Judgment not in Germany: Chapter 4

The Four-Power-Team Pulls Apart

The Four-Power-Team Pulls Apart

The industrial plan was the translation of the Potsdam Agreement into production figures and percentages. Translated into a set of figures, the contradiction between those articles of the Potsdam Agreement, which contained industrial disarmament and the satisfaction of the Allied reparations wishes, and Article 19, which said that the German people were to be left with sufficient funds, became clear to all eyes to be able to exist without outside help. Certainly the industrial plan for 1949 calculated (on paper) a not inconsiderable export surplus, but the reality of the western zones spoke a different language. By April 1946, 1 million tons of food had been shipped to the British zone and 1/2 million tons to the American zone. It was abundantly clear that Germany was dependent on imports even to starve. The catastrophic food situation had an impact on the mining industry, this on the steel industry (2 million tons instead of the permitted 5.8 tons), this again on the production of artificial fertilizers on agriculture and on the other branches of industry. The deficit, as it now turned out, had to be borne by the British and American taxpayers. The starvation and depravity of the German population cost them more than German comfort. Revenge was not only sweet, but also exceedingly expensive.

On closer inspection, the Americans noticed that the Russians (and French) were taking goods from current production which, if the German economy were to be treated as one, would have had to pay for the food imports to be exported. The Russians had found that the German machines served the economic development of the Soviet Union better if they produced locally for the Soviet economy than if they rusted away in a siding somewhere in the Soviet Union. In December 1945, the Russians took over Soviet ownership of various German factories and converted them into the legal form of Soviet AGs in the summer of 1946. The uniform treatment of imports and exports for all four zones was to become the price riddle (without a solution), on which the Control Council failed.

The American Secretary of State Byrnes (6), appointed shortly before the Potsdam Conference by Truman, attempted this task. While Byrnes had no foreign policy experience, over the course of 35 years in Congress he had matured into a Talleyrand of ambulatory walkers who believed he could apply the same tricks he had used to dealing with the Republicans to the Russians. After Yalta he was very optimistic, after Potsdam still moderately optimistic. At the first meeting in London of the Council of Foreign Ministers set up in Potsdam, he tried to put his skills to the test. He strove for a compromise that the governments to be formed in Eastern and Southeastern Europe should be friendly to the Soviet Union, with the United States not supporting anti-Soviet aspirations, but that on the other hand these governments should establish their own internal order on the basis of the people's right to self-determination could decide. Molotov heard this with difficulty. So in December 1945 Byrnes set out for Moscow, where the desired compromise then took the form of handing over the peoples of eastern and south-eastern Europe, for better or for worse, to the Soviets, in whose hands they were (according to Byrnes) anyway, while Stalin allowed the nominal participation of bourgeois democratic politicians in the governments he controlled. This "compromise" provoked dissatisfaction among Truman, the Republicans, and that wing of the Democrats who were less willing to cede Texas to the Russians for the sake of peace if necessary.

In the future, Byrnes only appeared at international conferences framed by Senators Tom Connally (Democrat) and Arthur Vandenberg (Republican). The latter had become important because the forthcoming peace treaties with the former Axis powers required the votes of the Republicans, unless - like the Treaty of Versailles - they were to fail because of opposition from the Senate. The "bipartisanship" of foreign policy that became necessary as a result gave it a more conservative streak, which led to a gradual departure from Roosevelt's constructions.

When the German question, which had been dormant since Potsdam, was taken up again at the meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in Paris, which began at the end of April 1946, it found an American Foreign Minister who was a burned child in his Ostpolitik. Byrnes urged that Germany's remaining resources should be shared and that the export question should be resolved. A committee was to prepare the economic reunification of Germany within 90 days. Molotov, on the other hand, insisted on a reverse approach. First the question of reparations should be solved and the Soviet Union should be given the 10 billion dollars promised in Yalta, then economic unity could be restored. In the Control Council, the Russians explained that the equalization of imports and exports was a zonal matter until the reparations were settled. The Potsdam Agreement called for “the various local conditions to be taken into account if necessary.”

When the points of view could no longer be brought to a common denominator and the right of veto prevented a decision by the Control Council, General Clay announced on April 8, 1946 that the Americans would stop delivering reparations until economic unity had been established. In the dispute over reparations, it turned out that the occupying powers had fundamentally different conceptions of Germany policy. Russia was striving for the rapid strengthening of the Soviet economy and expected Germany to make a maximum contribution to this goal. The Americans saw in Germany an Allied condominium with inferior rights and a lower standard of living, into which they did not want to invest anything. Byrnes was still building a golden bridge by promoting a 25-year four-power pact for disarmament and demilitarization of Germany that had been discussed with Stalin and proposed to the Allies in February. On the one hand, Molotov wanted the pact to be extended to 40 years, but on the other hand he found it inadequate, since it neither mentioned the 10 billion dollars nor laid down the details of the "democratization" of Germany. Byrnes allowed himself to be discussed about democratization, but on the question of reparations he could not and would not make any concessions for which the American taxpayer was ultimately responsible.

On July 10, 1946, Molotov launched an attack in Paris. He subjected the various American Germany plans to caustic criticism. The conversion of Germany into a pasture (Morgenthau), the obliteration of the German state (Shirer), the separation of the Ruhr area (White), as well as the plans for the division of Germany into partial states (Hull) and their offshoots in “federalism” (Clay) became the calculated for Americans. Deciding on the structure of the state is just as much a matter for the German population as it is about the separation of areas. German peacetime production should be increased rigorously (compared to the industrial plan). A German government was to be established, which was to be responsible for the two tasks of "eradicating the remains of fascism in Germany and fulfilling Germany's obligations to the Allies." If the government had proven itself in these tasks, then a peace treaty could be concluded.

If the United States had strained Russian nerves with an embarrassing harping on the right of peoples to self-determination that did not correspond to Roosevelt's system, the Russians were no longer gentle on their nerves either. Discontent grew, and Byrnes declared that the United States refused to take responsibility for the "chaos" caused by the zoning of Germany. He called on the other occupying powers to merge their zones with the American one. Since the request was addressed to the various governments and not to the Control Council, no nation could veto it. Only the British agreed to accept the American proposal.

On September 5, 1946, the first agreement on the amalgamation of the two zones was signed, and the following day Byrnes delivered a speech in Stuttgart that had been decided on in Paris. According to her, the political elimination of Germany was still the core of American Germany policy. Those Potsdam resolutions relating to the demilitarization of Germany and the reparations to be paid by it were to be carried out in their entirety. But at the same time, on the basis of the Potsdam Agreement, Germany was to be left with sufficient industrial capacity to be able to maintain the average standard of living without foreign help. Byrnes demanded: "Germany must be given the opportunity to export goods so that she can import enough to support her economy." Byrnes had negated certain consequences of the Potsdam policy without attacking the premises. Byrnes believed that Germany's political inability to act could somehow be linked to its economic viability.

The institutional structure of the United Economic Area (7) (Bizone) was an expression of this Germany policy. The five central offices that were set up were divided between Bielefeld, Frankfurt and Stuttgart to avoid establishing a seat of government. They were subordinate to executive committees made up of the departmental ministers of the eight countries. The implementation of their decisions was left to the individual countries, which thus formed the only political units capable of acting. The American directive of September 30, 1946, stipulated that power should be vested primarily in the states (not states!) and only secondarily, and on individual and narrowly limited issues, in a federal government. Government should be as decentralized as is compatible with the conditions of modern economic life. Although the directive spoke of a federal state, it meant a confederation of states. However, the maximally decentralized German administration faced a maximally centralized military government, which made all decisions in General Clay's Berlin staff. The practical feasibility of the “federal” structure therefore did not need to be put to the test.

In his Stuttgart speech Byrnes had managed the feat of linking the violently contradictory formulas of the two irreconcilably opposed schools of American policy on Germany with one another, badly and rightly. In addition to the constant repetition of the anti-Germanic slogan that the existing conditions in Germany were only the result of its aggression, he also wove the core sentence of the opposite direction "Germany is a part of Europe" into his speech. The inner-American explosion was inevitable. US Secretary of Commerce and former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who had long since disapproved of Truman's policies, saying that dispelling Russian suspicions should be the primary concern of US foreign policy, gave a speech at Madison Square Garden on September 12, 1946 , which Truman had publicly but "inadvertently" endorsed. As usual, Wallace attacked the “Get Tough with Russia” policy in sharp terms and said that one only had to be tough on England, which wanted to return to the imperialist balance-of-power policy. He added to the excitement with a memorandum attacking a bipartisan foreign policy that conceded too much to "isolationism masquerading as harsh realism." Byrnes protested, and Truman was forced to fire Wallace. He wrote to his mother: "I haven't been this angry since Chicago. So I called him this morning and told him I couldn't use him anymore and he took it so kindly I wanted to undo it. So now I'm rid of him, and all the oddballs are throwing tantrums.” The prophet of the "Century of the Little Man" was succeeded by the multi-millionaire W. Averell Harriman, who, as ambassador to Moscow, was one of the first to express grave misgivings about Roosevelt's Russia policy.

(6)

“Byrnes”

James F Byrnes: Speaking Frankly, New York 1947.

(7)

“United Economic Area”

Walter Strauss: Development and construction of the United Economic Area. Walter Vogel: West Germany 1945-1950. The establishment of constitutional and administrative institutions in the countries of the three western occupation zones, Koblenz 1956.