The Division of Germany

The superpower struggle for control of Germany took the cold war to a menacing level. The agreements reached at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945 provided for Germany’s division into four zones, each of which was controlled by one of the four principal victors in World War II—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France. However, the superpowers disagreed on how to treat Germany. The U.S. occupation forces undertook to reprogram German attitudes by controlling the press and censoring all media in the U.S. zone to ensure that they did not express fascist values. In contrast, believing that Nazism was an extreme form of capitalism, Stalin confiscated the estates of wealthy Germans and redistributed them to ordinary people and supporters.

A second disagreement, concerning the economy, led to Germany’s partition. According to the American plan for coordinating the various segments of the German economy, surplus crops from the Soviet-occupied areas would feed urban populations in the western zones; in turn, industrial goods would be sent to the USSR. The Soviets upset this plan. Following the Allied agreement that the USSR would receive reparations from German resources, the Soviets seized German equipment, shipping it all to the Soviet Union. They transported skilled German workers, engineers, and scientists to the USSR to work as forced laborers. The Soviets also manipulated the currency in their zone, enabling the USSR to buy German goods at unfairly low prices. In response, the western Allies agreed to merge their zones into a West German state, and the United States began an economic buildup of the western zone under the Marshall Plan. Notions of a permanently weakened Germany ended as the United States enlisted many former Nazi officials as spies and bureaucrats to jump-start the economy and pursue the cold war.

On July 24, 1948, Stalin retaliated by using Soviet troops to blockade Germany’s capital, Berlin. Like Germany as a whole, the city—located more than one hundred miles deep into the Soviet zone and thus cut off from western territory—had been divided into four occupation zones. The Soviets also refused to allow western vehicles to travel through the Soviet zone to reach Berlin. The United States responded decisively with the Berlin airlift—Operation Vittles, as U.S. pilots called it—flying in millions of tons of provisions to some two million isolated citizens (Map 27.2). Given the limited number of available transport planes, pilots kept the plane engines on to achieve a rapid turnaround that would ensure adequate delivery. The Soviets ended their blockade in May 1949, but the cold war rhetoric of good versus evil made the divided capital of Berlin an enduring symbol of the capitalist-communist divide.

The creation of competing military alliances added to cold war tensions (Map 27.3). A few months after the establishment of the West German state in 1948, the USSR formed an East German state. In 1949, the United States, Canada, and their allies in western Europe and Scandinavia formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which provided a unified military force for its member countries. In 1955, after the United States forced France and Britain to invite West Germany to join NATO, the Soviet Union retaliated by establishing with its satellite countries the military organization commonly called the Warsaw Pact. By that time, both the United States and the USSR had accelerated arms buildups: the Soviets had exploded their own atomic bomb in 1949, and both nations then tested increasingly powerful nuclear weapons, outstripping the individual might of the formerly dominant European powers.