Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (27 page)

The British were extracting at most $29 million in reparations from Germany; but the occupation was costing London $80 million a year, leaving the British taxpayer to foot the bill for the difference even as the British government was forced to impose bread rationing at home (an expedient that had been avoided throughout the war). In the opinion of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, the British were ‘paying reparations to the Germans.’ The Americans were not under the same economic constraints and their zone had not suffered as much war damage, but the situation appeared no less absurd to them—the US Army in particular was not well pleased, since the cost of feeding millions of hungry Germans fell on its own budget. As George Kennan observed: ‘the unconditional surrender of Germany . . . left us with the sole responsibility for a section of Germany which had never been economically self-supporting in modern times and the capacity of which for self-support had been catastrophically reduced by the circumstances of the war and the German defeat. At the moment we accepted that responsibility we had no program for the rehabilitation of the economy of our zone, preferring to leave all that to later settlement by international agreement.’

Faced with this dilemma, and growing German resentment at the dismantling of plant and installations for shipment east, the US military governor, General Clay, unilaterally suspended deliveries of reparations from the American zone to the Soviet Union (or anywhere else) in May 1946, observing that Soviet authorities had failed to keep their part of the Potsdam arrangements. The British followed suit two months later. This signaled a first parting of the ways, but no more than that. The French, like the USSR, still wanted reparations, and all four Allies were still formally committed to the 1946 ‘Levels-of-Industry’ agreement under which Germany was to be held down to a standard of living no higher than the European average (excluding Britain and the Soviet Union). Moreover the British Cabinet, meeting in May 1946, was still reluctant to accept a formal division of occupied Germany into eastern and western halves, with all the implications that would have for European security.

But it was becoming obvious that the four Occupying Powers were not about to reach an agreement. Once the main Nuremberg Trial ended in October 1946 and the terms of the Paris Peace Treaties were finalized the following month, the wartime Allies were bound by little more than their co-responsibility for Germany, the contradictions of which thus came increasingly to the fore. The Americans and British agreed at the end of 1946 to fuse the economies of their two occupation zones into a so-called ‘Bizone’; but even this did not yet signify a firm division of Germany, much less a commitment to integrating the Bizone into the West. On the contrary: three months later, in February 1947, the French and British ostentatiously signed the Dunkirk Treaty in which they committed themselves to mutual support against any future
German
aggression. And US Secretary of State Marshall was still optimistic, in early 1947, that whatever arrangements were made to resolve the German economic conundrum need not result in a divided Germany. On this, at least, East and West were still in formal accord.

The real break came in the spring of 1947, at the (March 10th-April 24th) Moscow meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, convened once again to seek agreement on a Peace Treaty for Germany and Austria. By now the fault lines were clear. The British and Americans were determined to build up the Western German economy, in order that the Germans might support themselves but also to contribute to the revival of the European economy in general. The Soviet representatives wanted a restoration of reparations from the Western zones of Germany and, to this end, a united German administration and economy as initially envisaged (albeit vaguely) at Potsdam. But by now the Western Allies were no longer seeking a single German administration. For this would entail not just the abandonment of the population of the western zones of Germany—by now a political consideration in its own right—but the effective handing over of the country to the Soviet sphere of control, given the military asymmetry of the time.

As Robert K. Murphy, the political adviser to the US Military Government in Germany, recognized, ‘it was the Moscow Conference of 1947 . . . which really rang down the Iron Curtain.’ Ernest Bevin had abandoned any serious hope of agreement over Germany before he even arrived in Moscow, but for Marshall (and Bidault) it was the defining moment. For Molotov and Stalin as well, no doubt. By the time the four Foreign Ministers next met, in Paris from June 27th-July 2nd to discuss Marshall’s dramatic new Plan, the Americans and British had already agreed (on May 23rd) to permit German representation on a new Bizone ‘Economic Council’, the embryonic prelude to a West German government.

From this point on, things moved rapidly forward. Neither side made or sought any further concessions: the Americans and British, who had long feared a separate Russo-German Peace and had countenanced delays and compromises in order to forestall it, ceased to take into account an eventuality they could now discount. In August they unilaterally increased output in the Bizone (to a chorus of Soviet
and
French criticism). The Joint Chiefs of Staff directive JCS 1067 (the ‘Morgenthau plan’) was replaced by JCS 1779 which formally acknowledged the new American goals: economic unification of the western zone of Germany and the encouragement of German self-government. For the Americans especially, Germans were rapidly ceasing to be the enemy.
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The Foreign Ministers—Molotov, Bevin, Marshall and Bidault—met one last time, in London, from November 25th through December 16th 1947. It was a curious gathering, since their relations had already in practice broken down. The Western Allies were moving forward with independent plans for West European recovery, while two months earlier Stalin had established the Cominform, instructed the Communist parties of France and Italy to take an intransigent line in their countries’ affairs and clamped down sharply on the Communist-controlled countries in what was now a Soviet bloc. The Ministers discussed, as in the past, the prospects for an all-German government under Allied control and other terms for an eventual Peace Treaty. But there was no further agreement on the common administration of Germany or plans for its future and the meeting broke up without scheduling any future gatherings.

Instead Britain, France and the US began tripartite discussions on Germany’s future at an extended conference, once again held in London, beginning on February 23rd, 1948. In that same week the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia staged its successful coup, signaling Stalin’s definitive abandonment of his earlier strategy and his acceptance of the inevitability of confrontation rather than agreement with the West. In the shadow of the Prague coup, France and Britain extended their Dunkirk Treaty into the Brussels Pact of March 17th, binding Britain, France and the Benelux countries in a mutual defense alliance.

There was now nothing to inhibit the Western leaders and the London Conference rapidly agreed to extend the Marshall Plan to western Germany and lay down schemes for an eventual government for a West German state (an arrangement approvedby the French delegation in exchange for the—temporary—separation of the Saar from Germany and a proposal for an independent authority to oversee the industry of the Ruhr). These plans constituted an explicit departure from the spirit of the Potsdam accords and General Vassily Sokolovsky, the Soviet representative on the Allied Control Council (ACC) in Berlin, duly protested (neglecting to acknowledge the Soviet Union’s own frequent breaches of those same accords).

On March 10th, Sokolovsky condemned plans for western Germany as the enforced imposition of capitalist interests upon a German population denied the chance to demonstrate its desire for Socialism, and repeated Soviet assertions that Western powers were abusing their presence in Berlin—which he claimed was part of the Soviet Zone—to interfere in eastern German affairs. Ten days later, at an ACC meeting in Berlin on March 20th, Sokolovsky denounced the ‘unilateral actions’ of the Western Allies, ‘taken in Western Germany and which are against the interests of the peaceful countries and peace-loving Germans who seek the peaceful unity and democratization of their country’. He then swept out of the room, followed by the rest of the Soviet delegation. No date was set for a further meeting. The joint Allied occupation of Germany was over: less than two weeks later, on April 1st, the Soviet military authorities in Berlin began to interfere with surface traffic between western Germany and the Western Allies’ zones of occupation in Berlin. The real Cold War in Europe had begun.

It should be clear from this narrative that there is little to be gained from asking ‘who started the Cold War?’ To the extent that the Cold War was about Germany, the final outcome—a divided country—was probably preferred by all parties to a Germany united against them. No one planned this outcome in May 1945, but few were deeply discontented with it. Some German politicians, notably Konrad Adenauer himself, even owed their career to the division of their country: had Germany remained a quadri-zonal or united country, an obscure local politician from the far-western Catholic Rhineland would almost certainly not have made it to the top.

But Adenauer could hardly have espoused the division of Germany as a goal, however much he welcomed it in private. His chief opponent in the first years of the Federal Republic, the Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher, was a Protestant from West Prussia and a tireless advocate of German unity. In contrast to Adenauer
he
would readily have accepted a neutralized Germany as the price for a single German state, which was what Stalin appeared to be offering. And Schumacher’s position was probably the more popular one in Germany at the time, which was why Adenauer had to tread carefully and ensure that the responsibility for a divided Germany fell squarely on the occupying forces.

By 1948 the United States, like Great Britain, was not unhappy to see the emergence of a divided Germany, with American influence dominant in the larger, western segment. But although there were some, like George Kennan, who had perceptively anticipated this outcome (as early as 1945 he had concluded that the USA had ‘no choice but to lead her section of Germany . . . to a form of independence so prosperous, so secure, so superior, that the east cannot threaten it’), they were in the minority. The Americans, like Stalin, were improvising in these years. It is sometimes suggested that certain key American decisions and declarations, notably the Truman Doctrine of March 1947, precipitated Stalin’s retreat from compromise to rigidity and that in this sense the responsibility for European divisions lay with Washington’s insensitivity or, worse, its calculated intransigence. But this is not so.

For the Truman Doctrine, to take this example, had remarkably little impact on Soviet calculations. President Truman’s March 12th 1947 announcement to Congress that ‘It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure’ was a direct response to London’s inability to continue with aid to Greece and Turkey following the British economic crisis of February 1947. America would have to take over Britain’s role. Truman thus sought Congressional approval for a $400 million increase in his budget for overseas aid: to secure the funding he presented the request in the context of a crisis of Communist insurgency.

Congress took him seriously, but Moscow did not. Stalin was not much interested in Turkey and Greece—the chief beneficiaries of the aid package—and he understood perfectly well that his own sphere of interest was unlikely to be affected by Truman’s grandstanding. On the contrary, he continued to suppose that there were very good prospects for a split within the Western camp of which the American assumption of erstwhile British responsibilities in the Eastern Mediterranean was a sign and precursor. Whatever led Stalin to adjust his calculations in Eastern Europe, it was decidedly not the rhetoric of American domestic politics.
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The immediate cause of the division of Germany and Europe lies rather in Stalin’s own errors in these years. In central Europe, where he would have preferred a united Germany, weak and neutral, he squandered his advantage in 1945 and subsequent years by uncompromising rigidity and confrontational tactics. If Stalin’s hope had been to let Germany rot until the fruit of German resentment and hopelessness fell into his lap, then he miscalculated seriously—though there were moments when the Allied authorities in western Germany wondered whether he might yet succeed. In that sense the Cold War in Europe was an unavoidable outcome of the Soviet dictator’s personality and the system over which he ruled.

But the fact remains that Germany was at his feet, as his opponents well knew—‘The trouble is that we are playing with fire which we have nothing with which to put out’, as Marshall put it to the National Security Council on February 13th 1948. All the Soviet Union needed to do was accept the Marshall Plan and convince a majority of the Germans of Moscow’s good faith in seeking a neutral, independent Germany. In 1947 this would radically have shifted the European balance of advantage. Whatever Marshall, Bevin or their advisers might have thought of such maneuvers, they would have been helpless to prevent them. That such tactical calculations were beyond Stalin cannot be credited to the West. As Dean Acheson put it on another occasion, ‘We were fortunate in our opponents.’

Looking back, it is somewhat ironic that after fighting a murderous war to reduce the power of an over-mighty Germany at the heart of the European continent, the victors should have proven so unable to agree on post-war arrangements to keep the German colossus down that they ended up dividing it between them in order to benefit separately from its restored strength. It had become clear—first to the British, then to the Americans, belatedly to the French and finally to the Soviets—that the only way to keep Germany from being the problem was to change the terms of the debate and declare it the solution. This was uncomfortable, but it worked. In the words of Noel Annan, a British intelligence officer in occupied Germany, ‘It was odious to find oneself in alliance with people who had been willing to go along with Hitler to keep Communism at bay. But the best hope for the West was to encourage the Germans themselves to create a Western democratic state.