Germany from Defeat to Partition, 1945-1963

D.G. Williamson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317887232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Deutsche Geschichte

This book covers the years, 1945-63 which witnessed th total defeat of the Third Reich, the occupation a nd evolution of the German Federal Republic and German Democratic Republic. The impact of the occupation is analysed, as are the events leading to the division of Germany. Politics, economic history and social and cultural change in both Germanys are fully explored. Thus in the FRG the nature of Adenauer's success in creating a parliamentary democracy is analysed, as is the West German 'economic miracle'.There is also a chapter specifically on social and cultural developments i nthe FRG. The GDR is treated equally comprehensively with particular attention being paid to the Socialist Unity Party and how it was able to dominate the GDR and survive the riots of 17-18 June 1953. The events leading up to the construction of the Berlin Wall are also carefully covered. In the Conclusion a comparative summary of the two German states is made in the light of key themes.

PART ONE

THE BACKGROUND

CHAPTER ONE

PLANS AND REALITY: THE ALLIES AND GERMANY, 1943–45

ZONAL DIVISION

By the summer of 1943 after the defeat of the German armies in North Africa and Stalingrad, it was clear that the future of Continental Europe and its strongest state, Germany, would be decided by the USSR, Great Britain and the USA. In January 1944 these three powers set up the European Advisory Commission to begin work on detailed planning for postwar Europe. By the autumn plans both for an Allied Control Council to supervise a post-Nazi German central administration and the division of Germany into zones of occupation were drawn up. Most of the eastern half of the pre-war Reich was envisaged as the Soviet Zone of occupation. In further negotiations the Soviet Union was ceded the northern half of East Prussia. The rest of Germany to the east of the Oder was to be annexed by Poland in exchange for the territory which had been allotted to the USSR under the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939. The British Zone was to comprise the Ruhr and most of north-west Germany, while the Americans were to occupy the predominantly rural areas of Bavaria, Hesse and Württemberg-Baden in addition to the northern port of Bremen through which their occupying army would be supplied. Each of the three occupying powers was also to have a zone in Berlin. These plans were confirmed at Yalta where it was also belatedly agreed to allocate small zones to France in both Berlin and Western Germany [62].

THE FUTURE OF GERMANY

Right up to the Potsdam Conference the great powers oscillated between enforcing a Carthaginian peace on Germany that would, as Stalin succinctly expressed it, eliminate ‘forever its ability to function as a single state in the centre of Europe’ [53 p. 9] and pursuing a more conciliatory policy which, through re-education and disarmament, would ultimately allow a chastened but independent Germany to survive. In America this debate was particularly vigorous. Initially, President Roosevelt’s intention was to destroy the economic nationalism of the Nazis and force Germany to take its place in a new liberal world order of free trade and democracy dominated by the United States. However, pressure from the Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, led to Roosevelt and Churchill accepting a plan which envisaged the eventual partition of Germany into several states in which higher education would be initially banned and heavy industry destroyed. The Morgenthau Plan remained official Anglo-American policy up to the early spring of 1945, when it was replaced with the more practical aim of creating a decentralized federal Germany. In Britain, too, by 1945, a consensus had emerged that once Germany was disarmed and denazified, British interests would best be served by a controlled revival of the German economy – ’security from attack and then business as usual’, as one historian has expressed it [103 p. 48]. Similarly, in Russia, plans for the partition of Germany were dropped, and at Yalta Stalin accepted the prospect of a united but neutral and probably non-Communist Germany. Stalin was ready to exploit any favourable situation in Germany as it arose to bring Germany into the Soviet sphere of influence, but he was primarily concerned to turn Russian gains in Eastern Europe into a protective shield against any future attack from the West. Above all he wanted to extract reparations from Germany to help rebuild the war-shattered Soviet Union. By the spring of 1945 it was the French who were the fiercest opponents of a united Germany. Essentially, their intention was to turn the Rhineland and the Saar into satellite states dependent on Paris, while the rest of Germany would only be a loose confederation of states [41; 48; 68]. The Ruhr would also be detached and put under international control.

Each of the Allied powers drew up radical plans for fundamentally restructuring German society. The British, Americans and later the French set up teams composed of civil and military experts who would, on the defeat of Germany, move into the relevant zones and assume the complex tasks of administration, denazification and re-education. Although the advice of émigrés had been sought in London and Washington, and the American security services had compiled a ‘white book’ of reliable Germans who could be given administrative posts, it was only the Russians who had trained groups of German émigré Communists to follow the Red Army into Germany to assist the Soviet Military Government in its initial task of setting up reliable local administrations. Their leader was Walther Ulbricht, a 52-year-old cabinet-maker who had gone to Moscow in 1938. Later, in building up the GDR, he was to show political skills rivalled only by Adenauer in the West [13; 53] [Doc. 6].

THE REVOLUTIONARY IMPACT OF WAR ON GERMAN SOCIETY

Since 1943 Germany had been undergoing a social revolution which continued unabated until the early 1950s. What remained of the influence of the Prussian Junkers was destroyed. The decimation of the traditional officer class on the eastern front finally broke their grip on the army, while their houses, estates and often their families were liquidated in Eastern Germany by the advancing Russians and Poles. The urban evacuees from the bombed-out cities and then the twelve million Germans expelled from East Prussia, Pomerania, Lower Silesia and the Sudetenland irrevocably destroyed the traditional structure and isolation of rural and small-town Germany [Docs 3–5]. ‘The uprooted person… became the typical figure of the immediate post-war period’ [41 p. 62], while another symbolic figure of this period was the Trummerfrau, the female rubble clearer. By 1945 the position of women in German society had undergone a dramatic change. With so many of the men dead or prisoners of war there was a numerical surplus of 70 per cent women over men. Females were therefore ‘catapulted’ [102 p. 12] into a life for which the Third Reich had hardly prepared them. They had to work at back-breaking tasks and find food and shelter for their families [Doc. 6].

Yet amid this destruction and misery it is possible to see in hindsight that preconditions for the future (West) German economic and political renaissance were already in place. Despite heavy bombing, much industrial machinery was intact. For instance, in May 1945 German machine tool holdings were double the sum of those in Britain [103]. Even before the end of the war some businessmen were beginning to move away from the concept of autarky and centralized planning to make clandestine contact with free market economists such as Ludwig Erhard. It can also be argued that paradoxically a ‘democratic transformation had already begun in the institutions created by Nazi Germany’ [45 p. 109]. The Nazi Labour Front, for instance, had created a language of harmony which later helped defuse class warfare, while many former members of the Hitler Youth were to find a home in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) through which some of the more egalitarian and democratic elements of Nazi ideology were later absorbed and transferred into the Federal Republic [39; 45; 103].

THE INTERREGNUM, MAY–JULY 1945

As the Allies advanced into Germany they were confronted by what could only be called ‘indescribable, impenetrable chaos’ [10 p. 19]. Virtually every town as far east as Berlin with a population over 50,000 had been destroyed by British and American bombers. In Cologne, for instance, 72 per cent of the buildings were destroyed and in Berlin 75 per cent, while just under one per cent of the buildings of the city of Hanover were undamaged [Doc. 6]. Throughout the former Reich the whole transport system had been paralysed by Allied bombing. The main roads were blocked with never-ending columns of refugees and the concourses and platforms of the stations became at night enormous communal dormitories.

By the time Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 British troops had already crossed the Elbe and further south American and Russian troops had met up at Torgau. Grand Admiral Dönitz, whom Hitler had designated as his successor, had little option but to accept Allied demands for unconditional surrender on 8 May. Two weeks later his government, which had been allowed to survive in Schleswig-Holstein, was dissolved and its members arrested. On 5 June the Allied commanders officially announced the assumption of supreme authority over Germany by the occupying powers, its division into four zones and the setting up of the Allied Control Commission, which was, or so it seemed, to be the executive body of the Military Government. It took another month to re-deploy the British and American armies from the points they had reached when hostilities ended, back into the zones agreed upon at Yalta, and to finalize the borders of the French Zone. It was only then, on 5 July, that the Russians allowed the Western Allies to take over their zones in Berlin, and it was not until 29 July that the Control Council first met in Berlin [12].

The preceding three months were something of an ‘interregnum’ in which the occupying troops tried to establish order within the chaos that was Germany. Contrary to expectations, the advancing troops had met with no opposition or partisan activities from Nazi Werwolf units. Instead, in many areas anti-Fascist action committees had been formed, which were ready to cooperate with the Allies in stamping out the last remnants of Nazism. They were predominantly Socialist or Communist and had developed their own programmes for the future of Germany.

Some wished to set up a soviet republic with the help of the Red Army, others wanted to form broadly based anti-Fascist fronts. The anti-Fascist committees were ‘the first and only political initiatives with revolutionary potential’ [41 p. 107] and were therefore dissolved by the occupying authorities after a few weeks. The Western Allies were determined to prevent revolution while the Russians saw them as ‘sectarian’ and a threat to their own policies, which at that time were aimed at winning over the bourgeoisie and establishing a broadly based coalition or bloc of anti-Nazi groups.

In the absence, until the end of July, of a centrally established control council in Berlin, the local commanders had no option but to try to solve the daunting problems of the occupation in their own way. The immediate priorities facing the occupying forces were to restore the basic services of water, gas, electricity and sewerage, repair the railways, bridges and canals, and ensure that the population was provided with a minimum ration and housed. In the Western zones military engineers working with Germans achieved considerable success. For instance, in Hanover, water and electricity services were fully restored by 1 July [51]. Feeding and rehousing the population was a much more complex task, complicated by the new zonal divisions, the claims of the millions of displaced persons released from forced labour or the concentration camps and the constant stream of refugees coming from the East. Cellars, lofts, ruins, corrugated iron huts and camps were all used to house the millions of homeless.

Faced with emergencies on this scale the local commanders sought out experienced German administrators. In the West, the advice of the local clergy was often followed in appointing officials who had been either dismissed by the Nazis or were living in retirement [41]. In the Soviet Zone the local commandants’ work was made easier by the presence of the émigré groups which were able to recommend suitable German civil administrators, with a proven anti-Fascist past. To stop looting and to help the Allies maintain civil order, local police forces were rapidly set up in all four zones. Efforts were made to ensure that the senior German officers were untainted by Nazism, but at the lower levels a considerable number of ex-Nazis were accepted. Inevitably, in those early chaotic days, when faced with the choice between ‘efficiency and political purity’ [51 p. 37] all the Allies chose the former [53].

THE POTSDAM CONFERENCE

Some two weeks before the first meeting of the Control Council the Allied leaders met at Potsdam. The American State Department’s growing interest in ‘multilateralism’ or the creation of a free capitalist global economy, in which Germany would play its part, intensified Russian suspicions of American economic imperialism. There was also sharp disagreement over Poland’s western frontiers where the Poles, against the expressed wishes of Britain and America but with Soviet backing, had annexed German territory right up to the Western Neisse and were already beginning to expell or indeed starve to death the German population [Doc. 6]. The statesmen at Potsdam, far from providing concise and practical guidelines for the Control Council, could only paper over their deep mutual disagreements with generalizations. There was a consensus on the need to enforce the ‘four d’s’ – denazification, demilitarization, decartelization and democratization – but no agreement on how this should be carried out in practice. The Allies also committed themselves to a united, but decentralized Germany. There was ‘for the time being’ [Doc. 6] to be no central government, but only central departments headed by German civil servants were to be set up in the areas of finance, transport, communications, foreign trade and industry. In the key question of reparations the Western powers rejected the figure of $20 billion, which Stalin had first put forward at Yalta, but did agree that 50 per cent of the eventual total should go to Russia. The Russians had already begun to remove materials and industrial plant from their zone to help rebuild their own war-shattered economy, but the Americans and the British were convinced that the German economy must be left sufficiently strong to pay for imports of food and raw materials – the so-called ‘first charge principle’ [48 p. 134]. A compromise was agreed upon whereby Russia and the Western powers would take rep...