The Soviet army crossed the German border on the 12th of January 1945, at the start of the Vistula-Oder offensive. By the end of April it was on the Spree, fighting through the burning streets of central Berlin. On the 30th of April Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. On the 2nd of May the city's garrison surrendered. On the 8th of May the German military command formally capitulated to the Allies in a small school building at Reims in France, and again the following day, to satisfy Stalin, in a Karlshorst villa on the eastern outskirts of Berlin. By the time the second surrender was signed, the Soviet army was the occupying power in a zone of central Germany roughly the size of Iceland and containing approximately seventeen million people.
What the Soviet zone was for had not, on the day of the surrender, been settled. The Yalta Conference of February 1945 had divided Germany into four occupation zones — American, British, French, Soviet — and Berlin into four sectors. The intention, at Yalta, had been temporary occupation, with the four powers governing jointly through an Allied Control Council until a final settlement could be negotiated. No one had specified what the final settlement would look like. Stalin, in private conversations with his own ministers, had not yet decided whether he preferred a unified neutral Germany (which he could perhaps detach from the Western alliance) or a separate Communist East Germany (which he could absolutely control).
The Ulbricht group
The men who would eventually run East Germany flew into Berlin from Moscow on the 30th of April 1945 — the day Hitler died. They were ten German Communists, led by Walter Ulbricht, who had spent the war in the Soviet Union, in some cases since 1933. They had been trained as the German civil and political administration of a Soviet-controlled Germany. Their orders, given to them by Stalin's deputy in Moscow before their departure, were explicit: "It must look democratic, but we must hold everything in our hands." (The line is recorded in the diary of Wolfgang Leonhard, a member of the group who later defected and described it.)
The Ulbricht group set up shop in a Berlin suburb on the 1st of May 1945, before the surrender, and began appointing Communist mayors, Communist police chiefs, and Communist members of putatively non-Communist local councils throughout the Soviet zone. The pattern was set: Communist domination of all essential offices, conducted under the institutional appearance of a multi-party democracy. The Christian Democrats (CDU) and Liberal Democrats (LDPD) would be allowed to exist as junior coalition partners. So would the Social Democrats — until April 1946, when they would be forcibly merged into the Communists to form the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED). Otto Grotewohl, the Social Democratic leader, signed the merger reluctantly under heavy Soviet pressure. The Western occupation authorities recognised it for what it was — a hostile takeover — and the SED quickly became the symbol of the political division of Germany.
Land reform and the factories
The major social transformation of the occupation period was rural. In September 1945 the Soviet authorities issued a land-reform decree expropriating all agricultural estates over a hundred hectares without compensation. About 7,000 large landed estates were broken up. The land — about a third of the agricultural area of the Soviet zone — was distributed in small plots to refugee families (of whom the zone now contained around four million, expelled from Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia) and to former farm labourers. The reform ended, in a single autumn, the East-Elbian Junker class that had run the eastern German countryside for five centuries.
Industrial expropriation was more selective. Plants belonging to former Nazi officials or major war industrialists were expropriated outright. Other plants were dismantled and shipped to the Soviet Union as reparations — about a third of the zone's industrial capacity was removed in this way between 1945 and 1948, including entire factories, machine tool collections, railway track, and locomotive stock. The remainder was placed under "people's ownership" (Volkseigene Betriebe — VEBs) and incorporated into a planned economy. Private enterprise in small services and retail continued, in a marginal way, until the 1970s.
The Berlin Blockade
The relationship between the four occupying powers deteriorated steadily through 1946 and 1947. By 1948, the Western powers had concluded that the joint administration of Germany was no longer feasible and had begun to plan a separate western German state. The trigger for open confrontation was a currency reform: on the 20th of June 1948 the Western zones introduced the new Deutsche Mark, replacing the old Reichsmark which had become essentially worthless. The Soviet zone introduced its own East Mark four days later. The currency split made economic separation a practical reality.
The Soviet response was the Berlin Blockade. On the 24th of June 1948, the Soviet authorities closed all road, rail, and water access to the Western sectors of Berlin, which lay 160 kilometres inside the Soviet zone. The Western Allies could either withdraw, allowing the Soviets to absorb West Berlin, or supply two million people by air. They chose the air. The Berlin Airlift — Operation Vittles, on the American side; Operation Plainfare, on the British — lasted eleven months. At its peak it landed a plane in Tempelhof airfield every ninety seconds. It delivered 2.3 million tons of supplies, including coal in the winter of 1948-49. The Soviets lifted the blockade on the 12th of May 1949 without achieving any of their objectives.
"We hold something more important than military might. We hold the lives of two million people. The blockade fails not because we have more planes, but because the Berliners want us to succeed." — Lucius Clay, US military governor, to Truman, October 1948
Two German states
The blockade made the political division of Germany unavoidable. On the 23rd of May 1949, the three Western occupation zones combined to proclaim the Federal Republic of Germany, with a capital at Bonn. On the 7th of October 1949, exactly twenty weeks later, the Soviet zone formally proclaimed the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR), with a capital in East Berlin. Wilhelm Pieck, an elderly former Reichstag deputy who had been a leader of the German Communist Party in the 1920s, became the first president. Otto Grotewohl became prime minister. Walter Ulbricht — the man who would actually run the country for the next twenty years — became Deputy Prime Minister and General Secretary of the SED.
The new country covered 108,000 square kilometres (about the size of Bulgaria) and contained 18.4 million inhabitants. It included the cities of Leipzig, Dresden, Erfurt, Halle, Magdeburg, Rostock, Schwerin, Chemnitz (briefly renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1953), and the eastern sectors of Berlin. It included the Brandenburg countryside, the Mecklenburg Baltic coast, the Saxon highlands, and the small piece of Thuringia that had been separated from West Germany by the post-war border. It included the great cultural cities of Goethe's Weimar, Luther's Wittenberg, and Bach's Leipzig. It excluded — for the next forty years — almost any meaningful contact with Western Europe.
The country had not been planned. It had emerged, through a series of escalating Cold War decisions, from what was supposed to be a temporary occupation. Its leadership, in 1949, did not know whether it would last fifteen years or a hundred. The answer turned out to be forty-one.
End of Chapter I