The consolidation of Soviet controls in Eastern Europe continued, and this process culminated in the coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, which did not have a fully communist government before this time. Non-communist leaders in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania had been eliminated by terrorism, faked trials and political purges by the end of 1948. Czechoslovakia was different from the other countries in Eastern Europe since it was the one country that might have been able to reconcile a western-style democracy with the requirement of being “friendly” to the Soviet Union while operating with democratic institutions. However, when the economic situation in Czechoslovakia began deteriorating in late 1947, the communist Minister of the Interior filled key police posts with trusted comrades and prepared trials against political opponents. When the non-communist members of the government resigned in protest, President Benes installed an all-communist government that replaced the former coalition of parties. The surrounding events of the Prague coup on 25 February 1948 that eliminated the last democracy in eastern Europe also contributed to acquiring public support for Truman’s containment policy. It also became increasingly apparent that unifying the four German occupation zones became implausible.
Suspicions among western authorities that the Russians were planning for further westward political encroachments, in addition to consolidating their influence in the satellite states in their orbit. Britain, France and the Benelux countries concluded the Treaty of Brussels in March 1948 that established a mutual defence pact, which the US joined in April, to take collective action in the event of renewed aggression by the Soviet Union. This treaty also established the Western European Union that would manage this defensive alliance. Postwar western European reconstruction was further augmented when the United States Congress endorsed the Marshall Plan by an overwhelming majority two months later, and was ratified by President Truman on 3 April 1948. The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) came into being on 16 April to administer the oversight of the Plan in the form of five billion dollars to sixteen European countries, which was later followed by seventeen billion dollars in financial aid and technical assistance. Forty percent of West Germany’s in its expanding coal industry emanated from these funds in 19149-1950. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the Comecon, was the Eastern Bloc’s response to the formation in western Europe of the Marshall Plan and the OEEC from 5 to 8 January 1949, with its headquarters in Moscow.
In addition to the widening political chasm demonstrated by the ideological positions of the Soviet Union and the western Allies at the international level, separate interpretations of broad Allied aims began taking shape separately in the four occupation zones. There were diverging policies regarding denazification that were guided by Control Council legislation, including Directive No. 24 that required the removal of former more than nominal NSDAP members from public and semi-public positions of responsibility, but they were implemented differently through zonal legislation that was administered separately in the four occupation zones. Whereas denazification was fairly radical in the Soviet occupation zone in the form of structural transformation and personnel purge turnover aiming at the creation of a anti-fascist state with a socialist, i.e. anti-capitalist, society, the prosecution of other former Nazis was unsuccessful in many cases owing to cumbersome bureaucratic implementation with relative inefficiency in the American occupation zone to determine separate degrees of political guilt according to individual conduct during the Nazi regime, and a more moderate application focusing on leading authorities in the British occupation zone, and not any systematic approach in the French occupation zone where only serious cases were handled. The American military occupation authorities arrested and detailed 170,000 suspected individuals, in contrast to 91,000 by the British, 21,000 by the French, and 154,000 by the Russians. Former Nazis were only forbidden from occupying positions relating to administration, justice and police functions by the end of 1949. In contrast, personnel possessing necessary expertise were commonly able to return to their previous occupation in all but the most egregious cases of committing crimes or taking actions relating to supporting the Nazi regime. It became apparent that it was impossible to operate various tasks without the expertise of experienced personnel who had operated during the National Socialist regime. Whole professional groups that were needed after 1945 were tainted with guilt by association with the NSDAP, and merely continued functioning in their former professions to continue making necessary contributions to restored normal living conditions, especially as former regulations were tempered in the face of increasing Cold War tensions, along with granting of amnesties absolving formerly guilty parties of their previous associations with the Nazi regime.
Denazification thus proved to be impractical, with the purpose of cleansing society of Nazi influences proved to be more inefficiently punitive than imposing a re-education in establishing democratic processes and normal institutional functions in the state and society, while attempting to evaluate individuals’ degrees of complicity with the Nazi regime ranged from enforced conformity and active commitment, which became increasingly unimportant in the face of Cold War conditions and increasing anti-communist sentiments, when the Soviet Union became the greater present enemy than defeated German nationals who could become reintegrated into the new state and postwar society as a pragmatic consideration, and personal considerations about previous offences became whitewashed to different degrees, depending on how long they remained incarcerated or deprived of employment. The most egregious twenty-two surviving perpetrators representing the NSDAP, the state, industry, and the military were adjudicated in the Nuremberg Trials to judge them for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity as unprecedented legal concepts to prosecute international crimes, by which adjudication would be applied retroactively between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946 by the International Military Tribunal (IMT). Eleven major Nazi leaders were sentenced to death, three were acquitted, and lengthy prison terms were imposed on the others. Twelve further tribunals were held as subsequent Nuremberg proceedings that led to the conviction of an additional ninety-seven defendants. Separate trials for crimes against humanity and war crimes were adjudicated in the separate occupation zones, prior to their transfer to locally restored German administrations of justice, (See https://books.google.com.tw/books/about/Indirect_Perpetrators.html?id=G58VmAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y; https://books.google.com.tw/books/about/The_Restoration_of_Justice_in_Postwar_He.html?id=uN5kLOUiZjMC&redir_esc=y) leading to 12,478 Germans being convicted of committing war crimes by 1949. German legislation would continue to be applied against codified crimes that had been committed prior to the military occupation.
Denazification was eventually abandoned in the western occupation zones during 1951 where any radical measures to transform political, economic and social life were not implemented, while reconstruction was oriented toward re-establishing a functioning capitalist market economy and democratic institutions with legal safeguards. Following the creation of the German Democratic Republic in 1950, 10,000 former convicted NSDAP criminals were released from imprisonment, 500 were deported to the Soviet Union, and roughly 3,500 were prosecuted in local Waldheim trials, out of which 1,586 were convicted. Although close to 1,800 former Nazis held high positions of responsibility in the Federal Republic of Germany, nearly 1,000 former Nazis likewise held such positions in the German Democratic Republic while having to demonstrate their loyalty to the state, while nearly 3,500 others were prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in reconstituted German courts on the basis of following the application of Allied Control Council Law No. 10 during the military occupation, and then German legislation for the next several decades through the postwar administrations of justice among separate areas of jurisdiction.
The structural forms of restoring institutions in the western and Soviet occupation zones emerged differently. In addition to establishing political control according to the Soviet occupation authorities’ directions, they effected economic reforms that radically restructured agriculture and industry. The Soviet occupation authorities made structural changes to agriculture, with one of the first measures being the expropriation of the property of about 7000 estate owners who owned 2.5 million hectares of land, and a further 600,000 were confiscated from individuals who occupied prominent positions in the Nazi regime. About two-thirds of this land, or about 2.1 million hectares, were subsequently distributed to a half a million land labourers, while the remaining third was administered by local authorities, until agriculture was later to be reorganized into collective farms by 1953. While the western occupation powers were taking actions to rebuild western Germany’s economy, the Soviet occupation authorities extracted contributions to the rebuilding of the Soviet Union as reparations. By the end of 1946, the equipment of about 1400 enterprises were had been wholly or partially transported to the east. In 1947, a further 200 firms were converted into so-called Soviet Joint Stock Companies that produced about a quarter of the total output of the East German industrial economy, out of which a considerable amount was removed as reparations.
While the Soviet Union had received the predominantly agrarian parts of Germany in the east, the Russians wanted reparations drawn from all sectors, mostly from the still potentially powerful Ruhr district, and while Britain and the U.S. occupied relatively industrialized zones, they were heavily dependent on food imports while internal communications in Germany had broken down, and dramatic food shortages affected the whole country. The British and the Americans therefore decided to let German industry rebuild so that it could produce sufficient amounts of goods in exchange for necessary food imports, which led them to coordinate their policies within their respective zones.
The deadlock in the diplomatic negotiations for a postwar settlement led to the British and Americans merging their zones for economic purposes into a single unified zone on 1 January 1947 called the Bizone, in which they shifted much of the administrative responsibility for running economic affairs under Allied supervision, with a quasi-governmental organisation in the form of its Economic Council established in June 1947. These developments were opposed by the Soviets who correctly saw the beginning of a future independent western German state, while international discussions for unifying the four occupation zones remained hopelessly stalled, in addition to being denied reparations from the industrialised western zones that stymied Stalin’s intention to keep Germany economically weak through drawing reparations from them. A major step toward stabilizing the West German economy was the introduction of a new currency, the Deutschmark (DM), replacing the former Reichsmark that was essentially valueless, on 18 June 1948, following the Russians staging a coup in Czechoslovakia that widened the rift of the failing cooperation between the wartime Allies by adding to widespread suspicions of further political encroachments in the Soviet sphere of influence. While the Russians were dismantling industrial assets in the Soviet occupation zone to contribute to rebuilding the economy in the Soviet Union, the western Allies restarted the economy in the western occupation zones by eliminating the greatly devalued Reichsmark that led to the thriving black market that was only actively functioning economy in western Germany. Introducing this newly stable currency almost immediately eliminated the black market. Although it eliminated cash savings, confidence in money was restored and goods were sold for cash rather than primitive barter exchange, which restored legitimate commerce for restored local business operations.
This currency reform in the three western zones of Germany was announced without Soviet agreement in order to accelerate the process of economic reconstruction of the western zones, which would be integrated with western Europe with Marshall Plan aid, as well as contribute to establishing a West German state, while also excluding the recovery of eastern Germany, as well as the four-power city of Berlin that was isolated within the Soviet zone. The French representatives in the Council of Foreign Ministers had been pursuing their own independent policies for maintaining German decentralized were eventually brought into cooperation with the British and the Americans. The economic situation in western Europe improved significantly after the United States granted financial aid under the Marshall Plan, an American reconstruction program that helped rebuild the economies of Germany’s three western zones and other countries of Western Europe, whereas the London foreign ministers conference led to the western allies deciding to reduce reparations by fifty percent in 1948, along with providing Marshall Aid support for the western occupation zones that significantly contributed to the western postwar German economic recovery. Soviet authorities interpreted the introduction of the Deutschmark as an act of economic aggression paving the way to creating a West German state and draw West Berlin into its orbit. They subsequently retaliated by introducing separate East German currency (MDM) a few days after the DM was issued, which was immediately followed by the introduction of the DM in the western Berlin occupation sectors, which in turn led to initiating the Berlin blockade of Berlin by closing the road, rail and canal links with the west, and cutting off electricity from the western sectors. The economic division of Germany thus took effect, while the way was opened for establishing a West German state.
The Soviet Union was in control of the predominantly agrarian parts of Germany in the east. The Russians therefore demanded reparations drawn from all of the occupation zones, mostly from the still potentially powerful Ruhr district. When they did not receive reparations, they seized almost all they could move in their own sector. Having received the less industrialized part of Germany, the Soviets were least interested in partition. They hoped to retain their areas and expand. Britain and the United States faced a particular dilemma: their sectors were relatively industrialized but therefore heavily dependent upon food imports. As internal communications in Germany had broken down and as dramatic food shortages affected the whole country, the British and Americans concluded that they had to bring in as much food for the Germans under their occupation as they could. This helped relieve the famines, though by no means the shortages. British and American taxpayers, moreover, resented feeding the Germans for an extended period. The British and Americans therefore quickly abandoned their policy of demolishing the remainders of German industry and to destroy what they could not use.
They decided to encourage the reconstruction of German industry to enable the economy to sufficiently generate funding for the necessary food imports into western Germany, where returning prisoners-of-war needed to be accommodated, along with the flooding of the British and American occupation zones with surviving German expellees from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, as well as different countries in eastern Europe, including approximately 7.6 million Germans from Poland and 3 million from Czechoslovakia, which constituted major postwar ethnic cleansing, in addition to other ethnic German minorities who were expelled from Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, and the Netherlands in the interest of establishing postwar nationalism, as well as considering these ethnic Germans, composing as many as fourteen million, as potentially constituting a threat to future national security. Plans to rebuild the postwar German economy led to British and American occupation authorities to coordinate their policies within their respective zones, and the French decided to join this policy a year later. The Marshall Plan, an American reconstruction program, helped to rebuild the economies of the Germany’s three western occupation zones and the other countries of western Europe, which conformed to the U.S. new international role of opening new markets, as well as the “Truman Doctrine” of stemming the rising tide of communist influences, as was perceived by the suspicions of Soviet expansionist goals in Europe.
The east-west rift continued in developments in Germany, with the London foreign ministers’ conference in December 1947 remaining characteristically inconclusive on the questions of reparations and pooling German economic resources that had been envisaged at the Potsdam Conference. In March 1948, an agreement of principle on Germany had been reached in London by the Conference of Six Powers (America, Britain, France, and the Benelux countries). Reconvening in April, the participants on 7 June issued a statement based on the preliminary agreement reached two months earlier, authorizing the Ministers-President of the German Länder, states, to convene a constituent assembly by 1 September 1948, for the purpose of drafting a constitution for a federal form of government to restore a functioning democracy. This constituted a military alliance that was aimed against the Soviet Union, which retaliated by promptly withdrawing from the Allied Control Council, and thus ending four power control over Germany, while the French authorities withdrew most of their objections for the unification of the western zones, and fused their zone with the Bizone in April. The Brussels Treaty signatories and American authorities then met in London where they decided to allow for restoring German political institutions. Representatives of the western allied occupation forces submitted a number of documents to the prime ministers and two mayors of the western zones of occupation, known as the Frankfurt Documents, on 1 July 1948, which presented recommendations for establishing a West German state, rather than providing for an all-German solution, and would eventually compose a working basis for drafting a state constitution.
A Russian note in the Allied Control Council on 6 March 1948 asserted that the London Conference had violated the Potsdam Agreement, and its recommendations were therefore invalid. The Soviet military governor, Marshal Sokolovsky, complained about what had amounted to a separatist German government in western Germany at the meeting of the four-power Allied Control Council in Berlin on 20 January 1948, which was a violation of Allied agreements, and then after the Control Council had failed to reach a joint agreement with the Soviets over currency reform, Sokolovsky declared on 20 March that the Control Council had ceased to exist as an organ of government. Moscow’s response to this sequence of events in the western zones was predictable, and represented the last, and most important, phase of Stalin’s rejection of the Marshall Plan. The postwar Allied occupation of Germany that was characterised by increasingly deteriorating cooperation then broke out into open conflict. The Soviets then soon began to interfere with Allied railway transport coming to Berlin from the west and interrupted vital telephone links until the four-power Berlin government met for the last time on 16 June, which marked the beginning of the city. The Soviets who had aimed at blocking the independence and economic revival of the western zones, retaliated by isolating the western sectors of Berlin.
With approximately two million people in western Berlin and seventeen Soviet military divisions in eastern Germany while the western powers were weakened militarily by demobilisation or deployment for colonial wars and policing actions around the world and the Soviet Union having become the world’s greatest land power, the Allies decided to circumvent the Russians preventing the western allies from having access to Berlin by imposing restriction on land routes, and searching every truck and train leaving West Berlin. The Western powers then took action to restore stable economic conditions by introducing a new convertible currency in the western zones and their Berlin occupation sectors, the Deutschmark, on 20 June, along with ending price controls and food rationing. The Russians reacted to this economic breach between the eastern and western zones by suspending all rail traffic between Berlin and the West was on the night of June 23-24, in an attempt to pry the Western Allies out of Berlin and imposed major electricity cuts and a trade embargo to force the western allies out of Berlin. By 24 June, the blockade of the western sectors of Berlin was complete, as the Soviets blocked all road, water and rail routes to the western sectors in Berlin in the first open confrontation between the western powers and the Soviet Union. Rather than risk losing prestige and credibility by abandoning West Berlin that would be deprived of food and fuel to cease normal living conditions, the British and Americans retaliated by halting all rail traffic to the Soviet occupation zone, which undermined the eastern German economy by halting deliveries of vital coal and steel imports, whereas the Soviets blocked the deliveries of food supplies to western Berlin on 25 June.
The Russians also responded to currency reform in the western zones by introducing a new currency in the Soviet zone and in Berlin on 26 June, in order to prevent the flow of newly valueless Reichsmarks into their zone. Rather than risk an armed confrontation in the face of overwhelming numbers of surrounding Russian troops, the British and American began airlifting supplies on 26 June 1948 as the only alternative to maintaining their military presence and supporting the civilian population in the western occupation sectors through air corridors between the western zones and western Berlin that composed an audacious logistical feat that was successfully managed with pressing time and weather conditions, and Soviet air harassment in the air corridors. At its height, there was an aircraft landing every sixty-three seconds, twenty-four hours a day, which greatly reinforced confidence among the population in the western Allies who provided their material support in the form of ultimately delivering over 2.3 million tons of cargo. Russian participation in the Allied government of the city ceased altogether on 1 July. Further east-west division among the occupation zones was reinforced during this time with the formation of German Economic Commission in the Soviet zone to coordinate its administration, which would become the nucleus of an East German state, while work began on drafting separate state constitutions in both the western and the Soviet zones. During this time, the minister-presidents of the western German Lȁnder were requested to formulate a constitution on federal democratic forms in July 1948, which initiated the process of setting up a pro-western German state.
As the U.S. and Great Britain continued staging the effective airlifting of supplies to western Berlin, the U.S., Canada, and the five European Union states, along with Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Italy, and Portugal joined together to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) on 4 April 1949 in a firm commitment to their collective defence, which would function independently of the United Nations, in which Cold War tensions became increasingly evident. The NATO member states also pledged to promote democratic institutions and economic collaboration, The Soviet authorities later realized the futility of the blockade that damaged the economy of their occupation zone, and lifted it on 12 May 1949 when airlifted supplies reached their maximum of 12,000 tons a day in what represented a colossal exercise in airborne logistics and the greatest relief operation in aviation history to rescue forty percent of a divided city by providing essential food and fuel supplies, while the Russians were unable to counter this effort to sustain normal living conditions in western Berlin. The implication thus became that the western allies could only be stopped by force, and for the since time since the end of the war, while a lasting alliance was formed between German populations in the western zones and western Berlin. American strategic bombers moved back to England with the potential capacity to drop atomic bombs on the Soviet Union. This confrontation over Berlin consolidated the international breach between the western Allies and the Soviet Union, while planning for a united West German state continued.
The Federal Republic of Germany was created out of the western military occupation zones on 23 May 1949, as the most practical solution to restore a functioning democracy that would also provide a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. The Basic Law, or the constitution of West Germany was instituted without the weaknesses of the prior Weimar constitution. The office of the president became largely ceremonial, as they were to be elected indirectly by a college of parliamentarians, while the most powerful figure is the chancellor. It was also made considerably more difficult to remove an elected government with a “constructive vote of no confidence” that required the opposition to present an alternative chancellor to be voted into office. The individual states were also given a considerable degree of autonomy with a direct vote in the legislative process. Each voter could cast votes for a named candidate for a constituency representative, and for a political party for a parliamentary seat that were to be assigned in proportion to the votes received by the party, which required receiving at least five percent of the popular vote to ensure fringe parties would not acquire a national platform, and also facilitating creating coalition governments, which had plagued the Weimar democracy. Another political device to protect democracy was instituting the constructive vote of no confidence to preclude a perpetual lack of effective governance. Negotiations for a unified settlement in Germany between the western allies and the Soviet Union continued in stalemate, and the western allies continued to move forward with establishing a West German state, with began to operate with its new national democratic constitutional government of the Federal Republic of Germany on 21 September 1949 with its capital in Bonn as a provisional capital, with Konrad Adenauer elected as its first chancellor, and Theodor Heuss was elected president. However, complete state sovereignty was yet to be restored, as all legislation was to be counter-signed by the three high commissioners.
Having been unable to restore a unified Germany that was envisaged at Potsdam four years earlier, the occupation powers settled for a provisional arrangement by which they created two German states that conformed to their respective ideologies. This division of Germany into two states thus represented in the new international situation – the so-called Cold War between the western allies and the Soviet Union – with both new states representing the ideological interests of east and west. The Russians later organised the combination of economic resources in their own satellites in Europe by establishing the COMECON, a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in January 1949, thus further consolidating the economic and political chasm of interests between eastern and western Europe. Two separate German states came into being – one capitalist and democratic, and one communist and authoritarian. Democratic West Germany recovered from the devastations of the war, and rebuilt its economy, its cities and its infrastructure with American assistance in conjunction with responsible German authorities.
The Russians reacted to the creation of a West German state by accelerating parallel developments in their occupation zone. A four hundred member People’s Council began working on drafting a constitution that the SED introduced to them in the autumn of 1949, which was approved by an elected People’s Congress in May 1949. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was formally created out the Soviet zone, under the auspices of the Soviet military administration, by establishing the German Democratic Republic on 7 October 1949, as a puppet state of the Soviet Union controlled by the SED under the leadership of a People’s Council (Volksrat) that in turn converted itself into a People’s Chamber (Volkskammer), with its capital in East Berlin, in reaction to the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, and officially came into being on 11 October. Ulbricht was appointed the head of state as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, while Wilhelm Pieck was elected president and Otto Grotewohl as minister-president. The Soviet military command conferred its administrative functions to the GDR and converted itself into the Soviet High Commission.
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