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How Germany Was Divided After
World War II
A temporary solution to organize Germany into four occupation zones
led to a divided nation under the Cold War.
BY: DAVE ROOS
UPDATED: OCTOBER 4, 2023 | ORIGINAL: APRIL 27, 2022
When the Allies celebrated Victory in Europe (VE) Day on May 8, 1945, the British
military commander Bernard Law Montgomery cautioned his troops, “We have won
the German war. Let us now win the peace.”
Months before Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II, the “Big Three”
Allied powers—the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union—met at the
Yalta Conference to discuss Germany’s future. They all wanted to avoid a repeat of
what had happened after World War I, when a postwar economic collapse in
Germany fueled nationalist resentment and the rise of the Nazi Party.
The situation in Germany after World War II was dire. Millions of Germans were
homeless from Allied bombing campaigns that razed entire cities. And millions more
Germans living in Poland and East Prussia became refugees when the Soviet Union
expelled them. With the German economy and government in shambles, the Allies
concluded that Germany needed to be occupied after the war to assure a peaceful
transition to a post-Nazi state.
What the Allies never intended, though, was that their temporary solution to organize
Germany into four occupation zones, each administered by a different Allied army,
would ultimately lead to a divided Germany.
“Only over time, as the Cold War eroded trust between the Soviet Union and the
Western Allies, did these occupation zones coalesce into two different German
nations,” says Thomas Boghardt, a senior historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military
History.
Four Allies, Four Occupation Zones
In July of 1945, the “Big Three” met again at the Potsdam Conference. At Yalta, the
Allies had agreed to a broad framework that included the demilitarization,
democratization and denazification of Germany. With the war officially over, it was
time to initiate a “nuts and bolts” action plan for an Allied occupation of Germany.
Instead of administering and policing Germany side by side, as the Allies did in
postwar Austria, the decision was made at Potsdam to divide Germany into four
distinct occupation zones, one for each Allied nation (including France). The British
were assigned the northwest quadrant, the French the southwest, and the Americans
the southeast. Since the Soviet army already occupied much of eastern Germany, the
Soviet Union was put in charge of the northeast quadrant, which included the capital
Berlin.
Berlin itself was also subdivided into four quadrants, with the British, French, Soviets
and Americans each policing a different zone of the capital, which was fully
surrounded by Soviet-occupied territory.
“At the Potsdam Conference, the idea was that a central authority called the Allied
Control Council would issue joint directives that would then be executed at a lower
level by each Ally in their occupation zone,” says Boghardt, author of Covert Legions:
U.S. Army Intelligence in Germany, 1944-1949. “The devil was in the details, though, and
the longer the occupation lasted, it became clear that this was not workable.”
Rifts Between Soviet and Other Occupied
Zones
From the start, the Soviets ran their occupation zone very differently than the British,
French and Americans.
“The Soviet army and Russian civilians had suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis
during the war,” says Boghardt. “So when it came to carrying out the joint directive of
denazification, for example, they not only arrested Nazi officials, but they considered
all major German landowners to be Nazis. So they confiscated their land.”
The same was true of the joint directive to establish free and democratic elections in
each zone of occupation. On the surface, the Soviets allowed the formation of
independent political parties in their zone, but they soon forced all parties to merge
under a Communist “coalition” controlled by Moscow. The move was heavily criticized
by the Western Allies.
But the biggest rift between the Soviet Union and the rest of the occupying nations
formed around the issue of war reparations. One of the reasons that the German
economy collapsed after World War I was that it had to pay billions of dollars in
reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles. The British, French and Americans
wanted to avoid that mistake, but the Soviet Union, whose own economy was heavily
damaged by the Germans during World War II, wanted Germany to pay up.
A deal was struck in which the Soviet Union agreed to trade food grown in its
occupation zone for cash reparations and finished goods from German factories in
the western occupation zones. But when the Soviets failed to keep up with their
agricultural shipments, the Western Allies cut off reparation payments.
By 1946, tensions escalated further as Soviet military forces helped to establish
Communist regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania. In a famous
speech, Winston Churchill, the former British Prime Minister, described the threat of
Soviet Communism as an “iron curtain” descending across the European continent,
signaling the start of the Cold War. Any chance of cooperation between the Western
and Soviet occupying forces was fading fast.
Tensions Lead to the Berlin Blockade
In 1947, Great Britain and the United States decided to merge their two occupation
zones in order to foster more economic cooperation between the regions. The large
new territory was called “Bizonia” referring to the two zones that made up its borders.
Then the western Allies took things a step further by stepping up economic aid to
Bizonia and the French occupied territory with cash from the Marshall Plan. They also
replaced Germany’s badly inflated currency, the Reichsmark, with a new and more
stable Deutsche mark. All of these actions were taken without Soviet approval.
Tensions came to head when the western Allies tried to circulate the new Deutsche
mark in Berlin. The Soviets boycotted the Allied Control Council, and when the West
didn’t bow to their demands, Joseph Stalin ordered a total blockade of Berlin, located
100 miles inside Soviet-occupied territory.
“Berlin is an island in the Soviet zone,” says Boghardt. “Stalin decided to squeeze the
western Allies where they were most vulnerable. He cut off all access to West Berlin
by road, train and ship, but not by air.”
Berlin Airlift Breaks Blockade
The Americans, British and French responded with the Berlin Airlift, a months-long air
campaign to drop food and fuel into West Berlin that ultimately broke the Soviet
blockade in 1949.
Later that same year, France officially merged its occupied territory with Bizonia,
creating the Federal Republic of Germany, or what became known as West Germany.
In October of 1949, the Soviet Union responded with the establishment of the
German Democratic Republic, a Communist state known as East Germany.
In 1952, East Germany began policing its Western border to stop the flight of
engineers, scientists and doctors to West Germany. Interestingly, the border within
Berlin wasn’t as tightly controlled.
“For eight years, there was that loophole,” says Boghardt, “when it was very easy for
anybody who wanted to flee East Germany to do so. All you had to do was hop on a
subway in East Berlin and exit in West Berlin.”
On the night of August 12 to August 13, 1961, East German soldiers in Berlin laid out
miles of barbed wire that would become the Berlin Wall, sealing the border with West
Germany for the next 28 years.
BY: DAVE ROOS
Dave Roos is a journalist and podcaster based in the U.S. and Mexico. He's the co-host
of Biblical Time Machine, a history podcast, and a writer for the popular podcast Stuff
You Should Know. Learn more at daveroos.com.
Citation Information
Article Title How Germany Was Divided After World War II
Author Dave Roos
Website Name HISTORY
URL https://www.history.com/news/germany-divided-world-war-ii
Date Accessed February 3, 2024
Publisher A&E Television Networks
Last Updated October 4, 2023
Original Published Date April 27, 2022
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