U.S. Plans for Postwar Germany (1941-1945)
American policies for defeated Nazi Germany were shaped by domestic, military, and international—in particular alliancepolitical—considerations. The planning process moved between the poles of a liberal democratic commitment to self-determination, peaceful international cooperation, and renunciation of retribution as expressed in the Atlantic Charter (1941), and the insistence on unconditional surrender as well as the intent to eradicate Nazism as announced at the Casablanca Conference (1943).
Within the Roosevelt administration conflicts arose between those arguing that punitive measures would provoke bitterness and hatred among the Germans, thus undermining the prospects for peace, and others who objected to swift reconstruction and rehabilitation as inappropriate both in view of German war crimes but also as safeguards against renewed aggression. This intra-ad- ministrative ambivalence was resolved only when perceived cold war exigencies after 1945 gave an additional boost to those favoring Germany’s integration into the West as part of a double containment policy.Contrary to persistent myths a “Carthaginian peace” was not envisioned at any point. Instead, the various plans were guided by the same intense desire to avoid the “mistakes of the past” (e.g., the Versailles Treaty and interwar policy) and by a strong commitment to reform Germany in order to “prevent World War III.” All postwar planning had as its point of departure more or less explicit, yet conflicting, assumptions about the nature of the National Socialist regime and its place in German history. In order to solve the German problem, it first had to be properly understood. Competing political philosophies regarding America’s own domestic situation translated into different visions for a peaceful international world order and contributed further to conflicting ideas for Germany. A pronounced sense of responsibility and anxiety about this “second chance” at peacemaking competed with concerns over how much overseas postwar engagement an exhausted American public would tolerate.
