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It makes little sense to juxtapose »defeat« and »liberation,« since the military defeat of the German army and hence the German Reich were simply preconditions for liberation. When we are liberated, that liberation is always from something. In this case, all parts of Europe ruled by National Socialism were liberated from a monstrous regime of terror that knew no bounds. However, the Allied victory did not necessarily mean that freedom, however defined, would become a reality
Liberation understood as »freedom from« meant the restoration of national independence and of a self-generated constitutional order for countries like France where it was de facto achieved as early as the summer of 1944. The recovery of national independence in France was considerably less problematic than the liberation of Germany, the origin and center of a continental empire run by the fascist-National Socialist regime. There, the most promising attempt at self-liberation was the failed coup of July 20, 1944. Local attempts at self-liberation remained marginal even during the regime’s death throes in early 1945. Their failure made it inevitable that Germany would have to be conquered and occupied by troops of the victorious Allied powers.
Among the Germans liberated – in a literal sense – in early 1945 and thereby sometimes rescued from certain death were surviving concentration camp prisoners and penitentiary inmates. Also redeemed were undisputed opponents of the Nazis as well as certain persecuted or discriminated-against groups within the population. Furthermore, soldiers and civilians were liberated from the furies of war, which, during the last few weeks of the conflict, claimed exceptionally high casualties while causing widespread destruction. In addition, the sovereign German nation, which had allowed its powers of internal political self-determination to be taken away in 1933, was objectively liberated. Finally, the class of wage laborers, in particular millions of »foreign workers,« who lacked any rights at all, were freed by the Allied victory. But that is not the whole picture.
Devastation and millions of displaced persons
Liberation through conquest, ratified by Germany’s unconditional surrender, was closely associated with new experiences of suffering and repression that were partly inevitable and partly the outcome of political decisions made by the victors. The Germans too paid a high price in blood, having lost at least six million people, either as a direct result of the war or indirectly through war-related deaths.
After the inferno of the war’s final phases in 1945, large stretches of Germany looked totally devastated. In some cases, city centers resembled fields of rubble. Millions of refugees from the East and people driven out of regions now under Polish or Soviet control came streaming into the occupied zones. Countless displaced persons from lands previously occupied by Germany and now in Allied hands wandered around aimlessly, while German prisoners of war who had been released gradually found their way back to their old homes. During the first few postwar years, providing for the needs of all those people required dramatic efforts. There were shortages of everything; most importantly, there was a lack of food in both the quantitative and qualitative senses. For the first time in many years, the German people suffered from famine.
As it turned out, the destruction of industrial plants was on the whole less serious than it looked, especially considering the expansion of industrial capacity that had occurred during wartime. Once repairs to the most important transportation infrastructure, including highways, had been finished, the transition to a civilian economy completed, and Allied restrictions lifted, production could rapidly accelerate.
Disorientation and insecurity
By war’s end, a deep sense of disorientation and insecurity pervaded the outlook of the German people, although a not-inconsiderable segment of the population remained »ineducable.« However, a significant minority of early activists, sometimes in direct continuity with the resistance and usually from one of the numerous ideological currents within the socialist workers‹ movement, organized themselves as anti-fascist committees in at least 500 towns. Occasionally they managed to do so even before the occupation began, often acting independently of one another. In certain locales, those organizations counted thousands of members. Moreover, they frequently set up provisional works councils, labor union circles, and embryonic political parties. In all four of the occupation zones, the antifa committees and provisional works councils sought to revive elements of social cohesion. In a spirit of solidarity, they took charge of restoring the material conditions of production and of life itself. Furthermore, they carried out initial steps toward de-Nazification.
As a rule, these »antifas,« as the Americans called them, were dissolved by the summer of 1945 at the latest, either by military governments or by administrative bodies under their control. In the western zones they were regarded as crypto-communist or pro-social revolution; in the eastern zone they were perceived as sectarian or dysfunctional: too autonomous, almost out of control, and illegitimate, since they constituted a form of grass-roots democracy that extended across all the occupation zones. This home-grown leftist antifascism does not fit well with today’s preferred image of an almost entirely nazified German Volksgemeinschaft or national community. Nor does it square with the claim that the Germans had sunk into almost total political apathy by the time the war was over. By the same token, the rapid organizational development of left-wing political parties and labor unions after their legalization contradicts the prevailing image of postwar realities.
In the wake of the devastation caused by Nazi fascism and the Second World War, it seemed for a while as though the workers‹ movement would become the dominant political force throughout Europe. Beginning in 1943–44, the crisis of the bourgeois order began with military reversals suffered by the Axis powers, coupled with movements of national resistance in countries occupied by Germany. Large property owners and the dominant social strata in those countries were discredited by their collaboration with Nazism. There are clear indications that a majority of the populations in such countries wanted to extend anti-fascism beyond political democratization. The idea was to break the power of big capital and open a developmental path that would lead »beyond capitalism,« to cite the title of a widely-read book from that time by Richard Löwenthal, writing under the pseudonym Paul Sering.
A pro-American orientation
Nevertheless, one factor already retarding the advance of the left was the inability and unwillingness of the newly-elected British Labour government, which had recently defeated the war-winning Prime Minister Winston Churchill, to assume a leadership role in Europe independent of the United States. Yet it’s also true that the pro-American positions of most social-democratic parties in Western Europe also represented a reaction to the dictatorial and repressive practices of the new »people’s democracies« of eastern Europe. At any rate the left, as it showed in the founding of the Federal Republic and adoption of its Basic Law, was able to push through a more durable compromise: political democracy plus the protections afforded by a social-welfare state and strong organization of working people.
It seemed for a while as though the workers’ movement would become the dominant political force everywhere in Europe.
In the course of the Second World War, American policymakers elaborated a basic, shared foreign policy consensus − albeit one with distinct shades of opinion. The goal was to discourage the formation of economic blocs of the sort that emerged during the interwar era in favor of the restoration of a unitary liberal-capitalist world market (if possible, one that would include the USSR) to be dominated informally by the USA. The American economy, especially its industrial base, had emerged unscathed from the war, which never directly touched the country. The future American leadership role was supported by several factors; most notably the adoption of the dollar as the global reserve currency and the establishment of transnational organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. As far as the constitutional order was concerned, representative democracies were to be supported, at least in the northern hemisphere.
American vision, Soviet interests
In contrast to the American vision of one world, the Soviet Union, under Stalin’s one-man dictatorship, was primarily interested in securing a sphere of influence in east-central and southern Europe that the Western powers would recognize, at least informally. In 1945 the Soviet Union was a major international player solely because it was the dominant land power, which had caused the tide of war to turn in its favor on its own territory. Still, it was not until the 1950s or even 1960s that it managed to catch up with the USA as a nuclear-armed power.
As far as policy toward Germany was concerned, the »Big Three« met at Yalta from February 4–11, 1945, and again in Potsdam from July 17 to August 2, 1945. They agreed to divide the country into four occupation zones, including a French one, to be bracketed by an Allied Control Commission. They also concurred on the importance of demilitarization and de-Nazification. At both meetings the participants agreed to shift Poland’s borders considerably to the west, but there was no consensus on exactly how far. Finally, Article XIII of the Potsdam Protocols insisted upon the »orderly and humane transfer of Germans who were left behind in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.« That meant the forced resettlement of all Germans living beyond the Oder-Neisse line, a movement that by no means was carried out in an orderly and humane way.
The German question was the catalyst of the Cold War and remained an important element in it.
The Potsdam Agreement demanded a ban on National-Socialist parties and institutions, legal proceedings against Nazi war criminals, and the re-education of the German people. But the economic stipulations of that Agreement, including the principle that what remained of Germany should be treated as a single economic unit, became obsolete almost from the start. Partly from motives of self-interest, the victorious powers did not wish to ruin the country totally. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was determined to dismantle and haul away industrial plants from its zone to make up for its enormous losses during the war, both material and human, including as many as 27 million killed. France, especially, stood in the way of the full implementation of the central administrative authority that was supposed to integrate the economies of the four occupation zones as stipulated in the Potsdam Agreement. Later, the economic separation of those zones would encourage their political division. Economic unity ultimately remained elusive due to growing differences of opinion and tensions among the victorious powers. The Cold War, latent since the end of World War II, broke out openly in 1947-48. It did not arise exclusively or even primarily on account of issues involving Germany; however, the German question was its catalyst and remained an important element in it.
From the outset, the Potsdam consensus left room for a variety of interpretations and could not prevent the four occupation zones from drifting apart. In particular, it could not stop the Soviet zone from developing in its own way. There, the »antifascist-democratic revolution« that the German Communist Party and later the Socialist Unity Party launched with the backing of the Soviet Union featured campaigns against large-scale capital and landed property. Economic intervention of that kind was by no means inherently unpopular. Initially, an anti-capitalist mood was dominant in the western part of Germany as well. The Soviet occupation zone began its slide toward dictatorship with the establishment of a bloc of political parties in the summer of 1945 then continued with the merger of the German Communist Party and the German Social-Democratic Party in early 1946.