Dismemberment of Germany

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Mutilation of Germany after WWII

The dismemberment of Germany (German: Verstümmelung Deutschlands) was planned by the Allies during World War II in Teheran as well as Yalta and was finalized in Potsdam after the war. The occupying forces divided up the states of the German Reich, eventually forming the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic and Eastern Germany, which was occupied and incorporated by communist nations. These territorial losses clearly exceeded the painful losses of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the Napoleonic Wars (leading to the demise of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806) and those of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I.

History

Map of the division of Germany from the Yalta Conference
"The map is a much-enlarged version of one printed in the February 21, 1944 issue of Time magazine. Time was published—along with Fortune and Life—by the fiercely anti-Communist Henry Luce, which may explain why the map makes no allowance for a Soviet role in the post-war disposition of Germany."[1]
Loss of German Eastern Territories after WWII; After the Potsdam conference, Germany was divided into four occupied zones: Great Britain in the northwest, France in the southwest, the United States in the south and the Soviet Union in the east. Berlin, the capital city situated in Soviet territory, was also divided into four occupied zones.
Germans being expelled from their homeland in Eastern Germany in 1945
Partition crime: Occupation zone borders in Germany, 1947. The territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union, are shown as white as is the likewise detached Saar Protectorate. Berlin is the multinational area within the Soviet zone.
Allied Negotiations and the Dismemberment of Germany, 1981; The world seemingly had learned nothing from the devastating mistakes of the Treaty of Versailles.

The idea of keeping Germany divided into several or many independent and rival states has had a long history. It was a prominent objective of French policy, from Richelieu to Napoleon III and Georges Clemenceau. The hope and desire for the partition of Germany haunted Allied policy-makers during the Second World War, and played an important part in delaying and confusing the efforts to achieve, before Germany's surrender, a consistent and effective Allied policy for the postwar treatment of defeated Germany.

One of the main difficulties was that the proponents of dismemberment never made clear exactly what it really implied. Apparently, the first official discussions took place during Foreign Secretary Eden's visit to Washington D.C. in March 1943. Eden raised with President Franklin D. Roosevelt the question of whether the Allies were going to deal with Germany as a unit after the war, or whether they "were going to insist that it be broken up into several independent states."

Certain members of the Advisory Committee and the expert staff itself were skeptical of the effectiveness of dismemberment as a means of preventing future German aggression and believed that the United States would not be willing, in the long run, to impose and maintain dismemberment by force. They also pointed out that dismemberment would prepare the ground for rallying all Germans against the victorious Powers, would discredit all attempts to develop a democratic régime and spirit in Germany, and would render the economic problem of German livelihood absolutely unmanageable. They foresaw that the Germans would strive in every way to undo partition through playing off the victorious Powers against each other, and would thus increase greatly the dangers of a postwar falling-out among the victors.[2]

Following the First World War, the new Free State of Prussia bore most of Germany's territorial losses but remained the dominant state of the Weimar Republic, accounting for about three-fifths of both its land area and population. Almost all of Germany's territorial losses were again from areas that had been part of Prussia.

Political timeline

  • Austria returns home (Anschluss 1938)
  • Sudetenland returns home (1938)
  • Memelland returns home (1939)
  • Danzig returns home (1939)
  • Tehran Conference (1943)
  • Yalta Conference (1945)
  • Potsdam Conference (1945)
  • Berlin Declaration (1945)
  • Potsdam Agreement (1945)
  • Luxembourg's annexations (1946 and 1949)
  • Saar Protectorate (1947)
  • Paris Protocol (1949)
    • The Committee on Western German frontiers established by the decisions of the Conference held at London in May and June 1948, and composed of representatives of the United States of America, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands met in Paris again on 22 February 1949; it ended its work on 22 March 1949.
  • Dutch annexation of Elten and Selfkant (1949)
  • Belgian annexations (1949)
  • Establishment of East and West Germany (1949)
  • Treaty of Zgorzelec (1950)
  • Minor territorial exchanges between East Germany and Poland (1949 and 1951)
  • Bonn–Paris conventions and de facto return of Heligoland from the UK (1952)
  • Return of Kehl from France (1953)
  • London and Paris Conferences (1954)
  • Austrian State Treaty (1955)
  • Saar Treaty (1956)
  • "Little Reunification" with Saarland (1957)
  • Belgium–Germany border treaty and return of the majority of annexations (1958)
  • Return of Kammerwald from Luxembourg (1959)
  • Ausgleichsvertrag (1960)
  • Return of Selfkant (1963)
    • After the Second World War, on 23 April 1949, the Netherlands annexed Selfkant as part of war reparations, and its inhabitants were given a Dutch passport with the special indication "to be treated as a Dutchman". In March 1957, official negotiations started between the Netherlands and West Germany concerning the return of the area, and on 1 August 1963 the area was returned to Germany in exchange for a payment of 280 million deutschmarks.
  • Polish–East German Baltic Continental Shelf Delimitation Treaty (1968)
  • Treaty of Moscow (1970)
  • Treaty of Warsaw (1970)
  • Four Power Agreement on Berlin (1971)
  • Basic Treaty (1972)
  • Treaty of Prague (1973)
  • United Nations Security Council Resolution 335 (1973)
  • Polish–East German Maritime Boundary in Pomeranian Bay Delimitation Treaty (1989)
  • German partial reunification (1990)
  • German–Polish Border Treaty (1990)
  • Two Plus Four Treaty (1991)
  • Treaty of Good Neighbourship (1991)
    • In the Treaty Poland and Germany agreed to respect the rights of national minorities living on the other side of the border, and to promote cultural contacts, particularly among young people.[3]

Partition Plans

The way Germany was divided into Western- and Soviet-aligned republics after the Second World War was hardly a straightforward process. The Allies started thinking about whether and how to dismember Germany in the middle of the war and considered several options. Some, like the Dutch request for territorial compensation, were ignored. Others, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s suggestion of a north-south split, would morph into the east-west divide of the Cold War. Much of the planning during the war assumed that Germany should be denied the capacity to ever wage war again. Hence proposals to internationalize its heavy industries in the Ruhr — or, in the case of the French, to seize them outright. Jean Monnet, a French civil servant who would later play a major role in the creation of what is now the European Union, drafted a plan that involved taking the Ruhr area and the Saar from Germany. The rationale being not only to keep Germany weak, but also that the coal and steel industries there could speed up France’s postwar recovery. French wartime leader Charles de Gaulle endorsed the plan, but it was never fully implemented. The Ruhr was placed under an international administration for a few years — the International Authority for the Ruhr — until the European Coal and Steel Community made it redundant.
The French got the Saar, in a way. From 1947 to 1957, it was a French protectorate. The population voted against independence in a referendum that year, which the Western powers interpreted as a desire to rejoin Germany. But France would retain the right to mine coal from the Saar until 1981. [...] In the end, the Netherlands got only a few border towns from the Germans, nearly all of which were returned in 1963 after what was then West Germany had paid reparations. The Americans shared the French belief that Germany’s industrial capacity should be diminished in order to prevent another war. [...] The idea of splitting Germany into a northern and a southern half may not have originated with Welles. On his way to the Cairo and Tehran Conferences of 1943, President Roosevelt himself sketched out a similar proposal. He put predominantly Catholic Baden, Bavaria and Württemberg in one state and divided the mostly Protestant north along a line running from Stettin to Berlin to Leipzig to Bayreuth. Roosevelt’s thinking, wrote British prime minister Winston Churchill in his memoirs, was that Prussia needed to be detached from the rest and treated “sternly”. By this point, the American leader apparently did not blame western and southern Germans for the war anymore. “I should like to see them live tolerably,” he said at Tehran, “and in a generation they would feel differently.”
The United States, Roosevelt believed, should take responsibility for the northwestern zone, including Bremen and Hamburg, as well as Berlin. The British would take the south; the Soviets the remaining territory in the east. The American and British zones ended up the other way around, because planning for the invasion of Europe was already underway by the middle of 1943. This called for British and Commonwealth troops to attack from the north, through the Low Countries, and for the Americans to invade Germany from the south. The British were keen on this division of labor, because it meant they would be in a position to oversee the dismantling of the German fleet. Roosevelt, for his part, wasn’t fixated on the south for any other reason than he feared it would imply taking on responsibility for postwar France and possibly Italy as well, given supply lines and their proximity. When Churchill assured him this wouldn’t be the case, he was persuaded. Churchill generally followed Roosevelt’s thinking and said the idea of a “Danubian Confederation”, comprised of the southern German states, Austria and Hungary, had “always been attractive” to him. But when he met with Joseph Stalin in Moscow the following year, the Soviet leader insisted on keeping Hungary separate. “Uncle Joe wants Poland, Czecho and Hungary to form a realm of independent anti-Nazi, pro-Russian states,” he reported. Churchill came up with a proposal similar to Roosevelt’s, except it put the border between the two northern zones much farther to the west. He was also inclined to respect the historical boundaries of the German states. Whereas Roosevelt had drawn a straight line through the Rhineland, Hesse and north of Bavaria, Churchill sensibly stuck with the borders the Germans already knew. The Soviets approved; the Americans were appalled. Churchill had not only taken the division of Germany out of Anglo-American hands and brought the Soviets into the equation; he had promised the Russians far more territory than Roosevelt. That would prove impossible to take back.
The decision to split Germany into four occupational zones (including one for the French) was made at Yalta in February 1945. But the Allied leaders didn’t decide then and there what the borders of those zones would be, nor if they should be permanent. It wasn’t until the Potsdam Conference five months later, when the war in Europe had ended, that the powers agreed on the division that would persist throughout the Cold War. France got the Saar and part of the Rhineland. The British took the north, with the ports of Bremen and Hamburg. (Although rather than scuttle the German fleet, most ships were divided among the victors.) Large parts of Prussia were ceded to Poland, which would for all intents and purposes be a Soviet puppet state. The Russians took part of East Prussia for themselves and called it Kaliningrad. The Potsdam agreement called for an “orderly” expulsion of Germans from the eastern territories (which made millions homeless) and the dismantling of heavy industries. It didn’t take the Western Allies more than a few years to realize this had been a terrible mistake. By keeping the West Germans down, they were not only breeding German resentment; they were holding back the economic recovery of the whole of Western Europe. When this policy was reversed in the late 1940s, and West Germany given Marshall aid from the United States, it paved the way for the famed Wirtschaftswunder that lifted all of free Europe’s spirits. The Soviets, by contrast, kept sucking reparations out of their Germany, which would delay its recovery by years, if not decades.[4]

See also

Further reading

External links

References

  1. ↑ Time Magazine map of the post-WWII “ German Jigsaw “
  2. ↑ Dismemberment of Germany the Allied Negotiations from Yalta to Potsdam
  3. ↑ Poland's record on minorities 1919–1939, which includes their abrogation of signed treaties on minorities, is reprehensible.
  4. ↑ How Germany Was Divided: A History of Partition Plans, 2020 (Archive)
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