1945 — Total Defeat & Occupation

German Political History I closed with a total dictatorship — every institution this course traced, from the Reichstag to the federal states to the political parties to the army's own loyalty, absorbed into one system answering to one man. This course opens on the exact opposite condition: no German government at all. Every real thread this course goes on to trace — parties, federalism, the military, the presidency itself — has to be rebuilt, deliberately and carefully, from literally nothing.

8 May 1945: Unconditional Surrender

Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May 1945. There was no German government left to negotiate terms with in any meaningful sense — the Reich's own institutions, or what remained of them, simply ceased to function as a governing authority. What followed was decided entirely by the victorious Allied powers.

Four Zones, One Divided City

The Potsdam Agreement, concluded on 2 August 1945, formalized what the Allies had already begun: dividing "Germany as a whole" into four occupation zones, each administered by one power — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union.

The Allied Control Council, established 5 June 1945, was meant to govern Germany jointly, as a single unit, through the four occupying powers acting together. It didn't survive the peace it was built to administer: the Council de facto collapsed on 20 March 1948, when the Soviet Union walked out — the real, formal beginning of the split this course's own next chapters trace into two entirely separate German states.

The Potsdam "Four Ds"

The Allies' own stated policy for occupied Germany, real and specific, organized around four real goals:

Denazification in Practice: A Real, Documented Limit

The most famous single element was the Nuremberg Trials, prosecuting senior Nazi officials for war crimes through 1946 — though the real, contemporary German reaction was often skeptical, with many viewing the proceedings as little more than "victors' justice." Denazification itself varied sharply by zone: the American zone ran a real, systematic questionnaire process, the Fragebogen, while other zones applied less thorough methods.

A Country Physically Smaller Than It Had Been

Potsdam also redrew Germany's own eastern border. Territory east of the real Oder-Neisse line — including the former Free City of Danzig, the port of Stettin, Farther Pomerania, southern East Prussia, and Lower and parts of Upper Silesia — passed under Polish administration, pending what the Agreement called a final peace settlement. That settlement didn't actually arrive for 45 more years: the border wasn't formally finalized as Poland's own permanent frontier until the German-Polish Border Treaty of 1990 — a real detail this course's own reunification chapter returns to directly.

Filling a Genuine Vacuum, From the Ground Up

With no German national government of any kind, political organizing began the only way it structurally could: locally, independently, and without coordination. The Christian Democratic Union's own real founding illustrates the pattern directly — a Berlin organization formed on 26 June 1945, and separate, unrelated Rhineland and Westphalia branches followed that September, each group starting from the same broadly Christian-democratic idea without any single national founding act tying them together. Konrad Adenauer himself — the same figure whose government would later end denazification — wasn't even elected the CDU's own first national chairman until its first full convention, on 21 October 1950, more than five years after the party's earliest local roots.

Hands-On Exercises