A History of Modern Germany by Dietrich Orlow;

Author:Dietrich Orlow;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2025-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Allied Visions and Plans, 1941–1945

In February 1943 the Allies announced that they would not negotiate a peace treaty with any Reich government; they would accept only a declaration of “unconditional surrender.” The policy of unconditional surrender deprived the Germans of any recognized role in the country’s immediate future, but it left unanswered a host of questions about the Allies’ own ideas and approaches. Generally speaking, the Russians were most anxious to reach concrete decisions before the hostilities had ended. As early as July 1941, the Soviets demanded the dismemberment of Germany. In principle, American and British planners agreed that the Reich should be divided into three or more independent states. At the same time, especially U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was reluctant to draw up concrete plans for the future of a country that, as he put it, “We have not yet conquered.”

As the tide of the war turned, however, the Americans and the British, too, began to be concerned over the lack of concrete agreements for Germany’s postwar future. The Big Three agreed on the eradication of Nazism and resolved that the Reich should not again be in a position to wage war on its neighbors. But the Western powers also had to recognize that the total defeat of Germany would create a power vacuum in Central Europe that would bring with it far-reaching consequences. Almost by definition, a powerless and dismembered Germany would mean Russian hegemonic control of Central Europe. Indeed, some Western analysts expected that at the time of Germany’s surrender the Red Army would have reached the Rhine in its westward push. The prospect of Russian domination in Germany was not particularly disturbing to those in the West who expected the wartime alliance of the Big Three to continue as a peacetime partnership, but others were less sanguine. As the Soviets made their heavy-handed presence felt in Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945, installing communist regimes that were clearly not democratically elected, especially Winston Churchill and the British grew increasingly reluctant to tolerate the expansion of Soviet power.

The Americans remained divided. Henry Morgenthau Jr., the U.S. secretary of the treasury and Roosevelt’s personal friend, argued that a complete power vacuum in Central Europe was the only answer to the “German problem.” In contrast, Morgenthau’s colleague in the U.S. cabinet, Secretary of War Henry Stimson (the War and Navy Departments were not joined and reorganized into the Department of Defense until 1947), and officials in the State Department insisted an economically strong Germany was needed if Europe as a whole was to recover and stand on its own feet.

By the end of 1944, when the Allied armies stood poised to carry the war into Germany 241proper, the Big Three had not yet made a determination of Germany’s territorial and societal future. In response to a British suggestion, the Big Three had agreed in September 1943 that after the Third Reich had capitulated each of the Big Three would administer a zone of occupation. Largely to dilute Russian influence in Germany, the British proposed that France should also be assigned a zone of occupation.

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