INTRODUCTION

The Occupation of Germany

The end of the second world war brought catastrophe upon the German population.  Until the final year, many of them had lived relatively comfortably, supplied with food, consumer goods, manufacturing resources and labour extracted from the countries they had overrun.  But from 1944 onwards, as the Allies progressively freed the occupied countries of Europe, and bombed German cities, factories and railway lines, large parts the country became a wasteland.  While many rural villages and towns escaped relatively unscathed, the cities and major towns were reduced to rubble; industries destroyed; housing rendered uninhabitable, transport infrastructure unusable, and food stocks reduced to near-starvation levels.   Disease was rife; and hundreds of thousands of refugees, homeless and displaced persons roamed the country.[1]  In their shock at the destruction of their world, and the total collapse of the regime that had created it, and in recognition of the size of the task that now lay ahead of them, Germans called 1945 zero hour: ‘Stunde Null’.

The destruction had been deliberate.  With the perceived failures of the post-WWI Armistice still fresh in their minds, the Allies resolved that, this time, only unconditional surrender would make it possible to root out Nazism and German militarism once and for all; and that only total destruction would deliver an unconditional surrender.  But it was also understood that this would leave a dangerous vacuum at the heart of Europe: in a land where 66m people existed in deprivation and poverty, despair would soon turn to anger and resentment.   So, the occupation of a defeated Germany would have to involve far more than simply the military control of conquered territory.  The purposes of the occupation, as expressed in the Potsdam Agreement, were to: eliminate Germany as a potential military menace; convince the German people that they had been defeated and that they were responsible for their own suffering; destroy Nazism; and to prepare for the eventual reconstruction of political life on a democratic basis, and for the country’s eventual peaceful cooperation in international life.[2]  A complete transformation was required, to democratise of the country’s political, social and economic institutions, and to re-educate its people; and the task would have to be undertaken collectively and collaboratively by the war-time Allies – US, UK the USSR and France.  The instrument to achieve this was to be the Allied Control Commission. 

The Allied Control Commission

The Allied Control Commission was a unique arrangement: “[T]here were few precedents for civilised industrialized nations actually taking over the government of another (instead of giving orders to a puppet régime).”[3]  Its task was to establish and direct strategy and policy for the whole of Germany through an Allied Control Council (ACC), based in Berlin, composed of the four Allied Commanders-in-Chief, who were also Military Governors of the geographical zones in which they exercised supreme authority. 

The ACC met for the first time in Berlin on 30 July 1945, and monthly thereafter under rotating four-power chairmanship.  Its operations were cumbersome, to say the least: all decisions, meeting records and communiqués had to be agreed unanimously; every speech had to be translated into all of the other languages and, with no simultaneous translation, proceedings were often reduced to polemical statements of national positions, precluding effective debate and rapid decision-making.  Arranging meetings was made more problematic by differences in national mealtime habits: Russians breakfasted late so struggled to start a meeting at 11am, but could argue their way through the afternoon when US and UK, who started early, were ready to conclude their day.  Sometimes, the Council building restaurant provided the most useful space for to discuss informal solutions.[4]

Even without the practical and procedural drawbacks, the Allied Control Council would have struggled to fulfil its intended role.  While everyone agreed that Germany must be rendered incapable of wreaking devastation in Europe in future, there were differing views among the Allies from the outset about the nature of a future German state.  At the end of the War, Washington tended to share Moscow’s view that the way to curb Germany was to strip it of industrial power and reduce it to a pre-industrial state.  The US was keen not to be tied to Britain, seeing itself and the USSR as the power-brokers on the continent, and was in any case focused on leaving Europe within two years.  Under the American Morgenthau Plan, Germany was to be partitioned into northern and southern states, with the Ruhr internationalised, the Saar ceded to France, and parts of Silesia and East Prussia transferred to Poland.  Industries which were key to military capability would be removed or destroyed.[5]   

In Britain some people took the view, known as Vansittartism, that there was something intrinsic to the German character which made them prone to brutality and to a lust for domination, and that they should be treated accordingly.[6]  Others believed that, while the Germans had brought their current sufferings upon themselves, Britain  had a humanitarian duty to prevent starvation and disease.  More pragmatically, it was also recognized that a weakened and resentful Germany would be a dangerous neighbour, likely to be drawn into the Soviet orbit.[7] The UK Government’s view, forged by experience after WWI, was that imposing extreme measures on Germany would be futile, and that only rehabilitation, reform and re-education would produce the change of heart among the Germans themselves which would lead to lasting peace.  This view, which enjoyed cross-party support in Parliament, had underpinned British foreign policy throughout the War and remained broadly unchanged following the election of a Labour Government in July 1945.

The aims of rehabilitating and rebuilding Germany were spelled out by Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in a Memorandum to the Council of Foreign Ministers in Moscow in March 1947:

• To establish political conditions which will secure the world against any German reversion to dictatorship and any revival of German aggressive policy

• To establish economic conditions which will enable Germany to become self-supporting and to repay the expenditure incurred on her behalf by the occupying Powers since the beginning of the occupation; which will enable her to make good the damage done by the war; and will further enable Germans and the world outside Germany to benefit from German industry and resources without re-establishing the economic foundations of an aggressive policy

• To establish constitutional machinery in Germany which will ensure these ends and which will be acceptable to the German people

• To establish with this end in view, the maximum responsibility for and interest in political, administrative, and economic development s along democratic lines on the part of Germans themselves.

The Memorandum also proposed principles for establishing central government in Germany on the basis of political, legal, economic and financial unity.[8]

It came as no surprise when the Soviet Union rejected these principles: the British Government had for some time come to believe that an all-German state was probably unachievable, and had begun to consider the possibility of establishing western Germany as part of a western European federation of states.  This, of course, could not be achieved without the Americans, but US views were changing following the failure of the Potsdam Conference in July/August 1945, and as evidence mounted in subsequent four-power Foreign Ministers meetings and in daily interactions that the USSR was not interested in establishing a single German state, but rather in stripping Germany of its assets and establishing a communist-led satellite buffer on its western border.[9]  In January 1947 the US and UK agreed to merge the economies of their respective zones from to create a ‘bizone’ and, in August that year, to adopt a policy of economic reunification and German self-government.[10]  A year later, in August 1948, the French Zone was incorporated to create a ‘trizone’, thus paving the way for a unified western Germany.

When the London Council of Foreign Ministers Conference broke up in December 1947 without agreement or plans for future meetings, events leading to the separation of East and West Germany accelerated.  On 20 March 1948 the Soviet delegation walked out of the ACC meeting in Berlin, signalling the end of the joint occupation of Germany.  The Deutsche Mark was introduced in the western zones in June 1948, triggering a 14-month-long Soviet blockade of Berlin, during which the western allies  airlifted 2.34 million tons of food, coal, fuel and other vital supplies to the city’s 2.2 million inhabitants.[11]  By the time the blockade was lifted fourteen months later, a west German Parliamentary Council had drafted the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) establishing a constitution for the future Federal Republic of Germany, to be formed from the three western zones of occupation. 

When the Federal Republic of Germany was declared on 20 June 1949, followed on 7 October by the establishment of the German Democratic Republic in the former Soviet Zone, military occupation came to an end.  In the former western zones the Allied Control Commission’s residual control functions, such as demilitarisation, reparations, functioning of Ruhr controls, and foreign affairs,[12] were subsumed into the US, UK and French Allied High Commissions, while military functions continued to be exercised by the respective Commanders in Chief in the three former zones.[13]  The Federal Republic finally achieved full sovereignty on 5 May 1955, but a last relic of the Control Commission lingered throughout the Cold War in the 4-Power administration of Spandau prison in Berlin, where Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s erstwhile Deputy, was imprisoned until his death on 17 August 1987.  The Control Commission was not formally dismantled until after German reunification in 1990.

Allied Zones of Occupation

The division of Germany into three zones of occupation had been agreed by the US, UK and USSR in September 1944; and at Yalta in February 1945 the USSR reluctantly agreed to add a French zone, provided that it was carved out of the UK and US Zones.  The British Zone covered northwest Germany, which lay geographically closest to the UK, while the US Zone covered southern Germany plus the port and enclave of Bremen, which provided direct access for transatlantic shipping.  The French Zone covered the southwestern region adjacent to the French border, including Alsasce.  The whole of eastern Germany formed the Soviet Zone.  Berlin, subdivided into four sectors, was placed under four-power control.  At Potsdam it had been declared that occupied Germany should be treated as a single economic unit, but the interzonal boundaries, marking the limits of US, UK and Soviet military occupation very quickly hardened into economic frontiers through which normal trade could not flow.[14]