History of Germany (1945–1990)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 5th of June 1945, the four Allied powers signed the Berlin Declaration, formally abolishing the German Reich. What remained of Germany was a shattered landscape. Some eight million foreign displaced persons wandered its roads, including around 400,000 survivors of the Nazi concentration camp system. Nine million German soldiers sat in prisoner-of-war camps. Between 12 and 14 million German-speaking refugees were already moving westward from the former eastern territories, and an estimated two million of them died on the journey. Germany had not merely lost a war. It had lost its territorial shape, its sovereignty, its governing institutions, and its place in the world. What emerged over the next 45 years would be two countries built on fundamentally different visions of what Germany could become, separated by concrete and wire, and reunited only after the peaceful collapse of the regime that held the eastern half together.

• 2. Division and Occupation

  ›

  At the Potsdam Conference, which ran from the 17th of July to the 2nd of August 1945, the four Allied powers formalized a division that had already taken shape on the battlefield. France took the southwest, Britain the northwest, the United States the south, and the Soviet Union the east. The boundary between the new Germany and Poland was set at the Oder-Neisse line. All territorial expansion Germany had made between 1938 and 1945 was declared automatically invalid, including the absorption of Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Danzig, and more than a dozen other regions.

  The ethnic consequences of this redrawing were vast. In 1944, roughly 12.4 million ethnic Germans lived in territory that became part of postwar Poland and the Soviet Union. Approximately 6 million fled or were evacuated before the Red Army arrived. Of the remainder, about 2 million died during the war or in its aftermath. The Potsdam Agreement sanctioned what it called an "orderly and humane" transfer of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, even as it acknowledged that expulsions were already underway and were placing severe burdens on the occupation zones. Many of those being transferred, primarily women and children, were severely mistreated. Thousands died in forced labor camps, including Lambinowice, Zgoda, and Central Labour Camp Jaworzno. Others froze to death in transit.

  Around 8 million ethnic German refugees eventually settled in West Germany, with a further 3 million in East Germany. In the Federal Republic, they formed a major voting bloc that pressed for reunification, compensation, and the right of return, and that Konrad Adenauer's "Policy of Strength" deliberately cultivated, even as his westward-looking policies made their actual goals essentially unachievable through negotiation. In 1990, the unified Germany confirmed in treaties with Poland and the Soviet Union that the territorial transfers of 1945 had been permanent and irreversible.

• 3. Dismantling a Nation's Industry

  ›

  Henry Morgenthau Jr. had proposed turning Germany into a purely agricultural country after the war, and though that plan was officially shelved under public opposition, its influence ran deep. The punitive occupation directive JCS 1067 instructed U.S. forces to take no steps toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany. The first industrial level plan, issued on the 29th of March 1946, called for German heavy industry to be cut to 50 percent of its 1938 levels through the destruction of 1,500 listed manufacturing plants. In January 1946, the Allied Control Council capped German steel production at roughly 5.8 million tons per year, equivalent to 25 percent of prewar output.

  Food shortages compounded the industrial collapse. During 1945, the average German civilian in the U.S. and British occupation zones received 1,200 kilocalories per day in official rations. In early October 1945, the British government privately acknowledged in a cabinet meeting that adult civilian death rates had risen to four times prewar levels and child death rates had risen by ten times. The cold winter of 1946-1947 pushed daily caloric intake down to between 1,000 and 1,500 kilocalories, with severe fuel shortages adding to the toll.

  A parallel form of extraction targeted ideas rather than steel. Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for two years, the United States pursued a systematic program to harvest German patents, both inside Germany and abroad, and used them to strengthen Allied industrial competitiveness. John Gimbel's book "Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany" concluded that intellectual reparations taken by the U.S. and the UK amounted to close to $10 billion. During this period, no industrial research could take place in Germany, as any results would automatically become available to overseas competitors.

  The policy shifted on the 6th of September 1946, when Secretary of State James F. Byrnes delivered what became known as the Stuttgart speech, repudiating Morgenthau-influenced policies and signaling a changed U.S. approach. In July 1947, President Harry S. Truman rescinded JCS 1067 on national security grounds. Its replacement, JCS 1779, stated that an orderly and prosperous Europe required the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany.

• 4. Two States, Two Systems

  ›

  On the 23rd of May 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany came into being, with Bonn as its provisional capital. Konrad Adenauer had intervened emphatically for Bonn, which was only fifteen kilometers from his hometown. Most of the constitutional assembly and the U.S. Supreme Command had favored Frankfurt am Main, but other politicians worried that Frankfurt, as one of the largest German cities and a former center of the Holy Roman Empire, might be accepted as a permanent capital, weakening support for eventual return to Berlin. Adenauer's coalition of the CDU, CSU, and Free Democrats took office on the 20th of September 1949.

  Five months later, on the 7th of October 1949, the German Democratic Republic was established in the Soviet Zone, with East Berlin as its capital. Its leadership was dominated by the Soviet-aligned Socialist Unity Party. In 1952, Stalin proposed German reunification and superpower disengagement from Central Europe, but Britain, France, and the United States rejected the offer as insincere. Adenauer rejected it too, preferring what he called "Westintegration" over what he dismissed as experiments.

  The Soviet Union launched a full industrial dismantling campaign in its occupation zone that was far more extensive than anything carried out in the west. Soviet leaders soon recognized that this alienated the German workforce from the Communist cause, but decided that the desperate economic situation inside the Soviet Union took priority. Stalin had floated $20 billion as adequate reparations from Germany; when the United States refused to treat that figure as a negotiating basis, the Soviet Union was left extracting its own reparations at a heavy cost to East Germans. This was the beginning of the formal split. The Berlin Blockade in June 1948, which cut all ground routes between Western Germany and West Berlin, lasted eleven months before the Soviets lifted it, having failed to dislodge the Western airlift of supplies.

• 5. The Economic Miracle

  ›

  Between 1950 and 1960, the West German gross national product grew at an average annual rate of around 7 percent. Unemployment stood at 10.3 percent at the start of the decade and fell to 1.2 percent by 1960. The name attached to this transformation was Ludwig Erhard, who led the Ministry of Economics throughout the decade. The Marshall Plan played what economists came to regard as a key psychological role in the recovery, while concrete factors such as the currency reform of June 1948, which halted rampant inflation by introducing the Deutsche Mark, and the Korean War of 1950-1953, which created worldwide demand for goods and helped overcome lingering resistance to buying German products, drove the actual growth.

  By the end of the decade, younger East Germans were leaving in large numbers, crossing into the west and taking their labor with them. The Berlin Wall, constructed in August 1961, was the GDR's answer to this hemorrhage. For West Germany it created a new problem: how to satisfy an apparently insatiable demand for labor. The answer was Gastarbeiter, foreign workers recruited from Southern Europe. An initial agreement was signed with the Turkish government in October 1961. By 1966, roughly 1.3 million foreign workers had arrived, mainly from Italy, Turkey, Spain, and Greece. By 1971, the number had reached 2.6 million. The original plan assumed workers would return home after a limited period, but the gap between wages in their home countries and in Germany led many to bring their families and settle permanently. German authorities took little notice of the structural change underway.

• 6. Memory, Justice, and Silence

  ›

  In the 1950s Federal Republic, commemorating the Nazi period focused heavily on those executed after the 20th of July 1944 putsch attempt. Annual ceremonies attended by leading politicians were held at the Bendlerblock and Plötzensee Prison. By contrast, the ruins of concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen and Dachau were largely ignored and neglected by the regional governments responsible for their care. It was not until 1966 that the state of Lower Saxony opened Bergen-Belsen to the public, founding a small house of documentation, and only in response to outside criticism that the government had been intentionally neglecting the site.

  The legal system compounded the evasion. In 1963, a German court ruled in the Stashynsky case that a KGB assassin was not guilty of murder but only of being an accomplice to murder, placing full legal responsibility on those who had issued his orders. The implications for Nazi war crime prosecutions were severe: under this logic, only those at the highest levels of Reich leadership could be found guilty of murder. An SS man who had operated the gas chambers at Auschwitz while following orders could only be convicted as an accomplice to murder, while one who had beaten a single inmate to death on personal initiative could be convicted of murder itself.

  Fritz Bauer, a courageous prosecutor, gathered evidence against the guards of the Auschwitz death camp and brought roughly twenty of them to trial in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965. Daily newspaper reports and school visits to the proceedings revealed to the German public the scale of the concentration camp system. A study done in 1953 had already shown that of the 42,000 people who had survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, only 700 were entitled to compensation under the compensation law of that year. The 1953 law required claimants to have a territorial connection with Germany and to prove membership in the realm of German language and culture, excluding most of the surviving slave laborers from Central and Eastern Europe. It also excluded homosexuals, Roma, Sinti, Communists, and those classified as Asoziale, on the grounds that they had been criminals whom the state was protecting society from. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality, was not repealed until 1969, meaning that German gay survivors of the concentration camps were prosecuted under the same law that had been used against them between 1935 and 1945, though now sentenced to prison rather than camps.

  In autumn 1959, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno delivered a widely publicized television speech calling for Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the German phrase for coming to terms with the past. He argued that most people were engaged in willful forgetting and used euphemistic language, citing the use of the term Kristallnacht for the November 1938 pogrom as an example. In January 1979, the American miniseries Holocaust aired in West Germany and was watched by 20 million people, roughly half the West German population, bringing the scale of the genocide to public attention in a way nothing had before.

• 7. Reform, Revolt, and Terror

  ›

  In October 1962, the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel published an analysis of weaknesses in West Germany's military defenses. Ten days later, police raided Der Spiegel's Hamburg offices and seized quantities of documents, acting on orders from CSU Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss. Adenauer told the Bundestag the article amounted to high treason. The editor and owner Rudolf Augstein was jailed before public outcry over the breach of press freedom became too large to ignore. FDP members of Adenauer's cabinet resigned, demanding Strauss's departure. The British historian Frederick Taylor later argued this affair marked a turning point in German values, with ordinary people rejecting old authoritarian habits in favor of democratic norms.

  On the 7th of December 1970, Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt before a monument to those killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during a visit to Warsaw. The gesture, known as the Warschauer Kniefall, was unlike anything any German chancellor had done before. Brandt had built his chancellorship around Ostpolitik, a policy of rapprochement with Germany's eastern neighbors that produced agreements with Moscow in August 1970, Warsaw in December 1970, a four-power agreement over West Berlin in 1971, and an agreement on relations between West and East Germany in December 1972. He was forced to resign in May 1974 after a senior staff member, Gunter Guillaume, was uncovered as a spy for the East German Stasi. Brandt won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1971.

  The student movement of the late 1960s fed a violent underground that lasted decades. On the 2nd of June 1967, a bystander named Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the head and killed by a plain-clothed policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras, during a demonstration against the visiting Shah of Iran in West Berlin. It was later established that Kurras had been a paid Stasi agent. The Baader-Meinhof Group, later known as the Red Army Faction, began with bank raids and eventually assassinated politicians, judges, and businessmen. The highpoint came in the autumn of 1977. The industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer was kidnapped on the 5th of September 1977 to force the release of imprisoned Baader-Meinhof leaders. A Palestinian group hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181 to seize additional hostages. On the 18th of October 1977, GSG 9 commandos stormed the aircraft in Mogadishu and freed the hostages. That same day the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof leaders were found dead in their cells with gunshot wounds; the deaths were ruled suicides. Schleyer was then executed by his captors. The RAF's last action came in 1993, and the group announced it was disbanding in 1998.

• 8. The Road to Reunification

  ›

  Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik had laid the legal framework for eventual reconciliation with the east, though reunification itself remained a distant prospect through most of the 1970s and 1980s. Helmut Schmidt, who served as Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, emphasized the political unification of Europe in partnership with the United States. His successor governments inherited a Federal Republic whose democracy had proved more resilient than many had expected during the RAF years.

  In 1979, the environmental party the Greens crossed the 5 percent threshold required to win parliamentary seats, doing so first in the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen provincial election. Feminist and gay rights movements were also reshaping West German society. Until 1979, a married woman required her husband's permission to take a job or open a bank account. Paragraph 175, even after being softened in 1973, kept homosexual acts illegal with anyone under 18 until it was finally repealed in 1994.

  The decline and fall of the Socialist Unity Party's hold over East Germany, and the Peaceful Revolution that followed, brought the two states together on the 3rd of October 1990. The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, concluded that year, resolved the territorial questions that the Potsdam Conference had left open four and a half decades earlier, with the unified Germany formally confirming in treaties with Poland and the Soviet Union that the transfers of 1945 had been permanent. The capital question, deferred since 1949, would eventually be settled in favor of Berlin, the city that had been divided, blockaded, walled, and finally opened again as the first Wall sections came down in November 1989.