The Allies and the German Problem, 1941-1949

From Cooperation to Alternative Settlement

Andrew Szanajda

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137527714
• eBook ISBN: 9781137527721
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Allies and the German Problem, 1941-1949 examines Allied policymaking during the Second World War and the military occupation of postwar Germany, demonstrating how the initial unity of the Allies disintegrated during the postwar military occupation in the face of their separate goals for postwar Germany and Europe.

1

The Deliberations Begin – 1941–1944

Abstract: Various proposals for policies concerning the treatment of postwar Germany between 1941 and 1944 took place among the government leaders of the principal Allies, and Allied experts who served in an advisory capacity to their governments. Though acting in concert, the common objective was to prevent the resurgence of German military aggression by setting up the necessary safeguards for lasting peace. Allied leaders at the Teheran Conference determined that joint Allied planning was to be delegated to the European Advisory Commission, which set forth plans for postwar Germany to be divided into separate occupation zones under Allied military administrations while Germany was to be maintained as a unified whole. This decision superseded various earlier plans for partitioning Germany into separate states.

Szanajda, Andrew. The Allies and the German Problem, 1941–1949: From Cooperation to Alternative Settlement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137527721.0003.

Determining the terms of the peace settlement with Germany after it had been defeated in the Second World War, or the “German Problem,” was the subject of various proposals during the course of the war. Although these took various forms, they were characterised by a common objective – to prevent the resurgence of German military aggression by setting up the necessary safeguards for lasting peace. Proposals for policies concerning the treatment of postwar Germany between 1941 and 1944 took place at two levels: the government leaders of the principal Allies, and Allied experts who served in an advisory capacity to their governments. The leaders of the “Big Three” Allies, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, considered the dismemberment of Germany to be a suitable means of attaining this objective, believing that keeping Germany weak and divided would prevent its ability to engage in future military aggression. Allied advisors, on the other hand, concluded that dismemberment was impractical, and recommended that Germany as a whole should be reconstructed on democratic lines rather than partitioned. Despite the detailed studies that were advanced by the experts, Allied leaders did not take their arguments into consideration, and discussed plans for Germany that had been formulated on their own initiative. Apart from agreeing to act in concert on postwar planning, no official Allied policy on the treatment of postwar Germany was set before 1945.

The first Allied talks on the subject of dismembering Germany took place during the visit of the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, to Moscow in December 1941 in connection with discussions on Germany’s postwar boundaries. Joseph Stalin, Secretary-General of the Soviet Union, suggested that Poland’s eastern boundaries should be set at the Curzon Line that had been set after the First World War as a demarcation between the Second Polish Republic and Soviet Russia as the basis for a future border, and compensated with German territory in the west; the Rhineland and possibly Bavaria could be set up as autonomous states; the Sudetenland was to be returned to Czechoslovakia, and Austria was to be restored as a sovereign state.¹ However, this meeting was devoted primarily to discussions on a projected Anglo-Soviet treaty, and proposals on Germany would not be placed under serious study before Eden consulted with the British and American governments.²

The problem of dealing with postwar Germany was placed under study in America soon after its entry into the Second World War. In January 1942, President Roosevelt appointed an Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy that evaluated the efficacy of dismembering Germany as a means or a supplement for the international control of Germany.³ This committee consisted of various representatives of the US government, including senators and Congress representatives, the departments of State, War, and Navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House staff, the Library of Congress, wartime and continuing agencies of the US government, and certain outstanding individuals from private and public life, such as Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, Anne O’Hare McCormick, the foreign affairs analyst for the New York Times, and James Thomson Shotwell, the historian and Director of the Division of Economics and History of the Carnegie Endowment for International peace,⁴ who worked in conjunction with a staff of researchers⁵ to study world problems and submit practical recommendations for American postwar policy to the president through the secretary of state.⁶ The committee considered various plans for dismemberment, such as partitioning Germany into three, five, and seven separate states based on analyses of the political, economic, and demographic factors that were involved.⁷

In the final analysis, the committee members unanimously rejected the notion of partitioning Germany, concluding that dismemberment would not serve as a safeguard against military aggression since such a vindictive measure would only turn the Germans against the Allies. Partitioning Germany would impede the development of a democratic spirit and the coordinated administration of its economic resources. Moreover, since an imposed division of the country would be artificial, it would be necessary to indefinitely maintain the dismemberment by force, and therefore recommended that constructive measures be applied to Germany instead of dismemberment. These included preventing German rearmament, promoting the development of democratic institutions, decentralising the federal political structure, promoting German economic recovery, assimilating Germany into the postwar international community, and presenting tolerable peace terms with a “minimum of bitterness” in order to prevent future nationalistic upheavals.⁸ However, these proposals were not accepted by the head of the committee, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who was personally convinced that peace depended on the partitioning of Germany, and therefore did not forward this committee’s conclusions to President Roosevelt.⁹

Welles produced his own plan for postwar Germany, which advocated giving East Prussia to Poland, and dividing the remainder of Germany into three separate states whose boundaries would be “determined primarily by ‘cultural, historic and economic factors.’ ”¹⁰ A new predominantly Catholic southern German state would be created, comprising Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt, together with those regions that could be roughly defined as the Rhineland and the Saar. Two other predominantly Protestant states would be formed in northern Germany. One would consist of the former German subdivisions of Upper Hesse, Thuringia, Westphalia, Hanover, Oldenburg, Hamburg, and the smaller subdivisions contiguous to them. The other would be composed of Prussia (apart from East Prussia), Mecklenburg, and Saxony. In Welles’ view, these new states would maintain the religious, historical, and cultural divisions that existed for centuries before the creation of the Third Reich¹¹ and would thereby prevent Germany from waging military aggression.

Welles believed that Germany became a threat to peace as a result of two major developments in its history that he thought were interconnected: the belief “in German militarism as the supreme glory of the race,” and “the centralization of authority over all the widely divergent peoples of the German race.”¹² By breaking up the concentration of power in Germany through dismemberment, Welles argued that German militarism would be undermined and eliminated. Yet, Welles’s plan did not consider certain consequences of dismemberment that the Advisory Committee had considered. Partitioning meant reversing the forces that had brought about the integration of the various German states that had come to be organised as a single solid unit. The committee members believed that breaking up this unit would destabilise the organisation and management of the national economy, and maintaining dismemberment through a prolonged Allied occupation in order to block a nationalist sentiment for an eventual reunification would prove to be lengthy and costly.

Although government committees worked out proposals for the Allies’ treatment of postwar Germany, they were merely recommendations forwarded by advisors to their governments. Their conclusions otherwise remained in the background until after the “German Problem” was discussed at the top levels of government, while Roosevelt insisted that partitioning Germany was necessary for maintaining peace. On the other hand, the experts of the Advisory Committee argued that partition would have undesirable effects, and could lead to a reunification of Germany, but Roosevelt believed that these possibilities were exaggerated. Roosevelt thought that he knew Germany better than his advisors. However, he a1so thought that a plan for partition could be abandoned after it had been imposed, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Deliberations Begin 1941–1944
• 2  The Stage Is Set: The Conferences of Yalta and Potsdam
• 3  Cooperation and Conflict – 1945–1946
• 4  From Cooperation to Impasse 1947
• 5  From Impasse to Alternative Settlement – 1948–1949
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index