The consolidation of the two German states became increasingly further consolidated in different stages, following the failures of the four-power military occupation and their diplomatic representatives to cooperate toward a common postwar permanent postwar settlement. The zonal divisions in the west and the east became permanent with the creation of two separate German states as a result of initiatives among the western occupation powers, following developments at these national and international levels, whereas the Soviet Union established an eastern German state in reaction to the creation of a western German state following the gradual sovietisation of the formerly Soviet occupation zone. This was an inevitable outcome of irreconcilable viewpoints, regardless of German nationalist considerations that were superseded by economic and ideological conflicts. The question remained whether reunification could yet be made possible. The incorporation of the two states was reinforced through the two German states joining into separate economic, political and military alliances, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, regaining full state sovereignty following the end of the civilian administered occupation in 1955.
The first attempt to reunify East and West Germany was the Soviet initiative on 10 March 1952, proposing that the western allies conclude a peace treaty with a free, democratic, united and neutral Germany within the 1945 borders as a western buffer state between the NATO allies and the Soviet Union, without mentioning free elections. Adenauer interpreted this offer as an intention to undermine his ongoing process of western integration, and remained suspicious of Soviet plans of communist political encroachments in such an envisaged neutral state. As a staunch anti-communist, Adenauer followed a policy of integrating West Germany with the western Allies, in the interest of maintaining its national sovereignty and security. Subsequent discussions clarified that free all-German elections would follow a peace treaty that would impose strict neutrality on a reunified Germany, which only a democratically elected all-German government left free to determine its own foreign policy could accord binding status to such a peace treaty, as any other sovereign state. The western allies agreed that this proposal was unacceptable, as the American and British decisionmakers suspected a neutral Germany would increase the probability of establishing Soviet hegemony in Europe, whereas the French authorities would not contemplate a unification. West Germany’s orientation with western powers in the interest of maintaining freedom of political action with ensuring national security was thus maintained. Moreover, the majority of West German electors would not accept the formal loss of Pomerania, East Prussia and Silesia, including the large numbers of expellees residing in West Germany.
While the FRG’s foreign policy orientation remained on a course of political, economic and military integration with the western Allies as a bulwark against communism, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, as a satellite state of the Soviet Union, recovered more slowly but also managed to rebuild in the 1950s under repressive communist rule that perpetuated undemocratic structures, and established ties with the interests of the Soviet Union. Unlike the Federal Republic of Germany that retained the Ruhr as its industrial heartland and centre of energy production along with benefiting from Marshall Plan aid, the German Democratic Republic was largely deprived of industrial capacity, including due to industrial equipment seized as Soviet reparations in kind, which left the DDR with shortages of essential goods, contributed to the mass emigration of the local population to the west. Ulbricht determined to uphold the state through reconstructing the state by following the Soviet example by collectivising agriculture, investing in heavy industry, and eliminating private industry through discriminatory taxation.
Ulbricht’s attempts at economic reconstruction proved to be dismal failures. Collectivising agriculture led to disastrous food shortages. The socialisation of the GDR also involved removing the last vestiges of private ownership by imposing high taxes on any private enterprises, which undermined the supply consumer goods. Postwar economic development in the GDR was further hindered by Soviet extractions of reparations, which constituted an estimated thirty percent of wartime capital stock that was dismantled and transported to the Soviet Union, which included over fifty percent of machine tools, sixty-five percent of optics and sixty percent of electrical industrial equipment. Apart from these forms of advanced technology, human capital was also drawn in the form of over three thousand scientific and technical experts in Operation Osoaviakhim. The GDR was also forced to pay up to fifteen percent of its gross domestic product in reparations, which further aggravated economic reconstruction, in contrast to the Marshall Plan aid that the FRG was receiving. The process of attempted socialisation also involved rapid industrialisation, which also created a lower standard of living for the population. Whereas the West German economy received a decisive boost due to the demand for industrial equipment as a result of the Korean War, increased exports due to an undervalued currency and American encouragement of free in Europe, the East German population faced devastating shortages of most essential goods. Shortages of essential goods and improved living conditions in the west motivated many to emigrate westward. The numbers of East Germans surged to 166.000 in 1951, and 182,000 in 1952, leading to a total of approximately 500,000 in 1953. Forty percent of the most prosperous farmers left for the FRG, leading to food shortages, and electricity and heating supplies were interrupted in the cities. Shortages of labour to restore technical competencies and productivity, which further undermined postwar economic recovery, as they could not be physically prevented from leaving, primarily from East to West Berlin that maintained its unusual status as a divided city with its remaining four allied power presence.
Living conditions in western Germany gradually improved following the introduction of the Deutschemark on 21 June 1948, and ending price controls to repress inflation that had nullified incentives for manufacturers to produce goods for hitherto low fixed prices led to generating profits from restored production. Industrial production in late 1948 increased to eighty percent of what it had been at the same time in 1938, which continued increasing dramatically, which was boosted by international aid plans, including from the Marshall Plan that shipped food, fuel, machinery and funding from April 1948 to December 1951 to enable postwar economic recovery, create new import markets for American goods, and contain the influence of the Soviet Union. Successful economic reconstruction led to personal consumption in the FRG amounted to fifty-eight percent of national income, in contrast to forty-four percent in the GDR, by 1952.
International aid to West Germany composed approximately 2 billion US dollars by October 1954. The Marshall Plan also contributed to enabling West Germany to build an export-based economy, which led to established market ties with neighbouring western European countries, as well as providing manufactured goods to South Korea following the outbreak of war in 1950, which boosted German industrial production by approximately thirty percent. At a time when western animosity against Germany and previously imposing judicial accountability for Nazi atrocities was superseded by suspicions about communist encroachments, the 27 February 1953 London Agreement on German War Debt, otherwise known as the London Agreement on German External Debts that came into force on 16 September 1953, reduced reparations payments by fifty percent, which were to be drawn from three percent of export earnings when the FRG had a trade surplus, and proved to be for significantly reducing West Germany’s postwar debt burden while aiming to facilitate West Germany’s economic recovery by restructuring and reducing its external debt. These payments were completed by 1983, with a minimal impact on the FRG economy. A reformed graduated tax system also raised income for the state to operate while cultivating a flourishing middle class and potential for social mobility in a social market economy that combined a free market capitalism with social safety regulations and cooperative labour relations with a skilled and motivated workforce, which was reinforced with western financial assistance from the Marshall Plan. The economic miracle of the early 1950s created unprecedented wealth in the west, now under the direction of a parliamentary democratic government of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn overseeing a market economy based on entrepreneurs and consumers determining production during ongoing postwar economic reconstruction.
In contrast, the planned economy in the communist German Democratic Republic of Germany was based on political leaders and civil servants determining pre-determined levels of production, regardless of consumer demands that were sacrificed with prejudice to expanding heavy industry in conformity to Soviet-style multi-year plans, while the GDR economy suffered from grave advantages in comparison with the FRG, possessing only thirty percent of its manufacturing capacity, in addition to requiring importing most of its natural resources, leading to chronic shortages. While postwar reconstruction remained ongoing during the early 1950s in both German states, West Germany began prospering as a democracy that integrated its growing economy into western Europe with Marshall Plan economic assistance. In contrast, East Germany became an increasingly totalitarian state within the Soviet sphere of influence, with a judiciary politically synchronised toward maintaining state interests of the SED building a socialist state through the five hundred seat Volkskammer, or People’s Chamber as the national legislature, within a veneer or democratic representation by allowing for opposition parties to remain present therein, which included delegates from the SED holding 127 seats while exercising a total monopoly on political power, while the other “block parties,” composed of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPD), the National Democratic Party (NDPD), and the Democratic Farmers’ Party (NDPD) each holding 52 seats serving as powerless lobby groups, along with five mass organisations, consisting of the Free German Federation of Trade Unions holding 61 seats, the Free German Youth, holding 32 seats, the Democratic Women’s Association of Germany also holding 32 seats, the Kulturbund, or cultural association, holding 21 seats, and the Farmers’ Aid Association holding 14 seats as additional lobby groups advocating for specific separate interests, with all of the members constituting a National Front.
The economic disparity between East and West Germany became evident during the early 1950s. The eastern German economy had long specialized in producing consumer goods, particularly foodstuffs, and was deprived of western Germany as its primary market. The division between east and west also led to eastern Germany losing access to industrial goods that had long been largely produced in the west, which had been used to produce those consumer goods. The East German economy also lagged behind as its economy was repurposed toward building its own heavy industry at the direction of the Soviet Union, which also subjected the GDR to economic exploitation as a satellite state. In contrast to West Germany receiving American economic support, East Germany remained subject to paying war reparations to the Soviet Union in the form of dismantling its earlier heavy industry facilities and revenues drawn from German-Soviet joint stock enterprises, which led to a third of the GDR’s industrial output becoming the directly owned property of the Soviet Union. It was only because of this factor that the dismantling of factories and industrial sites, an estimated 14 billion USD was paid to the USSR by the GDR between 1946 and 1953, either directly or indirectly, while a hundred percent of its automobile manufacturing industry, between ninety and a hundred percent of its chemicals industry, and ninety-three percent of its fuel industry was under Soviet control. Soviet demands for GDR military commitments in 1952 composed twenty percent of its national budget, while the GDR political leadership sought to create a fully planned socialist economy that remained stagnating.
There was disappointment among a section of the GDR’s leadership that had hoped for a more sensitive application of socialist principles, which coincided with the anger and bitterness of a large segment of the working class. A widespread feeling thus ensued that the first blueprint for socialism had failed, and required substantial modification, while the output of several branches of industry fell short of what had been planned, and the since December 1952, the number of refugees leaving the GDR as a Soviet puppet state for the west had increased dramatically, from as many as 58,605 in March 1952 from 7,227 in January. While Ulbricht sought to maintain control of the state amid economic tensions, Stalin died on 5 March, which gave rise to uncertainty about who would succeed him and the future of the GDR. Some senior SED members, apart from Ulbricht, hoped that this would lead to a relaxation of the political climate throughout Eastern Europe on the suppression of political dissidence. The new leadership in Moscow urged the German to abandon their hard line on internal dissidence, and refused their request for special economic assistance while also urging the SED leadership to slow down the program of socialization of industry, which Ulbricht chose to defy. He praised Stalin’s “wise leadership” and appealed for greater vigilance against internal enemies of the state, and blamed the country’s economic problem on them, adding that the most pressing task of the state was to overcome low work norms. He also provoked a new clash with church authorities by announcing plans for a new “socialist” city to be called Stalinstadt that would not have any churches.
Ulbricht was calculating on the Kremlin itself that was divided between those in Moscow who wanted to maintain Stalin’s hard line, and others who favoured change, while there was also the question of the survival of the GDR itself, with the Russians giving up the GDR. He therefore decided to resist a softer line on domestic affairs by allying himself with the Soviet conservatives, while also moving against the moderates in his own Politburo who could replace him as the head of state, and therefore removed Franz Dahlem from the Politibureau and central committee who seemed to many of the old Communists to be the only possible alternative leader. This was followed by announcing new aggression against alleged enemies of the state in the interest of establishing socialism, and increasing production standards by ten to twenty percent for the same pay to address the problem of growing shortages, and setting forth Ulbricht’s sixtieth birthday as a “political climax,” in which every worker and official were to make “self-commitments” in his honour, thus creating a new cult of personality in the GDR that had begun to be criticised in Moscow.
These measures caused division in the GDR leadership, in which the opposition called for a peaceful change to a democratic society and reunification with western Germany, which was favoured by some members of the Soviet leadership that issued resolutions to be adopted by the SED politburo, to be aimed at the reunification of Germany, and reversed most of the measures taken since the Second Party Conference in July 1952 for “building socialism.” These measures included: cutting investments in heavy industry and increasing production of consumer goods, and allowing private businesses to be restored, and returning land to farmers. Refugees who had gone to the West were invited to return and offered assistance, and western Germans could get permission more easily to visit relatives in the GDR. Students who had been expelled from university because of their religious beliefs could come back, and all those arrested on religious grounds were to be released. Ulbricht then immediately looked for ways to undermine these measures by refusing to accept them, presumably due to his concern about the possible liquidation of the GDR.
Introducing poorly prepared economic policies, leading to fixed prices for consumer goods rising in December 1952 and April 1953 to forcibly reduce consumer demand, along with raising taxes announcing concessions for certain groups, while increasing work productivity quota norms to practically impossibly high requirements in Order 234, which introduced piecework wages and work time registrations, while maintaining the same wages for others, led to expressions of widespread discontent with the regime. The USSR leadership that had succeeded Stalin expressed concern over the flood of refugees from the GDR, and called for the GDR leadership to institute reforms, including ending inefficient forced collectivisation that had led to over 55,000 formerly independent farmers fleeing to the west that jeopardised food production, revising plans for building heavy industry, alleviating political and judicial controls and regimentation, including the persecution of the churches, in exchange for providing economic aid and reducing demands for reparations payments.
Ulbricht hereafter publicly announced a “New Course” on 11 June in conformity with these Soviet guidelines, which were designed to placate dissatisfaction with living conditions. These concessions included offering an amnesty for all East German refugees, assistance to medium and small private enterprises, relaxing restrictions on travel residency permits, extending certain degrees of freedom of worship, and suspending farming collectivisation by restoring ration cards to independent farmers. However, sustaining exceedingly high expectations for restructuring the state as Ulbricht sought to demonstrate his loyalty to the USSR, even after Stalin had deceased, by providing resources in the form of continued reparations. The attempts to establish a socialist state at the expense of the labour force, from whom more was demanded with insufficient benefits in terms of shortages of consumer goods, was in stark contrast to the increasingly greater prosperity in West Germany caused widespread discontent. Maintaining the same work production quotas and wages, along with facing wage reductions in the event of production standards not being met, led to protests and strikes beginning in Brandenburg on 12 June 1953, followed by others in Eisleben, Finsterwald and Chemnitz-Borna in the face of exposing the political bankruptcy of the regime due to this drastic policy shift. The press flatly stated that they should be made legally binding after workers had been convinced of their necessity.
A delegation of construction workers went to the government on the morning of 15 June and demanded the revocation of the work quotas, and sent a letter to Otto Grotewohl demanding a meeting and threatening to strike if he refused to rescind the increase in the production quota norms, which he simply ignored. On the following morning, the trade union newspaper confirmed the higher work norms in an article written at Walther Ulbricht’s request, which led to workers in Berlin going on strike to demand the government to resign and production norms to be decreased. Building workers then went to the German trade union federations building, and were joined by other workers along the way to demand the former lower work quotas, which were followed by calls for lifting other forms of state repression and control. As approximately twenty-thousand demonstrators converged on the DDR government and the SED buildings, there were widespread expressions of popular resentment. The Politburo then issued a statement that it had been wrong to order increasing work quotas, but did not clarify its intentions, stating this was only to be done “on the basis of persuasion and voluntary cooperation,” which led to plans for strikes in several large factories demanding genuine political changes.
A call for a general strike and a mass meeting of over forty-thousand protesters in Berlin on June 17 June, which had begun as a protest against economic conditions, expressed wider political dissatisfaction, including demanding not only a reduction of industrial norms, but also releasing all political prisoners, the freedom of travel, the resignation of the entire government and free elections, and unification with West Germany. A large crowd gathered in front of the House of Ministries, and up to a hundred demonstrators stormed the building, leading to minor clashes with the police, and then 20,000 Soviet troops and 600 tanks along with 15,000 police officers and the People’s Police that had been formed in 1952, drawn from the ranks of the frontier and transport police that had been established in 1947 and organised as soldiers, being deployed on the streets of East Berlin, which had already been in place since before the creation of the DDR. The Fifth Commissariat, or the Kommisariat-5 of the People’s Police in the Soviet occupation zone in 1947, which served as a political police force that was tasked with identifying opposition to the Soviet authorities, and were charged with detaining any dissidents. A separate Intelligence and Information Department was established under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior at approximately the same time to gather intelligence on potential non-Marxist opposition.
The Fifth Commissariat was dissolved in 1949, and was replaced by the Main Directorate for Defence of the People’s Economy. The Ministry of State Security, or the State Security Service, otherwise known as the “Stasi” secret police was created on 5 February 1950 under the auspices of Russian authorities led by Wilhelm Zaisser, and created a widely pervasive surveillance apparatus that monitored all aspects of life in the DDR that became a Stalinist socialist state with an atmosphere of prevailing fear and suspicion. This state secret state police force was established on the pattern of the Soviet NKVD, which had used former Nazi concentration camps and other areas during the military occupation to detain 150,000 alleged fascists, which remained in place as detention centres under East German control. The Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) remained in place, while the SED would function as its local political representation. Regardless of the surveillance apparatus that was in place to suppress any opposition to the regime that never had more than thirty percent of the population, the series of events took place with unexpected rapidity.
There were approximately 272 strikes and demonstrations in several parts of the country demonstrating solidarity with the protests in East Berlin, including Leipzig, Dresden, Gera, Cottbus, Erfurt, Halle, Potsdam, Frankurt-am-Oder, Falkensee, and Magdeburg, which composed about six percent of the total workforce, many of whom were violently opposed to communism and the SED regime, with the four most common demands being a revocation of the new work norms, an immediate lowering of the cost of living, free and secret elections, and immunity from prosecution for the strikers. In most towns, industrial workers reacted against the regime by tearing down posters of the party leader and other official slogans and banners. They occupied the town hall and various public buildings, and tried to release political prisoners in Magdeburg on 18 June. In certain cases, including in Halle, Wolfe, Marseburg, among others, organisations were set up to seize power in these regions. This type of protest committee in Bitterfeld demanded that the central government form a provisional government of revolutionary workers. The Soviet military commander declared a state of emergency as these demonstrations had assumed a direct political character, sealing the borders with West Berlin while martial law was imposed. Between at least 55 and 125 protesters were killed, and at least hundreds were wounded as Soviet forces and East German police engaged in street battles against East German workers as the strikes continued.
This rising of indignation came to a standstill after mass meetings dissipated. There were not any plans to continue or expand the uprising, and the workers had achieved their main demand to reduce work norms on the previous day. A wave of arrests followed, including 1,774 in East Berlin alone on 18 June and then over 6,300 throughout the GDR. Between twenty and forty demonstrators were executed for their roles in the protests, along with up to fifty-three Russian troops who were executed for refusing to fire at crowds of unarmed protesters. This spontaneous movement in East Berlin that spread throughout the DDR with 129 other demonstrations outside the city with 332 factories going on strike therefore dissipated by 24 June, while it lacked political leadership and an overall strategy, while the western Allies mainly observed and reported on the events of this short-lived uprising, without providing any notable external support that would risk the outbreak of war. Ulbricht remained in power with Soviet military force and political support in the interest of maintaining consistency, while other SED were removed from office. The state secret police dramatically increased state surveillance of the population. Other outcomes included the Soviet government making certain concessions, such as introducing certain economic reforms, freeing tens of thousands of prisoners-of-war who remained in the USSR, while the flow of refugees shifting westward continued. Extractions of reparations from the GDR were ceased, and joint-stock companies were placed under GDR control, apart from the one supervising a uranium mine. Nevertheless, the administration of a socialist command economy remained in place, and workforces proved to only be able to express their concerns about inadequate living and working conditions through emigration to the west after open organised resistance was crushed and proved to be futile. The GDR remained governed by force, rather than consent from the population with low living standards.
In contrast to the GDR that the Soviet Union officially recognised as an independent state in 1954, the economy of the FRG began to recover rapidly. It became a member of the Organisation of European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in October 1949. Full control over steel and coal production was restored to the FRG in the Treaty of Paris of 18 April 1951 that went into force on 23 July 1952, in exchange for becoming one of the six member states of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) that agreed to function toward economic integration. The FRG’s further integration into western Europe continued with the Occupation Statute ending in West Germany on 5 May 1955 in the Paris Accords, by which the FRG acquired “the full authority of a sovereign state.” West Germany then became a full member of the Western European Union on 7 June 1955. After the European Economic Community (EEC) with the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the FRG joined in the following year that consequently that closely integrated its economy with western Europe. This process of reintegration was matched by a remarkable economic recovery, an “economic miracle,” in the early 1950s, following the introduction of the convertible currency in 1948, along with lifting of price controls, and reducing taxation rates, which led the FRG becoming one of the world’s leading economic powers while employing great reserves of skilled labour, augmented by streams of refugees from eastern Europe and the GDR that saved vast sums of funding for education and training costs, and applying industrial expertise. One of the consequences of the spectacular rate of economic growth in conjunction with integration with western economic powers rendered a minority of disillusioned Nazis powerless in light of postwar prosperity.
The chasm between the FRG and DDR was also maintained through West German foreign policy. Adenauer pursued a policy of “maintaining tension” to discourage contact with the GDR in all agreements with other countries that had any element of relating to territorial questions, and Walther Hallstein, one of Adenauer’s chief foreign policy aides pursued the Hallstein Doctrine, first declared in 1955, to preclude international recognition of the GDR by not maintaining diplomatic relations with countries that established relations with East Germany, apart from the Soviet Union, with which the FRG established diplomatic relations on 13 September 1955. This policy prevented the FRG from establishing diplomatic relations with eastern European states that maintained ties with the GDR, which consequently prevented creating economic ties with these countries that had traditionally traded with Germany.
Both German states started rearmament by the mid-1950s that also widened the chasm between them. The invasion of South Korea by the North Korean regime in 1950, and Ulbricht pointedly comparing the Federal Republic to South Korea prompted Adenauer to reinforce integration with western powers to propose the formation of a 150,000 troop West German army, led by General Hans Speidel, a known anti-Nazi who had been arrested by the Gestapo following the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. The Cold War, which had split the anti-Hitler coalition almost immediately after the German defeat, mandated a German contribution to the defense of both power blocs that confronted each other in the middle of Germany, as the Cold War mandated a German contribution to the defence of both power blocs that confronted each other in central Europe. In sharp contrast to the earlier allied decision to disarm and demilitarise Germany, both German states would rearm in view of Cold War considerations when there was concern about war between Communist and democratic countries breaking out in Europe. West German political authorities intended to demonstrate their support for other western European countries, and American authorities who anticipated that a future European war would lead to an invasion of the FRG ratified plans for its rearmament.
American efforts in enlisting German personnel during the early stages of the Cold War began during the military occupation as a pragmatic matter of expediency as the east-west chasm became increasingly apparent, which was characteristic of reintegrating former Nazi personnel into separate elements of society, which also demonstrated the impracticality of the denazification programmes in practice. American intelligence authorities enlisted Major-General Reinhardt Gehlen, who had served as the military intelligence director for the German army in eastern Europe, otherwise known as Foreign Armies East, who had secretly planned to surrender to the western allies as early as 1944, when the defeat of the Nazi regime was apparent, and prepared to offer them intelligence assets. Gehlen and his senior officers microfilmed extensive amounts of secret wartime information on the USSR in March 1945, and concealed these files in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps prior to surrendering to the American Counter Intelligence Corps in Bavaria on 23 May 1945. Gehlen and his staff disclosed these caches of concealed information about the Soviet, which had mostly been acquired from Soviet prisoners-of-war, to American interrogators who did not comply with the Yalta Protocol to surrender Axis officers who had been engaged in “Eastern Area Activities” to the Soviet Union.
The functions of this Gehlen organisation began at the end of 1945, following the dissolution of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, with writing intelligence reports on the Red Army at Fort Hunt in the American state of Virginia. Gehlen later began building a postwar espionage network based in western Germany under American auspices in December 1947, Operation Rusty, drawing on fervently anti-communist former German personnel who had served for the National Socialist regime, including as members of the Gestapo, the SS, and the SD, although they were still technically prisoners-of-war. The contemporary exigencies of a common interest to create defences against the spread of communism. They were thus granted immunity from prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as undergoing the standard denazification procedures, in exchange for their collaboration as immediately available resources while American authorities were unprepared to face increasingly greater perceived threats from the Soviet Union. Its members in what would become known as the Gehlen Organisation were later engaged in collecting intelligence from unvetted spies in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany who were subject to automatic arrest for their wartime functions, and then enlisting informers within the FRG to monitor suspected communists, spreading anti-communist propaganda, training agents for partisan warfare, and providing them with weapons, such as for those who were infiltrated into Lithuania. It was eventually transferred into the DNB (Bundesnachrichtendienst) as the official West German intelligence service on 1 April 1956. Apart from depending on the Gehlen Organisation that functioned independently as a tactical intelligence unit until 1 July 1949, when it was sponsored under the auspices of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), established on 26 July 1947 in view of concerns about postwar Soviet intentions, the CIA developed Project Bloodstone to exploit former Nazis whose identities were concealed while they were granted immunity for prosecution, in return for their cooperation in safeguarding security interests against perceived threats from the Soviet Union, regardless of their egregious war crimes and crimes against humanity, as a matter of expediency.
The FRG became part of the collective western European defensive system by joining NATO on 9 June 1955 to make contributions to logistical cooperation to coordinate joint military efforts, discussing common security issues, standardising military material, participating in joint training exercises, and contributing military strength in the event of an attack on any of its member states. The Federal Republic of Germany was established with experienced German military personnel to establish the postwar Bundeswehr in November 1955 to contribute to the defence of the state. General Hans Speidel went on to be appointed supreme commander of NATO land forces in central Europe in 1957. An additional forty-one other former German generals were enlisted in the postwar West German army. Josef Kammhuber, who had created the night fighter defence system of Nazi Germany, created and became head of the new German air force in 1956, which remained known as the Luftwaffe. Friedrich Ruge, a former German navy admiral, re-created the postwar West German navy.
The Soviet Union considered the FRG joining NATO to be a direct threat to its interests. Soviet authorities thereby superseded the earlier bilateral defence agreements with its eastern European satellite states, where Soviet armies had already been stationed, by forming the Warsaw Pact on 14 May 1955 through the signing of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance as a counterbalance to NATO, as well as deter the member countries from leaving the Soviet sphere of control. The armed forces of Poland, Hungary, the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Albania were placed under the direct command of the Soviet Union, as the commander-in-chief was always a Russian military leader, beginning with Marshal Ivan Konev, who also served as the deputy minister to the Soviet minister of defence. Hence, the signing of this agreement did not bring any significant changes to the military alliance system between the USSR and the satellite states that had already been in place.
The Soviet Union oversaw the creation of the East German National People’s Army in January 1956, which included up to 90,000 former German prisoners-of-war, who reinforced the East German border police that had been operating since 1946 to secure and control the border to the west, and practically resembled a military force by 1948 as Barracked People’s Police as a disguised army, as the police officers were in fact soldiers operating according to military regulations. This remilitarisation was reinforced in 1950 with the creation of a Main Administration Sea Police and a Main Administration Air Police in 1950, which were later converted into the People’s Navy in 1960 and the People’s Air Force in 1956, following plans for creating an army with the sanction of the Soviet Union that had begun in early 1952. As in the FRG, the officer corps were likewise drawn from experienced veterans of the Second World War, with twenty-seven percent of the officer corps who had been members of the wartime Werhrmacht which seven former generals who had served during the Second World War. Among the former generals, General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach was a prominent anti-Nazi, and Lt.-General Vincenz Müller who identified himself as a staunch communist.
Another surreptitious form of division between east and west in the face of immediate postwar tensions during the appropriation of material economic assets from Germany during the military occupation also involved acquiring scientific resources and knowledge. Operation Paperclip was undertaken to locate these resources, which related to the development of new technology in Germany during the Second World War. Over three thousand scientific and technical experts entered allied occupied Germany, who included the British and American agents of the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) that had been established in London in the summer of 1944 to investigate German scientific developments, along with another technology recovery mission, known as the Alsos mission, who sought to locate top German scientists in the Osenburg list who were enlisted to conduct research on developing new superior weapons to sustain the war effort, which came into the possession of American intelligence services, and sought to locate German scientists and engineers in Operation Overcast in May 1945, and take them into custody for their own postwar scientific development. Seven hundred and sixty-five German scientists were secretly evacuated to the U.S. who would engage in weapons and rocket research. Eight missile development experts were seized by the Russians out of over thousand scientists they had taken into custody in their Operation Osoaviakhim, along with two entire German physics institutes.
An American Joint Intelligence Agency was established in the late summer of 1945 to execute Operation Overcast, later renamed Paperclip in November, in anticipation of acquiring military superiority over the Soviet Union that had begun to be considered to be a future military threat. The American authorities were therefore anxious to acquire aviation and missile technology, as well as chemical and biological weapons. Out of over 1,600 German scientists who were taken into custody to continue their scientific research as a result of suspicion about the future hostility from the Soviet Union against western countries, Werner von Braun, who had contributed to V1 and V2 production, and invented the V2, was particularly instrumental in developing American rocket development that later enabled the developments of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that were first introduced on 6 June 1957 that could strike at targets from a distance of 4,500 kilometres.
Dealing with the past remained an ongoing unresolved issue. Certain high-level SS criminals lived ordinary lives until the West German government brought them to trial long after the end of the allied military occupation with any reconstructed evidence. Entire professions who were needed to provide essential services after 1945 were tainted with guilt for abuses that were perpetrated during the Nazi regime, including jurists, police officers, doctors, businessmen, and administrators, who continued functioning in their former professions. Challenging them in the interest of addressing the past offences became the task of the new German generations. The student rebellions of the late 1960s in Germany often were a general reckoning up of the young generation with the crimes many members of the older generations had committed under the Third Reich. This was also the responsibility of the western allies, whose own actions had serious shortcomings. The United States “exculpated” many high-ranking Nazi officials because they had knowledge about the Soviet Union or about Germany’s high-tech missile program. The Soviet Union may have applied the strictest regime against ex-Nazis, but it seems that some of them changed their identities and became communists as a matter of pragmatic exigency.
Other high-profile Nazis fled Germany as fugitives fearing retribution, including to authoritarian regimes in South America who were sympathetic to National Socialist ideology, and provided them with refuge while benefiting from their expertise while experiencing economic growth through industrialisation. Various organisations and individuals set up escape routes known as “rat lines,” consisting of a series of routes to countries where fugitives who were guilty of perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity could find refuge from between 1946 to 1955. Plans for these routes were initially laid between the Argentinian government and the Vatican in diplomatic correspondence in 1942. Fugitives who could be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity were enabled by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) issuing displaced persons passports, which could then be used to apply for entry visas into foreign countries, on the strength of informal support from Catholic clergy, and then forge new identity and travel documents with assistance from the Vatican under the authority of pope Pius XII. The main escape route led through the Austrian Alps to South Tyrol, and a network of conspirators guided Nazi fugitives to escape through Austria and Italy with falsified documents from the Red Cross in South Tyrol that did not have a defined statehood status, accommodations and daily necessities along these “rat lines” through Italy and then commonly to South America, with assistance provided by the Catholic church who considered these Nazis to be anti-communists opposing communism as the archenemy of the church.
A former SS captain serving with the SD, Carlos Fuldner, arrived in Madrid from Berlin on 10 March 1945 set up an escape route for Nazi fugitives under the auspices of the Spanish government, and enabled passage for them to Argentina, such as for the leader of the Belgian fascist party, Pierre Daye, and another Argentinian born SS officer, Charles Lesker, by providing travel documents ensuring safe passage. Spain facilitated these escapes with Vatican support through Bishop Alois Hudal, a Nazi sympathizer, and other such sympathisers in the Catholic church operating the Vatican Refugee Organisation, which aided and abetted fugitives by providing them with false documentation, such as false identifications, in order to obtain displaced persons’ passports for individual refugees who had lost their identification documents from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which could in turn be used to apply for travel visas with support from clergy members that superseded verification requirements, whereas the attitude of the papacy itself toward Nazi atrocities was ambiguous.
Another escape route was the San Girolamo Ratline operated by a group of Croatian priests, led by Rev. Krunoslav Draganović, which housed fugitives in a Croatian monastery prior to travelling on an escape route ranging from Austria to Italy where they were given refuge in Vatican properties, and the onto Spain and Portugal. Among those who escaped immediate retribution were eminent Nazi regime personalities, including Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, and Klaus Barbie escaped to Argentina, where they were integrated into the large ethnic German community, as well as the infamous extermination camp operators Franz Stangl and Gustav Wagner who used the Vatican ratline to flee to Brazil. Other infamous personalities included Josef Schwammberger, Walther Rauff, Erich Priebke, and Gerhard Bohne. While Spain under Francisco Franco provided a provisional safe haven for perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity to escape accountability, although this destination became less hospitable to fugitives after the collapse of the National Socialist Germany, and allied pressure to allow for their extradition and prosecution.
Many perpetrators would then find permanent homes in Argentina, which had a long-standing arrangement with Nazi Germany as the outlet for looted American currency that had been filtered through Switzerland. The Argentinian government under Juan Perón, who was elected president in February 1946, welcomed the influx of military, scientific and technical expertise. Those fugitives could lend their expertise to legitimate German-owned business firms in Argentina, as well as serve as “anti-communist experts,” through offering falsified travel documents at the Pontifical Commission of Assistance in the Vatican through the Argentinian diplomatic missions in Europe, as well as other Argentinian representatives with whom fugitives could make contact. Nazi fugitives would enter Argentina between August 1946 and the early 1950s through Catholic church connections, in the Perón’s interest to acquire technical expertise and advanced scientific technology. An estimated ten thousand former German military personnel would emigrate to South America, while several thousands would find refuge in the Middle East, and many former SS personnel would join the French Foreign Legion, whereas others would evade adjudication indefinitely.
Fugitives set up small-scale rat lines through Scandinavia, Switzerland and Belgium, Spain and Italy. Aid for these escapes were also provided by governmental authorities in Syria and Egypt, where certain individuals considered Nazi Germany to be an objective ally of their local independence movements resisting colonial powers and Jewish immigration to Palestine. The president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, specifically welcomed Goebbels’s surviving propaganda experts with “knowledge of the mentality of the state’s enemies, referring to the fledgling state of Israel, and refused to allow for any such individuals to be extradited to face trial in Europe. Harboured fugitives in Egypt included Franz Bartel, who had been the assistant chief of the Gestapo in Katowice, his former superior officer, Rudolf Mildner, who had also been the head of the political department at the Auschwitz concentration camp, along with Wilhelm Bockler, who had played a prominent role in the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944, and Hans Eisele, the chief physician at Buchenwald concentration camp, among many others who were suspected of having perpetrated wartime atrocities.
A former SS officer who was implicated in holocaust atrocities, Walther Raufe, was among the first to organise the evacuation of Nazi fugitives transiting through Rome to the Middle East, following his earlier escape from imprisonment in Germany and living in hiding in Italy. He reactivated contacts he had made during the war to provide German specialists to Syria to rebuild its military and an intelligence service based on the Gestapo model from 1948, operating from the pontifical institute Santa Maria de Anima under the protection of bishop Alois Hudal who provided Nazi fugitives with false identifications, issuing pontifical certificates that were then used for Red Cross exit visa documents to enable passage abroad. Raufe and his family settled in Syria in 1948, with other Nazi fugitives arriving shortly after the establishment of the state of Israel, and led Arab military formations of the Arab League, founded in 1945, consisting of a coalition of seven Arab nations opposing its creation. Over sixty former German military commanders would travel to Egypt in 1951, led by Wilhelm Voss, who had led SS forced labour camps.
The vast majority of former Nazis acquiesced in Germany’s new democratic institutions, and regardless of the weaknesses of implementing denazification, the integration of former Nazis became a political success, regardless of haphazard implementation of the postwar denazification process in the four former occupation zones by following separate policies, until these efforts to identify individual connections with the Nazi regime were eventually abandoned altogether, following the implementation of a highly bureaucratic approach in the American occupation zone, and the most draconian measures taken in the Soviet zone, in contrast to improvised more lax implementation policies in the French and British zones. The GDR exposed 1,800 individuals in the “Brown Book – War and Nazi Criminals in the FRG” who occupied positions of responsibility with a very high degree of accuracy, and the FRG exposed another nearly a thousand former Nazis who held influential positions in the DDR in the “Brown Book DDR.” Another problem of assimilation into West German society were the ten million refugees from the east, by absorbing their skilled labour into an expanding economy and the “German economic miracle” that began with the 1948 currency reform during a time of chronic labour shortage. By 1955, the gross natural product of West Germany exceeded the 1936 national product of all Germany, although it had only 53 percent of Germany’s former area and 75 percent of its former population. German management had retained its traditional efficiency while installing the most modern equipment without governmental control, and German labour its discipline and capacity for work. Trade unions considered it was more important to increase production rates than to gain a better distribution of the national product for the workers, and therefore serious strikes were rare. 1.4 billion dollars in Marshall Plan loan aid that was granted to West Germany in 1949 placed the country in an optimal position to engage in postwar reconstruction of economic stability and productivity, as well as regain overseas markets by exporting capital to developing countries.
Ulbricht had defeated the internal party opposition and had stabilized the SED’s control over society, which continued with further consolidating the party’s authority, along with radical economic restructuring, which were diametrically opposed to the political and economic organisation in the FRG. The Fifth SED Congress in July 1958 ordered the final collectivization of agriculture and a sharp rise in industrial output as part of the Seven Year Economic Policy to bring per capita consumption in the GDR up to the level of West Germany. While travel stricter controls were imposed between East and West Germany on 26 May 1952 that led to the creation of a fortified border to prevent contact between the populations of the two states. Although border controls in Berlin were tightened, the open border to West Berlin remained the exception gateway to flee to the FRG, which continued the DDR manpower losses that had increasingly greater negative consequences for its economy. Berlin’s four power status was maintained during Khrushchev’s policy of peace co-existence with the west, regardless of the conflicting and thus incompatible political ideologies.
Khrushchev demanded in November 1958 that West Berlin be turned into a demilitarized “free city” within six months, which the western powers ignored and nothing was done, apart from increasing the flow of refugees during the effects of the Seven Year Plan, such as among disgruntled farmers whose land fell into cooperative hands from 45 to 85 percent in the first months of 1960, as well as alienated factory workers who felt the pressure for increased industrial output and also various types of professionals. The number of refugees therefore increased from a low of 144,000 in 1959 to 199,000 in 1960, which doubled in the first six months of 1961 to 207,000. The greatly superior living conditions in the west spurred these refugee movements, which included shifting companies with their managers and skilled workforces, including thirteen percent of the DDR’s working population. The new Soviet Union’s secretary-general of the communist party, Nikita Khrushchev initiated a new Berlin crisis in reaction to the FRG’s integration into NATO, which included deploying American nuclear weapons in the FRG, and raising concerns regarding West Berlin’s full integration into the FRG, by issuing an ultimatum on 18 May 1958. Khrushchev demanded the full withdrawal of western allied forces from the city, and creating a fully demilitarised free city of Berlin, or else turn over western transit rights to the city to the GDR. This ultimatum was withdrawn in 1959, and further negotiations remained unsettled while the city’s borders remained open, and the economic disparity between East and West Berlin was visibly increasing. Khrushchev re-issued this ultimatum on 4 June 1961 for the demilitarisation of Berlin, and thereby end the existing four-power agreements over the city, which was likewise dismissed by the western powers.
Approximately 2.7 million people had fled from the GDR, composing approximately one sixth of the population when it was created, since it was established, leading the GDR economy to being virtually on the verge of collapse due to personnel shortages in industry and agriculture that in turn threatened political stability. This flow of refugees was then stopped by force on 13 August 1961 with sealing western from eastern Berlin, regardless of the city’s unique four power status administration that allowed for free passage between the four power occupation sectors. Construction workers overseen by soldiers began closing the borders, first with barbed wire, and then mesh fencing that extended 43 kilometres through Berlin, and a further 112 with the borders with the GDR, thereby physically sealing off a democratic enclave within the GDR that had had open borders. Tearing up streets and laying concrete began on 17 August. 106 kilometres of 3.6 metre concrete barricades were added by 1965, topped with a smooth pipe to prevent climbing. This barrier was later reinforced with strips of spikes, guard dogs and land mines, along with 302 watchtowers and twenty concrete bunkers. A parallel fence was set up in the rear known as a “death strip,” where all buildings were demolished and covered with sand to provide a clear view for the border guards who were ordered to shoot anyone attempting to cross over. Any attempts at escape were met with deadly force, and an estimated seventy-five people were killed trying to escape over the wall.
Nearly five thousand East Germans who managed to escape through defecting to the west while they were abroad, while others escaped through digging tunnels or swimming across canals, flying a hot air balloon, and crashing through a barrier in a stolen tank. Two hundred and sixty-two were killed in different escape attempts. As the workforce was stabilised while being prevented from leaving the country, the population remained subject to heavy censorship, and secret police surveillance of what could be considered any form of subversive activity. The Stasi under Erich Mielke from 1957 developed a system of comprehensive surveillance over the East German population to preclude any opposition to the one-party dictatorship, and thus functioning as the main instrument for controlling society to neutralise any dissent against the state without being subjected to legal restrictions while controlling all forms of public life to ensure conformity to the regime. Many East Germans spied for the Stasi in a system of ubiquitous surveillance of the population for different reasons, such as either being convinced Marxist-Leninists who supported the state, while others were simply opportunists seeking personal advantages, or believed that serving the Stasi would protect them from becoming its victims themselves. Others were pressured into becoming informers in a country where all protests were considered subversive.
At a time when uniting a democracy with a socialist state was inconceivable due to the ideological chasm between them, Chancellor Willy Brandt attempted to ease relations between West and East Germany by improving relations with eastern European states during a period of Cold War detente. The earlier coalition government elected in 1966 shifted its foreign policy toward abandoning the Hallstein Doctrine by establishing diplomatic relations with Rumania and Yugoslavia in 1967 under the influence of the foreign minister, Willy Brandt, who was elected Chancellor in 1969. The FRG signed the Treaty of Moscow with the Soviet Union on 12 August 1970, recognising de facto the existence of the German Democratic Republic and its existing borders, and the Treaty of Warsaw with Poland on 7 December 1970 recognizing Poland’s western border at the Oder–Neisse line that was not to be changed by force, which was ratified by the West German Bundestag on 17 May 1972. These agreements later culminated in the mutual recognition of the two German states in 1972, and their entry as members of the United Nations in 1973. Brandt orchestrated a series of treaties and agreements that culminated in the “Basic Treaty” between the two German states in December 1972 that were later ratified in May 1973. Both German states were accepted as full members of the United Nations, leading to the two states to recognise each other’s existence in a special relationship, which was subject to different interpretations, and policies oriented toward improving relations between them. The resolution of German unification took place with dramatic rapidity during the domestic political revolutions in 1989-1990 in the context of the dissolution of the economically weakened Soviet Union that could not march American defence spending, and weakened their hold on its former eastern European satellite states, which was recognised by the new political leadership of the Soviet Union.
Fishbowl presentation
Select a random group of up to six students.
Conduct a discussion based on the contents, while the remaining students observe and record the results, noting the process and discussion contents.
Observers then consolidate a summary of the discussion, and raise any unanswered questions.
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