In the years after the First World War, crippling reparations were imposed upon Germany. In fact, these reparations and the mass poverty they caused cannot be absolved from blame in terms of causes of the Second World War. Therefore, it was only natural that the victorious allies should want to avoid putting the country over which they were now in control in such financial jeopardy again. Besides which, Britain and France both had taken out substantial loans from America to pay for the war, and Britain had suffered little damage except for that sustained during the Blitz.
Russia, however, had not been so lucky. The Nazi operations of the eastern front had devastated huge areas of Soviet territory. Entire cities had been demolished, transport links had been cut – Russia was indeed in a dire state. It is therefore understandable that when conferences were held regarding what to do about Germany, the allies were split in their opinions. The outcome was the division of Germany between each of the four factions, and then the further split of Berlin, which sat in Soviet territory. This was the beginning of high political tensions between Russia and her former allies, and a period of insecurity in Berlin.
The first notable rise of tensions between the east and west of Germany was the Berlin Blockade. In 1948, the east-German Soviets blocked all access to West Berlin, leaving all of its residents without any kind of provisions, bar what they already had. East Germany agreed to lift the Blockade, in return for the West repealing their introduction of the Deutsche mark. When West Germany refused, the two reached a standoff. During negotiations for the partition of Germany, there had been no official plan for allied access through soviet East Germany, thus they had no power to unseat the blockade, and instead they waited Stalin out. The two factions stopped sending goods across leaving both short of supplies. With West Berlin swiftly running out of provisions, the US Air force begun an airlift, dropping food and water behind the blockade. By the 1st of July, the allies had developed a working system to supply their zones adequately. Furious though the Soviets were, neither their Navy nor their Air force could compete with those of America, and the threat of nuclear war was something nobody wanted, thus the airlift was left largely to go ahead. In May 1949, the blockade was eventually lifted, and serious negotiations between the Allies and the Soviets could continue.
With the installation of the German Democratic Republic in 1949. East Germany had its own government, led by German communist leaders picked out by Stalin and his officials. In 1946, Churchill had accused Stalin of hiding Soviet territory behind an ‘Iron Curtain’ – that he was promoting underhand tactics behind the allies’ backs. In the beginning this was put down to speculation, and Churchill’s increasing paranoia. However as time progressed, Stalin became ever more secretive.
Perhaps the most widely-known product of the partition of Germany was the erection of the Berlin wall in 1961. Built literally overnight (at least in its original form), the wall separated Berlin across a 27 mile border, and provided a border between East and West Germany a further 69 miles. Not only was the wall built to stop people emigrating to the West, it became a physical representation of the ‘Iron Curtain’; It established Stalin’s power and dominance over Soviet sectors of influence. 9 crossing points along the wall allowed for extremely limited visits from West to East, and nobody could move from one sector to the other. The wall split friends, families and neighbours, some of whom would not see each other again until the fall of the wall in 1989. The demolition was not only an end to the separation of East and West Berlin, but also the beginning of a much more relaxed state of tensions between the Allies and the Soviets, marking the end of the cold war.
History @ Aber 