen. Belgian soldiers remained in Germany until the 31st of December 2005 , the last of the occupation-era forces to leave.

  Polish units, mainly from the 1st Armoured Division, were stationed in Emsland in northern Germany. The territory, covering 6,500 square kilometers, was originally conceived as a collection and dispersal zone for the millions of Polish displaced persons scattered across Germany and Western Europe. Early British proposals had even suggested formalizing it as a Polish occupation zone. Soviet opposition killed that idea. The zone was administered by the Polish government in exile, and its administrative center, the city of Haren, had its German population temporarily removed and was renamed Maczków , after General Stanislaw Maczek , from 1945 to 1947. Once Britain recognized the pro-Soviet government in Warsaw and withdrew recognition from the London exile government, the Emsland arrangement became politically awkward. Polish units within the British Army were demobilized in June 1947, and the last Polish residents left in 1948.

  In 1946, the Norwegian Brigade Group in Germany had 4,000 soldiers in Hanover. Among them was a young man then holding Norwegian citizenship and serving as a press attache , the future German Chancellor Willy Brandt. That same summer, the French zone presented its own peculiarity: the town of Busingen am Hochrhein, a German exclave physically separated from Germany by Swiss territory. The Swiss government permitted limited numbers of French troops to cross through neutral Switzerland to maintain order there.

  A Danish Brigade of 4,000 men arrived in the summer of 1947 under British command, taking up positions in Oldenburg following an agreement signed at Copenhagen in April 1947 between Denmark and the United Kingdom. A formal Danish Occupation Force was established on the 7th of October 1949, with its headquarters in the town of Jever in East Friesland, before moving to Itzehoe, where it remained , eventually known as the Danish Command in Germany , until 1958.

• 5. Hunger, Control, and Human Costs

  ›

  By the spring of 1946, the official food ration in the American zone had fallen to no more than 1,275 calories per day. In some areas the figure was probably as low as 700 calories per day. The British zone was no better. The British publisher Victor Gollancz visited in October and November of 1946 and found conditions in Dusseldorf particularly severe. The official 28-day allocation was meant to include 1,548 calories and 10 kilograms of bread. Limited grain reduced the bread ration to 8.5 kilograms, but actual supply was only about 50 percent of even that reduced figure , leaving residents with roughly 770 calories. Gollancz published his findings in letters and articles in The Times, the Daily Herald, and the Manchester Guardian, and included photographs taken during the visit.

  Some occupation soldiers exploited the food crisis. Cigarettes functioned as black-market currency, and soldiers used their surplus supplies to extract compliance from desperate local women. The children born from these encounters faced severe disadvantages. American soldiers were initially prohibited from paying maintenance for children they admitted fathering, because doing so was deemed "aiding the enemy." Marriages between white US soldiers and Austrian women were not permitted until January 1946, and with German women until December 1946.

  Children of African-American soldiers faced particular hardship. They could not conceal the foreign identity of their fathers the way mixed-race children of white soldiers sometimes could. African-American soldiers were reluctant to acknowledge paternity because doing so invited reprisals and accusations of rape , a charge prosecuted far more aggressively against Black soldiers than white ones, more likely to result in court-martial conviction, and carrying a potential death sentence. The US Army prohibited interracial marriages entirely until 1948. Between 1950 and 1955, the Allied High Commission for Germany prohibited all legal proceedings to establish paternity or liability for child maintenance, leaving those children without legal recourse.

  The Werwolf threat , the anticipated Nazi insurgency , proved largely illusory. Historians including Antony Beevor, Earl F. Ziemke, Golo Mann, and Richard Bessel all noted that widespread resistance never materialized. Perry Biddiscombe, while also characterizing German resistance as minor, estimated the total death toll from Werwolf actions and resulting reprisals at 3,000-5,000 people. The Soviets used the specter of Werwolf activity as justification for tightened police control and forced labor, applying the threat regardless of its actual scale.

• 6. The Break and Two Germanys

  ›

  The Allied Control Council , the joint governing body meant to administer Germany as a single unit , collapsed in practice on the 20th of March 1948. The Soviets walked out as tensions between east and west reached breaking point. From June 1948 to May 1949, the Soviet Union enforced the Berlin Blockade, cutting off western access to the jointly-occupied city. The three western zones had already merged incrementally: the American and British zones combined into the Bizone as of the 1st of January 1947, and France later joined to form the Trizone.

  The Federal Republic of Germany , West Germany , was established on the 23rd of May 1949. The German Democratic Republic, East Germany, followed on the 7th of October 1949. The Soviet Military Administration in Germany was replaced by the Soviet Control Commission on the 10th of October, though limited sovereignty was not granted to the GDR government until the 11th of November 1949.

  In the west, formal occupation ended on the 5th of May 1955, when the Deutschlandvertrag , the General Treaty , entered into force. Military governors became civilian high commissioners after 1949, and when the Deutschlandvertrag became law those commissioners became ordinary ambassadors. On the 12th of November 1955, West Germany established its armed forces: the Bundeswehr, or Federal Defense Force. In East Germany, the National People's Army followed on the 1st of March 1956.

  Full sovereignty came later still. Despite the grants of general sovereignty to both states in 1955, unrestricted sovereignty under international law was not achieved until German reunification in October 1990. The Two-plus-Four Treaty, which formally granted full sovereign powers, did not become law until the 15th of March 1991, after ratification by all participating governments. Russian troops departed in 1994. The Belgian Forces in Germany were the last to leave, staying until the end of 2005. And the Saar, separated since 1947 as a French protectorate, rejoined the Federal Republic on the 1st of January 1957 following a 1956 plebiscite , becoming its tenth state.