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.
THESIS STATEMENT FOR WW2 AFTERMATH FREE
The same was true of the joint directive to establish free and democratic elections in each zone of occupation. “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. “The Soviet army and Russian civilians had suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis during the war,” says Boghardt. “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 Zonesįrom the start, the Soviets ran their occupation zone very differently than the British, French and Americans. “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. 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.īerlin 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. The British were assigned the northwest quadrant, the French the southwest, and the Americans the southeast.
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). With the war officially over, it was time to initiate a “nuts and bolts” action plan for an Allied occupation of Germany. At Yalta, the Allies had agreed to a broad framework that included the demilitarization, democratization and denazification of Germany. In July of 1945, the “Big Three” met again at the Potsdam Conference. President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill standing together before starting sessions at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945.
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. And millions more Germans living in Poland and East Prussia became refugees when the Soviet Union expelled them.
Millions of Germans were homeless from Allied bombing campaigns that razed entire cities. The situation in Germany after World War II was dire. 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. 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. 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.
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