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1949 Germany Crisis 1949 Germany Crisis 1 | Page April 13th Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Table of Contents Staff Welcome Letters …………………………………………………….………………………. 3 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….………............ 4-5 Brief Overview……………………………………………………………………………………….. 5-6 Topics at Hand ……………………………………………………….…………...………………….. 6-17 Questions to Answer …………………….…………………………..……………………………. 18 What is Crisis ………………………………………………………………………………………… 19-20 2 | Page Letter from the Chair Dear Esteemed Delegates, Welcome to the Cold War Berlin Crisis Committee! Being a delegate in this committee with offers you an invaluable learning experience that with help shape your understanding of global geopolitics after the Cold War. My name is Madison Colaco, and I am a senior Political Science major, Public Administration minor here at the Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. I am very excited to be serving as your chair for this committee. Good luck and Best Wishes, Madison Colaco Letter from Crisis Hello, I am Mason Smith and am the crisis director for Cold War Berlin. I am a first year Master's student and also a full-time teacher. I have been in MUN since my sophomore year in college and have attended more conferences in more places than I could name. My favorite committee was probably the Great Schism at UPenn years ago, for reasons that I can't really discuss. I am looking forward to having an excellent discussion and reformation of Germany, and I hope we divert from the terrible ideas that were implemented in our actual history. I have lived in a half dozen cities across the world and am passionate about Education 3 | Page Good luck and best wishes, Mason D. Smith Introduction The World has just begun to recover from one of the deadliest incidents in recorded history, World War II. Over two years, an estimated eleven million men, women, and children were brutally slaughtered by the Nazis in concentration camps. After the war, the conquering powers divided the country into four districts and administered the same cruelty and famine conditions to the entirety of the German people. After four years, the powers have satisfied their cravings for revenge and are willing to begin allowing the German people to reestablish themselves, with strong oversight from the conquering Powers. The year is 1949 and the Powers have decided to convene a conference to determine the fate of Germany. The Western allies, the US, UK, and France have sent their best negotiators and heads of state while allowing a plethora of people from amongst the controlled districts to attend. The eastern power, the USSR has decided that they will not easily acquiesce to the demands of the West and see the potential for future conflict from Germany. The year is 1949 and Germany finds itself at the centerpiece of world history. The main forces of the world stand on two sides with conflicting ideology and the people of Germany lie in the middle. On the one side, the traditional powers of the United Kingdom, France, and relatively recently joining the world stage due to incredible profits with little 4 | Page losses from the World Wars, the United States of America, while on the other side stands a new coalescing superpower in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The two main parties have agreed to set apart their stark differences and come to a once-in-a-lifetime meeting regarding the delineation between the two powers and what to do with Germany as they begin to rebuild after their devastation caused by Hitler and the conquering, and now occupying forces. The representatives of the people of Germany have been invited to attend, however, due to their recent behavior causing the World Wars, they have been relegated to the background despite their influences on the current events. Brief Overview As a consequence of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, Germany was divided between the two global blocs in the East and West, a period known as the division of Germany. Germany was stripped of its war gains and lost territories in the east to Poland and the Soviet Union. At the end of the war, there were in Germany some eight million foreign displaced persons; mainly forced laborers and prisoners; including around 400,000 from the concentration camp system, survivors from a much larger number who had died from starvation, harsh conditions, murder, or being worked to death. Over 10 million German-speaking refugees arrived in Germany from other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Some 9 million Germans were POWs, many of whom were kept as forced laborers for several years to provide restitution to the countries Germany had devastated in the war, and some industrial equipment was removed as reparations. 5 | Page The Cold War, which at the time were considered a sense of heightened tensions divided Germany between the Allies in the west and Soviets in the east. Germans had little voice in government until 1949 when two states emerged: Federal Republic of Germany(FRG), commonly known as West Germany, was a parliamentary democracy with a free capitalist economic system and free churches and labor unions. German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly known as East Germany, was the smaller Marxist-Leninist socialist republic with its leadership dominated by the Soviet- aligned Socialist Unity Party of Germany(SED) in order to retain it within the Soviet sphere of influence. History Following the German military leaders’ unconditional surrender in May 1945, the country lay prostrate. The German state had ceased to exist, and sovereign authority passed to the victorious Allied powers. The physical devastation from Allied bombing campaigns and from ground battles was enormous: an estimated one-fourth of the country’s housing was destroyed or damaged beyond use, and in many cities, the toll exceeded 50 percent. Germany’s economic infrastructure had largely collapsed as factories and transportation systems ceased to function. Rampant inflation was undermining the value of the currency, and an acute shortage of food reduced the diet of many city dwellers to the level of malnutrition. These difficulties were compounded by the presence of 6 | Page millions of homeless German refugees from the former eastern provinces. The end of the war came to be remembered as “zero hour,” a low point from which virtually everything had to be rebuilt anew from the ground up. At the Potsdam Conference (17 July to 2 August 1945), after Germany's unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945, the Allies divided Germany into four military occupation zones — France in the southwest, Britain in the northwest, the United States in the south, and the Soviet Union in the east, bounded eastwards by the Oder-Neisse line. Berlin, the former capital, which was surrounded by the Soviet zone, was placed under joint four-power authority but was partitioned into four sectors for administrative purposes. An Allied Control Council was to exercise overall joint authority over the country. At Potsdam these four zones in total were denoted as 'Germany as a whole', and the four Allied Powers exercised the sovereign authority they now claimed within Germany in agreeing 'in principle' the future transfer of lands of the former German Reich east of 'Germany as a whole' to Poland and the Soviet Union. These eastern areas were notionally placed under Polish and Soviet administration pending a final peace treaty but in actuality were promptly reorganized as organic parts of their respective sovereign states. In addition, under the Allies' Berlin Declaration (1945), the territory of the extinguished German Reich was to be treated as the land area within its borders as of 31 December 1937. All Nazi land expansion from 1938 to 1945 was hence treated as automatically invalid. Such expansion included the League of Nations administered City- State of Danzig (occupied by Nazi Germany immediately following Germany's 1 September 1939 invasion of Poland), Austria, the occupied territory of Czechoslovakia, Suwalki, 7 | Page Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg, post 27 September 1939 "West Prussia", post 27 September 1939 "Posen Province", northern Slovenia, Eupen, Malmedy, the part of Southern Silesia ultimately detached from 1918 Germany by action of the Versailles Treaty, likewise, the Hultschiner Laendchen. These arrangements did not incorporate all of prewar Germany. The Soviets unilaterally severed the German territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers and placed these under the direct administrative authority of the Soviet Union and Poland, with the larger share going to the Poles as compensation for territory they lost to the Soviet Union. The former provinces of East Prussia, most of Pomerania, and Silesia were thus stripped from Germany. Since virtually the entire German population of some 9.5 million in these and adjacent regions was expelled westward, this amounted to a de facto annexation of one-fourth of Germany’s territory as of 1937, the year before the beginning of German expansion under Hitler. The Western Allies acquiesced in these actions by the Soviets, taking consolation in the expectation that these annexations were merely temporary expedients that the final peace terms would soon supersede. Expulsion The northern half of East Prussia in the region of Königsberg was administratively assigned by the Potsdam Agreement to the Soviet Union, pending a final Peace Conference (with the commitment of Britain and the United States to support its incorporation into PrussiaRussia); were and was incorporated then annexed into byPoland the Soviet on a similar
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