Table Of ContentThe Decision to Divide Germany
T D
he ecision to
D G
ivide ermany
American Foreign Policy
in Transition
John H. Backer
Duke University Press
DURHAM, N.C, 1978
© 1978 by Duke University Press
L.C.C. caïd no. 77-84614
I.S.B.N. 0-8223-0391-4
Printed in the United States of
America by Kingsport Press, Inc.
TO THE MEMORY OF
Philip E. Mosely
Contents
Preface ix
Chapter One. Historical Perceptions and American
Postwar Planning 3
Chapter Two. Early Plans for Partition 17
Chapter Three. The Reparations Issue before
Potsdam 28
Chapter Four. The American Taxpayer and German
Reparations 46
Chapter Five. The Soviet Reparations Claim 61
Chapter Six. Lend-Lease and the Prospect
of a Loan 73
Chapter Seven. Reparations at Potsdam
and Thereafter 88
Chapter Eight. Reconstructing the German Economy:
A Summary 102
Chapter Nine. A Convenient Legend 117
Chapter Ten. The Division of Germany: A Second-
Level Analysis 133
Chapter Eleven. The Critical Conference 149
Chapter Twelve. Conclusions 171
viii Contents
Appendix 1. The Yalta Reparations Protocol 179
Appendix 2. Instructions for the United States
Representative on the Allied Commission
on Reparations [Pauley] 180
Appendix 3. Potsdam Reparations Agreement [Part IV] 186
Appendix 4. Report on German Reparations to the
President of the United States, February
to September 1945, Part IX (III) 188
Appendix 5. Principal Economic Issues on Current
German Problems for Council of Foreign
Ministers’ Meeting, Moscow, Memorandum
No. 2, Annex E 190
Bibliography 195
Index 210
Prëface
This book deals with the circumstances which prompted the decision
to divide Germany along the present borders separating the Federal
and Democratic Republics. It does not concern itself with the eastern
boundaries of the latter nor with the annexation of East Prussia and
Silesia by the Soviet Union and Poland. In other words, the subject
of this inquiry is the de facto reversal of the Potsdam agreement to
establish a unified Germany and the developments which led to this
fundamental change of policy.
There is a widely held belief in this country that the behavior of
the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and particularly its ruthless ex
ploitation of the Russian Zone of occupation made the decision to
divide Germany unavoidable. Traditionalist historians like Herbert
Feis and Arthur Schlesinger supported this conclusion. In their writings
they emphasized Russia’s expansionist aims and cited Soviet disregard
for the Yalta and Potsdam agreements as well as repeated refusals in
1945 and 1946 to proceed with the economic unification of Germany.
More recently the revisionist school of historiography represented
by William A. Williams, Bruce Kuklick, and others has placed the
blame for the division of Europe on the doorstep of the United States.
American economic imperialism, so the revisionists assert, demanded
an aggressive “open-door” policy and free-market economies abroad
in order to make the world safe for the American brand of capitalism.
The common denominator of these two interpretations—a governing
grand design—will be challenged. Undoubtedly, similar long-range
schemes were in the minds of some leaders on both sides of the Iron
Curtain. But in the United States there were also other schemes cancel
ing out the former and it is safe to assume that a similar process took
place inside the Politburo of the Soviet Union. The result then was a
series of small, incremental decisions, sometimes taken at the lower
levels of government and often prompted by expediency rather than
by long-term considerations. The pervasive influence of congressional
x Preface
appropriations committees is a case in point. The primary constant
policy element was the evaluation of the past. Since only two decades
separated the two wars and the correlation of forces in the European
Theater was quite similar, America’s leaders endeavored to learn from
past mistakes. However—as will be shown—to the extent that the
perceptual heritage of the nation was fallacious, new and fateful errors
arose.
On the other hand, the long-range question of whether the partition
of Germany ought to be seen in a positive or negative light will not be
raised or discussed. This generation has been a witness to the problems
which resulted from the division, whereas a discussion of the perils of
an alternative solution merely would take us into an area of specula
tion. The purpose of this study then is to appraise the causes and the
rationale of American policies at the national and military government
levels, as well as the resulting failure to unify the Eastern and Western
Zones of occupation.
Most of the unpublished documents referred to here are stored in the
National Archives in Washington, D.C. I should like to express my
gratitude to Milton Gustavson and Patricia Dowling for facilitating
access to the files of the Department of State, to Thomas E. Hohmann
for expediting declassification of War Department documents; and to
John Taylor for making the research papers of the United States Office
of Strategic Services speedily available. Moreover, I am indebted to
Gordon Stewart, Adam Ulam, Barbara Chotiner, Martha and Karl
Mautner, Douglas Hodgson, Roy Bullock, and William I. Parker, who
read all or parts of the manuscript. William Diebold, Jr. and Herbert
Block were most helpful in their scrutiny of the fourth chapter; so was
Wynfried Jones in our discussions of the first. Otto Nuebel’s incisive
comments on the reparations issue were equally beneficial. Finally, I
want to thank my wife Evelyn without whose enduring patience this
book could not have been completed. Needless to say, the entire
responsibility for the contents of this study remains mine.
