American Occupation Zone

The American Occupation Zone was the region of postwar Germany occupied and administered by the United States from 1945 to 1955, the most extensive occupa­tion ever undertaken by U.S.

The American zone encompassed the German states of Bavaria and parts of Wurttemberg, Baden, the former Prussian province of Hessen, the U.S. enclave in the city of Bremen with Bremen’s port at Bre­merhaven, and a sector of western Berlin. It was the second largest (after the Russian) in terms of territory, encompassing 45,047 square miles, and the third largest in terms of population, with approximately 16.7 million inhabitants in 1949 (24 percent of the overall German population). With the influx of millions of ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe, the Ameri­can zone’s population grew within the first years of the occupation by about 17 per­cent to a total of 18.2 million inhabitants.

Planning for U.S. worldwide postwar occupation duties was principally the responsibility of the War Department and its Civil Affairs Division (also known as “G-5”), which was created in 1943. In the case of Germany, Civil Affairs Division staff comprised civilian specialists and emigres from Germany and other European coun­tries. Personnel received training at various military camps and in special civilian pro­grams in the United States and England. Other branches of the government—the State and Treasury departments—com- peted for influence in shaping occupation policies. In general, the War Department wanted a short occupation that limited the military’s responsibility for civilian affairs. State Department officials believed that oc­cupation policies should be aimed primarily at Germany’s reconstruction based on the transfer of an American model of demo­cratic political practices and liberal capital­ist economics.

In the fall of 1944, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau briefly con­vinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany would have to be com­pletely stripped of its industrial infrastruc­ture and effectively “pastoralized.” Though Roosevelt soon backed away from the “Morgenthau Plan,” he avoided reconcil­ing the various conflicting agendas for postwar Germany, thus allowing policy planning to drift. The result of this drift was a belated and vague occupation direc­tive drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that offered little by way of constructive policies for occupation officials to follow. The course of the occupation, then, would be shaped largely by a combination of im­provisation on the ground in Germany and by wider diplomatic developments among the wartime allies.

At the Yalta conference, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain agreed to establish an Allied Control Council (ACC) comprising the Allied commanders in chief. The ACC would govern the country; make decisions on policies dealing with Germany as a whole; and administer a program of political and economic decentralization, denazification, demilitarization, and democratization (the “Four D Program”). The council had to operate under the proviso of unanimity, a regulation France used to veto decisions successfully to prevent any policies that would have restored a functioning central authority for its old enemy. The Declara­tion of Potsdam on August 2, 1945, con­firmed the decisions taken at Moscow and Yalta, and subsequently Germany was di­vided into four zones, which were adminis­tered by the U.S., British, French, and So­viet military governments.

The U.S. Army’s forces in Germany were ordered to implement the “Four D Program” upon cessation of hostilities. In May 1945 at war’s end, combat troops be­came occupation troops charged with maintaining law and order in the American zone. At the same time, trained military government detachments numbering 13,000 officers and soldiers at the occupa­tion’s peak in September 1945 took over control of particular German cities, coun­ties, districts, and states. To guide its ef­forts, the army used Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 (JCS 1067), drafted in Sep­tember 1944, and the Handbook for Mili­tary Government in Germany, published in December 1944.

The occupation itself was initially ad­ministered by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces Europe (SHAEF; after July 1945, the U.S. Forces European Theater, which included G-5) and the U.S. Group of the Allied Control Council. In the fall of 1945, OMGUS as­sumed overall responsibility for the occu­pation. As Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. Army general Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first military governor of occupied Germany. In April 1945, the Office of Deputy Military Governor was created to represent Eisenhower at the ACC in Berlin. The first deputy military governor was U.S. Army general Lucius D. Clay, who became military governor in March 1947. Clay, a civil engineer by training, took a pragmatic approach toward administering the American zone, emphasizing the rapid restoration of transportation networks and other basic services and the fostering of local democratic self-government. In both endeavors, he was remarkably successful.

As U.S. troops entered Germany, they were faced with an enormous array of prob­lems resulting from vast physical destruc­tion, population displacement, and the col­lapse of political authority. Very often improvising with what material and person­nel were available on the spot, troops re­stored order and oversaw the restoration of many basic services. They contended with thousands of prisoners of war and displaced persons (including concentration camp sur­vivors).

Following Germany’s surrender, the Americans banned political activity of any kind. In August 1945, however, OMGUS allowed political parties to reorganize under its supervision. The reestablishment of local and state governments became a priority, and military governors began re­viving political life according to democratic principles in preparation for local elections in municipalities as early as September 1945. The effort included the licensing of political parties, registering voters, drafting election laws, formulating balloting proce­dures, identifying candidates, and other re­lated matters. Elections in villages with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants (Gemein- den) occurred in January 1946, whereas larger villages and counties Uaindkrei.se) elected their new administrations in April. City (Stadt) dwellers chose their represen­tatives in May.

As preparations for a return to elected government proceeded, the U.S. military government ordered the four appointed minister-presidents of Bavaria, Hesse, Wurttemberg-Baden, and Bremen to draft constitutions for their states.

The U.S. military government estab­lished a Council of States in Stuttgart in October 1945, comprising the lands within the American zone. It dealt with matters of common interest to all states. During its existence, the council took on difficult issues, such as treatment and inte­gration of expellees into society, adminis­tration of denazification starting in March 1946, food rationing, providing redress for Nazi wrongs, land resettlement and re­form, and revision of civil as well as crimi­nal codes and court procedures. When the United States and Great Britain decided to merge their zones economically, a Bizonal Council continued its work. With relations between the western Allies and the Soviet Union deteriorating, the U.S. Congress passed legislation in 1947 designed to res­urrect the shattered German economy through the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan).

Further, the United States also tried to “reeducate” the German population by overseeing the reopening of schools and universities and attempted reforms of the entire educational system that were gener­ally resisted by the Germans. More success­ful was a major initiative aimed at facilitat­ing communications between occupation authorities and the German public and restoring a free German media establish­ment. The Information Control Division (ICD) was created in 1945 to license new newspapers, book publishers, radio sta­tions, film productions, and musical per­formances with an eye toward eventually returning full control of these media to the Germans.

On the diplomatic front, four-power administration collapsed rapidly. The ACC was never effective and broke down com­pletely in January 1948, when the Soviet delegation walked out in protest over American, British, and French moves to­ward establishing a West German state. Concurrently, the foreign ministers of each Allied nation met in 1946 and 1947 to ne­gotiate a final peace treaty and were unsuc­cessful. The main problem was that Amer­ican, British, and French visions of Germany’s future could not be reconciled with those of the Soviet Union. On the U.S. side, the State Department’s position of rehabilitating Germany—if necessary at the expense of division—came to dominate Washington’s actions. In September 1946, U.S. secretary of state James F. Byrnes de­livered a speech in Stuttgart in which he gave priority to Germany’s economic re­construction above all other endeavors. Three months later, the Americans and British agreed to the joint economic ad­ministration of their two zones (the French zone was added in 1948). On the Soviet

side, Joseph Stalin initially hoped that Ger­many would remain unified and “neutral” but vulnerable to the Moscow-controlled German Communists. When this outcome appeared increasingly unlikely, he began to plan a separate East German state. Ameri­can, British, and French moves toward di­vision in late 1947 and early 1948 led Stalin to blockade the land access routes to western Berlin in June 1948 in order to force the Allies back to the negotiating table or out of Berlin or both. The Ameri­cans and British responded with an unex­pectedly successful airlift, handing the So­viets a humiliating diplomatic defeat and forcing them to lift the blockade in May 1949. Formal division was now a certainty, and in September 1949, the Federal Re­public of Germany was created out of the three western occupation zones and west­ern Berlin. A month later, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was created out of the Soviet zone.

In May 1949, the U.S. secretary of state ordered the State Department to as­sume nonmilitary responsibilities for the occupation under a civilian “high commis­sioner.” John J. McCloy, a lawyer and for­mer assistant secretary of war and World Bank president, would serve in this posi­tion until HICOG was dissolved in 1955 and West Germany gained full sovereignty.

Steven Remy and Bianka J. Adams

See also Barbie, Klaus; Bremerhaven; Denazification; Halvorsen, Gail S.; Morgenthau Plan; Nuremberg Trials; U.S. Plans for Postwar Germany; West Berlin; World War II

References and Further Reading

Clay, Lucius D. Decision in Germany. Garden City: Doubleday, 1950.

Ermarth, Michael, ed. America and the Shaping of German Society, 1945—1955. Providence: Berg, 1993.

Hohn, Maria. GIs and Frauleins: The German- American Encounter in 1950s West Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Schwartz, Thomas A. Americas Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Standifer, Leon C. Binding up the Wounds: An American Soldier in Occupied Germany, 1945-1946. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Wolfe, Robert, ed. Americans as Proconsuls: United States Military Government in Germany and Japan, 1944-1952. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Ziemke, Earl F. The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944-1946. Washington: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1975.