When the Allies celebrated Victory in Europe (VE) Day on May 8, 1945, the British army commander Bernard Law Montgomery cautioned his troops, “We have won the German war. Let us now win the peace.”
Months earlier than Germany’s unconditional give up in World War II, the “Big Three” Allied powers—the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union—met on the Yalta Conference to debate Germany’s future. They all needed to keep away from a repeat of what had occurred after World War I, when a postwar financial collapse in Germany fueled nationalist resentment and the rise of the far-right Nazi Party.
The state of affairs in Germany after World War II was dire. Millions of Germans had been homeless from Allied bombing campaigns that razed total cities. And thousands and thousands extra Germans dwelling in Poland and East Prussia turned refugees when the Soviet Union expelled them. With the German financial system and authorities in shambles, the Allies concluded that Germany wanted to be occupied after the struggle to guarantee a peaceable transition to a post-Nazi state.
What the Allies by no means meant, although, was that their short-term resolution to arrange Germany into 4 occupation zones, every administered by a distinct Allied military, would finally result in a divided Germany.
“Only over time, as the Cold War eroded trust between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, did these occupation zones coalesce into two different German nations,” says Thomas Boghardt, a senior historian on the U.S. Army Center of Military History.
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Four Allies, Four Occupation Zones
Soviet chief Joseph Stalin, U.S. President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill standing collectively earlier than beginning classes on the Potsdam Conference in July 1945.
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In July of 1945, the “Big Three” met once more on the Potsdam Conference. At Yalta, the Allies had agreed to a broad framework that included the demilitarization, democratization and denazification of Germany. With the struggle formally over, it was time to provoke a “nuts and bolts” motion plan for an Allied occupation of Germany.
Instead of administering and policing Germany aspect by aspect, because the Allies did in postwar Austria, the choice was made at Potsdam to divide Germany into 4 distinct occupation zones, one for every Allied nation (together with France). The British had been assigned the northwest quadrant, the French the southwest, and the Americans the southeast. Since the Soviet military already occupied a lot of jap Germany, the Soviet Union was put in control of the northeast quadrant, which included the capital Berlin.
Berlin itself was additionally subdivided into 4 quadrants, with the British, French, Soviets and Americans every policing a distinct zone of the capital, which was totally surrounded by Soviet-occupied territory.
“At the Potsdam Conference, the idea was that a central authority called the Allied Control Council would issue joint directives that would then be executed at a lower level by each Ally in their occupation zone,” says Boghardt, creator of Covert Legions: U.S. Army Intelligence in Germany, 1944-1949. “The devil was in the details, though, and the longer the occupation lasted, it became clear that this was not workable.”
Rifts Between Soviet and Other Occupied Zones
From the beginning, the Soviets ran their occupation zone very in another way than the British, French and Americans.
“The Soviet army and Russian civilians had suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis during the war,” says Boghardt. “So when it came to carrying out the joint directive of denazification, for example, they not only arrested Nazi officials, but they considered all major German landowners to be Nazis. So they confiscated their land.”
The similar was true of the joint directive to ascertain free and democratic elections in every zone of occupation. On the floor, the Soviets allowed the formation of impartial political events of their zone, however they quickly compelled all events to merge below a Communist “coalition” managed by Moscow. The transfer was closely criticized by the Western Allies.
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But the largest rift between the Soviet Union and the remainder of the occupying nations shaped across the problem of struggle reparations. One of the explanations that the German financial system collapsed after World War I used to be that it needed to pay billions of {dollars} in reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles. The British, French and Americans needed to keep away from that mistake, however the Soviet Union, whose personal financial system was closely broken by the Germans throughout World War II, needed Germany to pay up.
A deal was struck wherein the Soviet Union agreed to commerce meals grown in its occupation zone for money reparations and completed items from German factories within the western occupation zones. But when the Soviets didn’t sustain with their agricultural shipments, the Western Allies lower off reparation funds.
By 1946, tensions escalated additional as Soviet army forces helped to ascertain Communist regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania. In a well-known speech, Winston Churchill, the previous British Prime Minister, described the specter of Soviet Communism as an “iron curtain” descending throughout the European continent, signaling the beginning of the Cold War. Any probability of cooperation between the Western and Soviet occupying forces was fading quick.
Tensions Lead to the Berlin Blockade
During the multinational occupation of post-WWII Germany, the Soviet Union blocked Western Allies’ railway, highway and canal entry to the sectors of Berlin below Western management.
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In 1947, Great Britain and the United States determined to merge their two occupation zones as a way to foster extra financial cooperation between the areas. The giant new territory was known as “Bizonia” referring to the 2 zones that made up its borders.
Then the western Allies took issues a step additional by stepping up financial support to Bizonia and the French occupied territory with money from the Marshall Plan. They additionally changed Germany’s badly inflated forex, the Reichsmark, with a brand new and extra steady Deutsche mark. All of those actions had been taken with out Soviet approval.
Tensions got here to go when the western Allies tried to flow into the brand new Deutsche mark in Berlin. The Soviets boycotted the Allied Control Council, and when the West didn’t bow to their calls for, Joseph Stalin ordered a complete blockade of Berlin, positioned 100 miles inside Soviet-occupied territory.
“Berlin is an island in the Soviet zone,” says Boghardt. “Stalin decided to squeeze the western Allies where they were most vulnerable. He cut off all access to West Berlin by road, train and ship, but not by air.”
Berlin Airlift Breaks Blockade
A gaggle of German kids stand atop constructing rubble, cheering a U.S. cargo airplane because it flies over a western part of Berlin in January 1948.
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The Americans, British and French responded with the Berlin Airlift, a months-long air marketing campaign to drop meals and gas into West Berlin that finally broke the Soviet blockade in 1949.
Later that very same 12 months, France formally merged its occupied territory with Bizonia, creating the Federal Republic of Germany, or what turned often known as West Germany. In October of 1949, the Soviet Union responded with the institution of the German Democratic Republic, a Communist state often known as East Germany.
In 1952, East Germany started policing its Western border to cease the flight of engineers, scientists and medical doctors to West Germany. Interestingly, the border inside Berlin wasn’t as tightly managed.
“For eight years, there was that loophole,” says Boghardt, “when it was very easy for anybody who wanted to flee East Germany to do so. All you had to do was hop on a subway in East Berlin and exit in West Berlin.”
On the evening of August 12 to August 13, 1961, East German troopers in Berlin laid out miles of barbed wire that will change into the Berlin Wall, sealing the border with West Germany for the following 28 years.