Play as · Cold War 1947 · L2 · Divided & Occupied

Occupied Germany - 1947

Germany in 1947 is not a state - it is the central prize of the emerging Cold War, a country of about 65M people with no government, no army, no borders it controls, and no voice in the decisions being made about it. Two years after unconditional surrender, the four occupation powers - the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union - each run their zone as a separate economy and a separate political experiment. The Reich's industrial heartland lies in ruins, its cities are rubble, and eleven million expellees from the lost eastern territories crowd into the western zones. The Reichsmark is near-worthless, the cigarette is the working currency, and the winter of 1946-47 - the coldest in living memory - has just demonstrated that the occupation can freeze Germans even where it cannot yet feed them. The wartime alliance that defeated Hitler is splitting apart over what Germany is for. The strategic identity is the occupied fault line - the place where every question of post-war Europe (reparations, borders, ideology, security) comes down to the same unanswered one: whose Germany emerges from the rubble, and whether it can emerge at all without dividing the continent between two armed camps.

Starting position

The Potsdam framework of 1945 still nominally governs: Germany administered as a single economic unit by the Allied Control Council, with Berlin - 160 kilometers inside the Soviet zone - divided into four sectors under the same arrangement. In practice the machinery is dead. The Soviet Union extracts reparations from current production in its zone and has begun building a socialist order there; the western powers, watching their zones starve while paying to feed them, have concluded that recovery matters more than reparations. In January 1947 the American and British zones fused into Bizonia; France, fearful of any German revival but more fearful of standing on the wrong side of the split, is moving toward joining it. The Council of Foreign Ministers meets and fails. Denazification, demilitarization and industrial dismantling continue on paper. The Ruhr - the coal and steel engine both blocs need - sits in the British zone, its ownership and output the sharpest dispute of all.

What turns the campaign

What the western powers want is a self-supporting western Germany folded into European recovery - the Marshall Plan announced in June 1947 makes German recovery the condition of European recovery - and that means a currency, an administration, and eventually a state. What the Soviet Union wants is a Germany that cannot threaten it again: unity on Soviet terms, reparations out of the Ruhr, and at minimum the blocking of a western German state. What the Germans themselves want barely registers: food, coal, an end to dismantling, and not to be the battlefield of the next war. The fears are symmetrical and concrete. A currency reform in the western zones - already in preparation - will force the question of division into the open. A Soviet answer could come at Berlin, where the western sectors are supplied through road, rail and air corridors crossing the Soviet zone on nothing firmer than wartime habit. The blockade of 1948 is not yet history; it is the obvious next move.

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