Bizone

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Bizone is the name for the merged American and British occupation zones in Germany, created on the 1st of January 1947. After World War II, the Allies split defeated Germany four ways. The Americans held the south, the British held the west and north. France held the south-west, and the Soviets held central Germany, the area that would become East Germany. Berlin itself was carved into four zones the same way, while the easternmost German lands were permanently handed over to Poland or the Soviet Union. Cooperation between the four occupiers was supposed to hold that whole arrangement together. Something broke that cooperation badly enough that two of the four powers merged their zones together, while the other two did not. What went wrong between the Americans, British, French, and Soviets, and why did merging seem like the only way forward for the Americans and British?

• 2. A Four-Way Split Unravels

  ›

  At Potsdam, the Allies agreed that fifteen percent of all equipment dismantled in the western zones would go to the Soviets. That equipment came especially from metallurgical, chemical, and machine manufacturing plants. In return, Moscow was supposed to send food, coal, potash, timber, clay products, and petroleum products west. Deliveries from the western zones began in 1946, but the promised Soviet shipments never arrived.

  Lucius D. Clay, the American military administrator, halted factory transfers from the Ruhr to the Soviet sector on the 3rd of May 1946. German expellees from Soviet-controlled areas, already stripped of their possessions, kept arriving in the western zones until the end of 1948. Their arrival deepened pressure on food and heating supplies. The Soviet Union answered Clay's halt with a public relations campaign against American policy, and it began obstructing administrative work across all four occupation zones.

  Within months, that breakdown meant the four zones no longer shared even the basic administrative machinery needed to run a defeated country.

• 3. Four Zones, Four Governments

  ›

  In July 1945, months before the Potsdam Conference formally endorsed the idea, the Soviets had already built their own central administrations, called the Zentralverwaltungen. These covered nutrition, transport, jurisdiction, and finance. They were subdivisions of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, known as SVAG, which held all legislative power. That left the states in the Soviet zone with only limited functions.

  In Bad Oeynhausen, the Control Commission for Germany's British Element, called CCG/BE, set up central offices, the Zentralämter, in the summer of 1945. Chairpersons of these offices were appointed by the British military government. They carried more weight than the minister-presidents of the states in the British zone, which functioned as administrative bodies rather than republics. After March 1946, a British zonal advisory board, the Zonenbeirat, brought together the states, central offices, political parties, trade unions, and consumer organisations. But it had no legislative power of its own, and all final decisions in the British zone still rested with the CCG/BE.

  OMGUS, the Office of Military Government, United States, took a different approach in October 1945. It encouraged the states in its zone to form the Länderrat, a council with power to legislate across the entire US zone. This council built its own committees, the Ausschüsse, run by a secretariat based in Stuttgart. Unlike the British and Soviet central bodies, the American committees were not subdivisions of OMGUS itself, but autonomous German bodies operating under OMGUS supervision.

  France had skipped the Potsdam Conference altogether, so it felt free to accept some of its terms and ignore others. The French military government blocked interzonal administration everywhere. It even obstructed cooperation between the states inside its own zone, aiming instead for total decentralisation into separate sovereign states. States in the French zone received a high degree of autonomy under French supervision, but coordination among them was almost impossible.

  By September 1946, representatives from the American and British zones would meet to test whether their administrations could actually work together.

• 4. Two Zones Find Common Ground

  ›

  Between the 5th and the 11th of September 1946, Länder representatives from the American and British zones met and divided up administrative tasks. Economic policy went to Minden, and transportation, postal, and radio communications went to Frankfurt am Main. Food and agriculture, along with a new German Finance Commission, both went to Stuttgart.

  On the 6th of September, at the Stuttgart conference, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes delivered a speech called the Restatement of Policy on Germany. He called for German economic unity, greater German responsibility for its own politics and economy, and he explicitly repudiated the Morgenthau Plan.

  In Bremen on the 4th of October 1946, minister-presidents from the British and American zones met. They discussed proposals for a German Länderrat, modeled on the American example. Two months later, on the 2nd of December 1946, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin met his American counterpart, Byrnes, in New York. They agreed to unify the American and British zones economically, effective from the 1st of January 1947. On that date, the two zones merged into the Bizone, aiming to build a growing economy and a new political order across Germany.

  Early in 1947, the British zonal advisory board was rebuilt to match the American Länderrat model. States in the British zone gained real legislating power, while the British military government stepped back into a supervisory role.

  Extending that same legislative freedom to the Soviet zone was never on the table, for reasons rooted in the elections held there in 1946.

• 5. A Line Not Crossed

  ›

  Elections in the Soviet zone in 1946 turned out to be the last somewhat free vote held there. Communists did not clearly dominate every resulting state parliament and government. Extending Länderrat-style self-rule to that zone would have meant accepting those results and effectively ending communist rule in eastern Germany.

  The Soviet Union had already begun mass expropriations of entrepreneurs, real estate owners, and banks in September 1945. That process continued without pause in the years that followed. Handing the Soviet zone's central administrations, still under the Soviet Military Administration, over to genuine German self-rule would have undone that campaign of state control.

  The Bizone marked the first real coordination between at least two occupation zones in Germany, zones that had largely operated apart because of French obstructionism. Its creation became the seed of the future West Germany. Soviet-zone policy still answered to SVAG, and French-zone states remained discouraged from cooperating at all.

  Getting France to cooperate at all would take until the spring of 1949, at a conference held in Washington.

• 6. Land and People

  ›

  The Bizone stretched across eight Länder: Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Bavaria, and Württemberg-Baden, the northern part of today's Baden-Württemberg. It excluded the French zone's Württemberg-Hohenzollern, Baden, Rheinland-Pfalz, and the Soviet zone's Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Saxony.

  Neither part of divided Berlin belonged to the Trizone, and nor did the Saarland, which had been under separate French occupational control since February 1946. The Bizone's population came to roughly 39 million people.

  The British contributed the British Army of the Rhine, since renamed British Army Germany, alongside the Royal Air Force Germany. The Americans matched that with the United States Air Forces in Europe, the U.S. Seventh Army, and the U.S. Third Army.

  That population and that military footprint were about to be folded into something bigger: a merger with the French zone that was still being negotiated.

• 7. From Two Zones to Three

  ›

  On the 29th of May 1947, American and British military governments agreed to create an Economic Council for the Bizone, based in Frankfurt am Main. Day-to-day economic management stayed with a separate body, the Administrative Council for the Economy, headquartered in Minden.

  A currency reform arrived in June 1948, giving the Bizone's new constitutional and economic groundwork something firm to build on. Many West German politicians still strongly opposed the idea of a separate West German rump state, even as that state kept taking shape. Historian Lewkowicz has argued that establishing the Bizone was the single most significant factor behind Europe splitting into two Cold War blocs.

  Bizonia's governance already extended to include the French occupation zone on the 1st of August 1948. The result picked up an unofficial nickname, Trizonia, or jokingly, Trizonesia. That merger was formalized at the Washington Conference of Foreign Ministers, held from the 4th to the 8th of April 1949. There, France agreed to fold its own zone into the Bizone. France only reluctantly allowed representatives from its own zone to join the necessary preparations. Full unification of the three zones came together just six weeks before West Germany's founding.

  Relations among the four occupying powers kept deteriorating, and the old four-way structures became unworkable. In March 1948, the Allied Control Council stopped operating, and the Allied High Commission took its place for the Trizone. The Soviet-sponsored Kommandatura stopped functioning in June 1948, just before the Trizone's final transformation. On the 23rd of May 1949, the Trizone became the Federal Republic of Germany, the country known today as West Germany.

  Even the country's founding legal document acknowledged this bureaucratic inheritance directly. Article 133 of the Grundgesetz specified that the new Federal Republic took over the rights and duties of the Bizone's administration.