1. Discuss the details of the Marshall Plan in comparison with the Morgenthau Plan. What were the reasons that led the United States to implement the Marshall Plan? What were the repercussions of this decision with regard to the denazification of Germany? How did the United States profit from this decision in the post-war period?
References
Reading Assignment
· Germany from Partition to Reunification by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., pp. 1–54 and 104–147
· A Concise History of Germany by Mary Ful
ook, pp. 205–235
Commentary
Events Leading to World War II
Before jumping to the end of the Nazi regime in 1945 and the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, I do want to provide a very
ief historical overview of the Nazis' aggressive foreign policy before and during World War II.
After Hitler had secured his dictatorship through the Röhm-Putsch in 1934, he made no secret of his overall intentions to increase Germany's military power. He violated the Treaty of Versailles by introducing military conscription in 1935 and began to expand the German Wehrmacht into a huge army (in part through conscription, in part by dissolving the SA into the Wehrmacht). In 1936, German troops occupied the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, while, at the same time, providing military support for General Franco, who became dictator of Spain the same year. Two years later, in 1938, Germany marched into Austria and proclaimed the Anschluss (union) of the two countries. In September of that year, the British Prime Minister Chamberlain appeased Hitler at an international conference in Munich, after which Hitler immediately occupied first the Sudentenland (the German-heritage region of Czechoslovakia) and, half a year later, the remaining Czech lands, naming them the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Although France and Great Britain still did not engage the Nazis at that time, they publicly vowed to defend Poland should Hitler dare to invade it as well. Although Hitler continued to assert his peaceful intentions, everybody who had followed his political career or was even vaguely familiar with Mein Kampf knew that war was inevitable. This is precisely what happened on September 1, 1939: Hitler invaded Poland. In response, France and Great Britain declared war against Germany.
The Second World War in Europe (September 1939–May 1945)
Given Germany's immense military advantage (1.5 million well-equipped German soldiers against an understaffed and unprepared Polish army of mostly volunteers), it was no surprise that the so-called Blitzkrieg (lightning war) against Poland lasted only four weeks and ended with Poland's total capitulation. Hitler's attack of Denmark, Norway, and France was similarly successful. Only the invasion of Great Britain (codeword: Operation Sea Lion) did not go as planned, because the German air force failed to establish air superiority, without which an invasion of the island was all but impossible. Next to the Americans, Hitler admired the British the most, which is why he tried to negotiate a separate treaty with them several times, to no avail. He was more successful with Italy and Japan, and in September of 1940, he formed an alliance with both of them. (Japan was supposed to tie down the Americans should they enter the war, which indeed happened in December of 1941 after Japan's attack on Pearl Ha
or and Germany's declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941.)
Hitler's disdain for all Slavic peoples ran as deep as his admiration for the British and the Americans. So, although he had already signed a pact of nonaggression with Stalin on August 23, 1939, he turned against Russia when the planned invasion of Great Britain was out of the question. He did so partly because he considered Russia the last support for British resistance, and partly because the conquest of Lebensraum (living space) in the East had always been pivotal to his politics. The attack started on June 22, 1941. Although the Wehrmacht killed or captured about two million Russian soldiers and advanced as far as 200 miles short of Moscow, it did not succeed in destroying the Russian army nor did it force Stalin to su
ender or the Russian state to collapse. Starting in January of 1942, Stalin ordered a series of counteroffensives. The battle waged back and forth until November of 1942, when Hitler's sixth army found itself encircled and outnumbered by Russian troops at Stalingrad. Of the more than 300,000 men of the sixth army, only about 90,000 survived and were taken prisoners, and only about 5,000 of those made it back home to Germany after the war had ended. The Russian losses in Stalingrad, however, were even higher than the Germans', making this battle one of the most costly in the history of human warfare.
It is generally agreed by military historians that Hitler's defeat at Stalingrad marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. On June 6, 1944, the Allied forces landed in Normandy, France, and they took the Rhineland in March of 1945. Meanwhile, the Soviets had pushed the German forces back toward Berlin from the East and met up with Allied forces in April of 1945 at the Elbe River. Hitler spent the last few months of the war in his bunker in Berlin, increasingly losing touch with reality. (An intriguing and much discussed film version of Hitler's last days is Der Untergang [Downfall] by Oliver Hirschbiegel [2004].) Following Hitler, Goe
els and other leading officials of the Nazi regime committed suicide in late April. Germany su
endered unconditionally on May 9, 1945. The war in the Pacific between the United States and Japan, however, went on for a few more months. It was finally ended by the American use of the atom bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians.
At the end of the war, Germany had lost more than seven million people or more than ten percent of its population in 1939. The overall loss of life in World War II was roughly sixty-two million, with the Soviet Union losing almost twenty-one million people, half of them civilians. The Saar region was detached from Germany and made an autonomous province under French control. (In a later referendum in 1957, the people living in the area voted to join Germany rather than France. Since then, the Saarland has been one of the now sixteen German states.) The Eastern provinces, including East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia, were lost to the Soviet Union or Poland respectively, and many Germans in these areas either were relocated by force or fled from Soviet occupation. Their total number is estimated at about twelve million people.
Hour Zero
At the end of the war, Germany was in total ruins. Most cities were completely destroyed, with no civil government in place. The Allied Control Council (consisting of Allied representatives) effectively took control of the country in the summer of 1945. This situation came to be known as "hour zero," a term meant to signify a completely new beginning in German history. But this need for a new beginning also posed a serious problem: how to deal with the Nazi crimes and whom to hold responsible for them—the whole German population or only those who had deliberately collaborated with the Nazis? But who were Nazis? Party members? State officials? Regular soldiers? Or indeed everybody who had cheered them on and supported Nazi politics? These questions were to haunt Germany for decades to come, and we shall see in the remaining lessons how the difficulty of coming to terms with the Nazi past contributed to the rise of German te
orism in the 1960s and 1970s and later influenced the intense debate of how to deal with German Democratic Republic officials after German reunification in 1990.
For now, let me emphasize the ambivalent nature of "hour zero." On the one hand, there was no doubt that Germany needed to
eak with its nationalist past and authoritarian history in order to em
ace a democratic and peaceful future. On the surface, of course, Germans were only too happy to be done with this atrocious chapter of their country's history, particularly after the truth about the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes began to be revealed. Germany had sold its soul to the devil and needed to undergo a radical change if it were ever to take its place again among other nations. On the other hand, for these changes to be serious and lasting, those responsible for the past needed to be held accountable and the country "denazified," in the official term. The question, however, remained how to do this, and it soon became clear that the victors had very different notions of what denazification meant.
Figure 7.1. Occupied Germany in 1945.
At the Potsdam Conference during July and August of 1945, the three major victors of the war (represented by the American President Ha
y Truman, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the Soviet general and dictator Stalin) decided to divide Germany into four separate parts (American, British, French, and Soviet).The American and British sectors were first combined to the bi-zone (January 1947) and then, in 1948, joined the French sector to form the tri-zone. The Eastern zone, by contrast, remained isolated and under Soviet rule. Berlin was to retain a special status: although located in the Eastern part of the country, the city, too, would be divided into four sectors.
The division of Germany was originally conceived as a temporary solution only. France, for instance, insisted on treating Germany as a unit, since it had not participated in the Potsdam Conference and did not consider itself bound by it. Due to the increasing internal strife among the victors, each one dealt with its zone differently. France and Russia in particular dismantled Germany's industry and transported whatever they found useful back to their home countries. They also established serious denazification programs and convicted many more people of collaboration with the Nazis than the British and Americans, who, after the conclusion of the Nuremberg trial against the highest ranking war criminals in 1946, were much more lenient. America in particular had decided to allow Germany to recover economically, choosing the Marshall Plan (named after Secretary of State George C. Marshall) over the Morgenthau Plan (named after Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.) in 1947. The latter had called for harsh measures against Germany, including its partition into a northern and southern region as well as the complete dismantling of its industrial complexes, thereby effectively returning the country to an agricultural state. The stated goal of Morgenthau was to prevent Germany from ever waging war again.
The Marshall Plan, by contrast, provided about twenty billion dollars in economic aid to Europe and Germany in particular. Under American leadership, the Western Allies also began to curtail the dismantling of German industrial plants (with France putting up a lot of resistance against this plan) and allowed their sectors gradually to reestablish consular and commercial relations with other countries. This was a sign of trust in the economic potential and reliability of (West) Germany. But it was also based on sound economic reasoning. By adopting the Marshall Plan, the United States itself benefited economically from the recovery of Europe; it also created a dependable and strategically located ally in West Germany during the Cold War period.
The Cold War and the Separation of Germany
Figure 7.2. The Berlin Airlift.
The Cold War between the West and the USSR began in earnest with the "Berlin blockade" that lasted from April 1948 until May of 1949. Since all of Berlin lay in the Soviet occupation zone, Stalin decided to block the food and energy supply of the Western part of the city in order to put pressure on the Western forces to accept several of his political demands. The Americans, however, decided to support the city through the air, using huge bomber-planes to ca
y supplies for the needy Berlin population (who refe
ed to the planes as "raisin-bombers"). Although the Berlin Airlift was a major success and forced the Soviets to stop their blockade after thirteen months without having gained anything, it also meant that the division of the city, and of Germany as a whole, had become a matter of fact. Both sides hu
ied to turn their respective occupation zones into newly formed nations: the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was created on May 8, 1949, while the formation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was announced on October 7 the same year. Unfortunately, given the space constraints of a course such as this, it is not possible for us to discuss the development of the GDR in detail, which would require an entire seminar of its own. In the following, we shall, therefore, concentrate on the Federal Republic (i.e., West Germany). We will return to the GDR
iefly in the context of German reunification.
Adenauer and Western Integration
The newly founded West German Republic was not based on a constitution, but on a preliminary "basic law" (Grundgesetz). The latter was supposed to be augmented or supplanted by a constitution when reunification had been achieved. The drive toward reunification, in other words, remained a goal of German politics explicitly written into its basic law from the very beginning. West Germany, like united Germany today, was a federal nation consisting of eleven states or "countries" (so-called Bundesländer—today, after unification, there are sixteen). Like other Western democracies, it featured free and secret elections by the people every four years. The parliament of about 630 representatives is called the Bundestag. It is joined by the Bundesrat (consisting of representatives of the now sixteen states) to form the Bundesversammlung.
Given Germany's totalitarian past and its bad experiences with the Weimar