Zero Hour

The ruins of Germany, April 16, 1945

What does it take to rebuild a war-torn nation, to fashion a democracy given only the remnants of dictatorship? It's a question that the American-led coalition in Iraq is still trying to answer. It's also a question that America has answered before, nearly 60 years ago, when Nazi Germany fell.

How the Allies Prevailed in
Postwar Germany

Ask most Americans about the occupation of Germany after World War II, and they'll probably tell you about the Marshall Plan and Berlin Airlift. But the Marshall Plan didn't pass Congress until April 2, 1948, and the Soviets didn't blockade West Berlin until June 1948--three years after Germany's unconditional surrender in May 1945. So, what did Allied occupiers do before 1948?

Win Big

From 1939 to 1945, Nazi Germany waged total war. In 1945, the nation faced total defeat. An estimated 3.5 million German soldiers were dead or missing, along with some 750,000 civilians. Millions more were crippled or imprisoned. Food was scarce. Inflation was rampant. Refugees were everywhere. Allied bombs had flattened 25 percent of Germany's available housing. An entire district in Hamburg had to be walled in to prevent the spread of diseases from the corpses piled there.

The Germans coined the phrase "zero hour" to describe their situation. Everywhere they looked, they saw destruction. They also saw plenty of Allied troops. On V-E Day, General Eisenhower had 61 U.S. divisions (over 1.6 million men) inside Germany, and what remained of the German army (and people) were anxious to surrender to Eisenhower's GIs rather than face the Soviet Red Army rolling in from the east.

Despite a relatively orderly surrender following Adolf Hitler's suicide on April 30, 1945, the Allies expected to face considerable post-combat resistance. So when the Joint Chiefs of Staff created the Occupation Military Government, United States (OMGUS), one of its stated objectives was to "impress the Germans with their military defeat and the futility of further aggression." Evidently, the Germans were suitably impressed. According to a recent Rand Corporation study, the total number of post-conflict combat-related deaths in Germany was zero.

Start Small

Given the scale of Nazi atrocities during the war years, few sympathized with the Germans' plight at "zero hour." Before the war was over, the Soviets, who lost an estimated 18 million people in World War II, argued that Germany should never again have full sovereignty. The French tended to agree, as did many in the U.S. government.

The country and Berlin, its capital, were each divided into four zones of military occupation, with the major Allied powers--the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union--each assuming control of a zone. Still, the Allies agreed in 1945 that "all democratic political parties with rights of assembly and of public discussion shall be allowed and encouraged throughout Germany." They also agreed to create local self-government "on democratic principles . . . as rapidly as is consistent with military security," and to build up regional and state governments later.

Within the U.S. sector, these goals spurred grassroots efforts to develop the civil society necessary for democracy. The remnants of pre-Nazi German political parties re-emerged. At first, political parties could operate only at the county level, but soon they were authorized at the state level as well. Elections in small communities (less than 20,000 people) were scheduled in January 1946, with elections in larger communities a few months behind. As early as June 1946, a council of state-level ministers, the Landerrat, had become an important executive arm of the OMGUS.

In 1947, the United States and Great Britain combined the German administrative institutions within their zones, forming "Bizonia" to stimulate further economic and political recovery. The French joined the federative festivities in 1949, just before the Germans themselves voted the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) into being. The Soviets did not allow free elections within their zone.

Be Practical

As the Western occupiers transferred more and more authority back to the German people, they tried to ensure that they weren't just handing power back to former Nazis. They weren't always successful. Of some 5 million Nazi suspects, the Allies' special courts tried only 225,000. They convicted and punished even fewer. Only a handful--those most responsible for driving the Nazi war machine, and for murdering 6 million Jews--were tried by the special International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

The Nazi party was crushed, disbanded, and outlawed, but many bureaucrats, businesspeople, and other former rank-and-file party members soon resumed jobs and lives similar to those they had before the war. In December 1945, Allen W. Dulles, Bern Station Chief for the Office of Strategic Services, saw little choice to employing at least some former Nazis:

When we discover someone whose ability and politics are alike acceptable, we usually find as we did in one case that the man has been living abroad for the past ten years and is hopelessly out of touch with the local situation. We have already found out that you can't run railroads without taking in some Party members.

In the dozen years of dictatorial Nazi rule, most Germans had joined the party or one of its organizations, whether through conviction, convenience, or compulsion. Still, if most Germans were complicit in Nazism during the war, most were also complicit in its eradication after. Within five years, the people of West Germany had effectively turned their backs on totalitarianism, voted a new nation into existence, and freely chosen their first leaders.

By then, of course, the Allies had saved West Berlin from a Soviet blockade, and the United States had allocated $13 billion in Marshall Plan funds, helping to fire Germany's Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle") of the 1950s. The old war was over. The Cold War had just begun.