In 1943, the Allies decided to divide Germany into three zones. The US and Great Britain would split the western half of Germany and the Soviets would control the eastern half. The city of Berlin would be deep inside the Soviet side, but would be jointly occupied as a symbol of Allied unity1. This was the Attlee Plan, devised by the British and signed by US President Franklin Roosevelt, Great Britain Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin during the February 1945 Yalta conference. However, this plan did not allow for access for the United States or Britain2.
On 7May 1945, the formal surrender of Nazi Germany was completed. On 5 June 1945, the US, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union signed the “Declaration regarding the defeat of Germany and the assumption of supreme authority with respect to Germany by the Governments of the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom and the Provisional Government of the French Republic.” This gave the Allied powers supreme authority in Germany and control over their sectors in Germany, which included a divided Berlin.
. This declaration gave no access to Berlin to the US or British (the French sector had not yet formalized at this point). President Truman asked Premier Stalin, along with concurrence from Prime Minster Churchill, on 25 June 1945 for free access to Berlin. Stalin did not answer the request. The question then routed through the military channels and a planned meeting for 29 June 1945 between the military authorities. On June 29, General Luicius Clay, the US representative, LTG Ronald Weeks, the British representative, and Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the Soviet representative, met to discuss Berlin. Once th...
... middle of paper ...
...o go after military operations are complete. This was in Afghanistan when the Pakistani government shut down their borders to the US. The US military increased the flow of aircraft in in order to keep the mission going.
Works Cited
Haydock, Michael D. 1999. City Under Siege: the Berlin Blockade and airlift, 1948-1949. Brassey's, Inc.
Mifflin, Houghton. 1991. "Reader's Companion To American History." BERLIN BLOCKADE. Harcourt Publishing, Company. Accessed April 21, 2014. http://web.b.ebscohost.com/hrc/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=134e9a79-efda-44cf-be11-04e49b2414a5%40sessionmgr113&hid=121.
Miller, Roger G. 1998. "The Berlin Airlift, 1948-1949." US Air Force Historical Studies. Accessed April 26, 2014. http://www.afhso.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-101001-053.pdf.
Parrish, Thomas. 1998. Berlin in the Balance,1945-1949. Reading, Massachusetts: Perseus Books.
Following the conferences during World War Two, Germany was split up into two zones. Occupying West Germany and West Berlin was France, Britain and The United States, while the Soviet Union occupied Ea...
Eventually, the three leaders decided to divide Germany up and occupy it until it was certain peace would be upheld. However, they did not discuss the exact date they would stop occupying Germany. As time went on, the Soviets didn’t want to leave and even built a blockade in Berlin separating East Berlin from West Berlin. This only added to the fuel of the Cold War’s fire. This derailed the plan of the Potsdam Conference, which was to eventually withdraw their occupation. For this reason, the impact of The Potsdam Conference was more successful then the Treaty of Versailles but was still not a successful outcome. The Potsdam conference inevitably leads to tension between US and Soviet Union and used Germany as a place to show their
In the year 1961, the building of Berlin Wall called upon disasters in Germany. United States controlled the west of Berlin while German Democratic Republic held the East. Being stuck under the rule of day to day terror, people from East Berlin were making their way to the West Berlin. West Berlin was a safe spot and freedom checkpoint in the middle of terror. To stop the moving of East Berliners, the East German government decided to build a barrier that limited and halted the East Berliners from leaving. But the battle to control Berlin between, the United States and the Soviet Union, had been taking place since after the division of Germany. The German Democratic Republic wanted better control over its people to spread its communist ideas
June 5: Supreme power passed to the victorious countries: USA, UK, France and the Soviet Union. (Kettenacker L, 1997) Their main purpose, according to the London Protocol of September 12, 1944 and subsequent agreements, was the implementation of complete control over Germany (Douglas R, 2013) At the heart of this policy lay partition of the country into three zones of occupation, section of Berlin into three parts and the creation of a joint Supervisory Board of three commanders. The division of Germany into zones of occupation had ever recaptured her desire for world dominance.
Bard, Mitchell G. The Complete Idiot's Guide to world War II, Macmillan Publishing, New York, New York, 1999
At the end of WWII, the United States, Great Britain, and France occupied the western zone of Germany while the Soviet Union occupied the east. In 1948, Britain, France, and the U.S. combined their territories to make one nation. Stalin then discovered a loophole. He closed all highway and rail routes into West Berlin. This meant no food or fuel could reach that part of the city. In an attempt to break the blockade, American and British officials started the Berlin airlift. For 327 days, planes carrying food and supplies into West Berlin took off and landed every few minutes. West Berlin might not have made it if it wasn’t for the airlift. By May 1949, the Soviet Union realized it was beaten and lifted the blockade. By using the policy of containment, the Americans and the British were able to defeat the Soviets.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 precipitated the Reunification of Germany in 1990. Negotiations and talks between East German’s Lothar de Maiziere and West German’s Helmut Kohl and the four occupying powers of United States, United Kingdom, France, and Soviet Union resulted in the Unification Treaty or the “Two plus Four Treaty” recognizing the sovereignty of the newly unified German state. The five states of German Democratic Republic or East Germany united with Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany and Berlin became a unified city on October 3, 1990 marking the die wende or Turning Point. “By early 1991, however, not much more than a year after the barricade surrounding the Brandenburg Gate was actually removed, most Germans, East and West, were asking themselves whether the Wall’s absence was, by itself sufficient to bring the nation together again” (McAdams 199).” Zealous attempts to restructure East Germany’s economy after reunification in 1990 led to massive debt and high taxation, sparking disillusionment and frustration among German citizens, which resulted in a divided and unequal economy.
Even though Berlin lay deep within the Soviet sector, the Allies thought it would be the best to divide this capital. Therefore Berlin was also divided into four parts. Since the Soviet Union was in control of the eastern half of Germany, they made East Berlin the capital of East Germany. The other three counties were each in control of a small part of what was to be West Germany. The Allies decided that they would come together to form one country out of their three divided parts. Those three divided parts formed West Germany. After all the land was divided the Soviet Union controlled East Germany. Just like the Soviet Union, the economy in East Germany was struggling to get back on its feet after the war. While West Berlin became a lively urban area like many American cities, East Berlin became what many thought of as a ‘Mini-Moscow’. In East Germany there was literary almost nothing. The shelves in the stores were practically bare, and what was there was not in very good quality.
The most visible aspect of the Cold War was the Berlin Wall. Before the wall was constructed, East and West Germans could travel freely between the two states. The number of East Germans fleeing to West was an embarrassment to the Communists, and something had to be done to pro...
The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Mary Elise Sarotte explains the causes and events leading up the opening of the Berlin Wall. By first describing the state of Eastern Europe, Sarotte leads the reader into descriptive chapters about the people and events that lead up to November 9, 1989. The story of the opening of the Berlin Wall, or the Iron Curtain as some call it, is compellingly told by using a profusion of sources and actions from this historic, watershed event.
The Berlin Crisis reached its height in the fall of 1961. Between August and October of that year, the world watched as the United States and the Soviet Union faced off across a new Cold War barrier, the Berlin Wall. In some ways, the Wall was Khrushchev’s response to Kennedy’s conventional buildup at the end of July, and there were some in the West who saw it that way. However, as Hope Harrison has clearly shown, Khrushchev was not the dominant actor in the decision to raise the Wall, but rather acquiesced to pressure from East German leader Walter Ulbricht, who regarded the Wall as the first step to resolving East Germany’s political and economic difficulties. The most pressing of these difficulties was the refugee problem, which was at its height in the summer of 1961 as thousands of East Germans reacted to the increased tensions by fleeing westward. But Ulbricht also saw the Wall as a way to assert East German primacy in Berlin, and thus as a way to increase the pressure on the West to accept East German sovereignty over all of Berlin.
The extent to which the fact that the Western Allies did not respond with violence but with the airlift and its success was a main factor to its end will be assessed. The significance of the agreement made between the Soviets and the US in lifting not only the Berlin Blockade but also the Western counter blockade will also be evaluated. The reasons for the implementation of the blockade, the actions of the superpowers that do not contribute to the failure of the blockade, and the consequences of this crisis will not be investigated. The analysis will be done by researching different views on the blockade’s failure and the events leading up to it.... ...
Mr. Halvorsen began his pilot career by gaining his private pilot license in 1941 and joined the United States Army Air Forces in 1942 (1). From there Mr. Halvorsen was trained as a fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force and then assigned to the South Atlantic Theater of Operations (2). It wasn’t until the Berlin blockade that Mr. Halvorsen’s career took off. Mr. Halvorsen volunteered to take a friend’s place to fly in “Operation Vittles” on July 10, 1948 as a lieutenant flying C-54 Skymasters cargo planes (2). “Operation Vittles” or better known as the Berlin Airlift happened when Stalin blocked the Western Allies’ railroads, road, and canal access to their controlled sections of Berlin, later called the Berlin Blockade. The blockade lasted from June 24th, 1948 to May 12th, 1949 when Stalin lifted the blockade after the airlift was clearly succeeding. The Western allies even got to the point where they were delivering more by air then was previously done by other means before the blockade. Consisting of the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force, flights flew up to 8,893 tons of necessities each day, providing food and fuel for the Western Germans of Berlin to survive
Still bound by very complex regulations, West Berlin began to rebuild in earnest. It was given special treatment by West Germany and by the Allies. Its survival became a symbol of Western commitment against Soviet style communism. Money was pumped in, industries revived, a new University created, since Communist professors and principles dominated the Humboldt University in East Berlin. But the East German Government, certain that West Berlin would eventually fall to them, was richly inventive in tactics of intimidation. Highways were blocked for hours or days at a time, as were canal and rail corridors. Finally, they blockaded the city totally. The Americans - specifically, General Lucius Clay, - invented the Air Lift. For over a year, one B-29 after another flew into Tempelhof Airport and supplied the city until the blockade was lifted.
“The Berlin Tunnel Operation Gold (U.S.) Operation Stopwatch (U.K.)” coldwar.org, The Cold War Museum, n.d. Web 19 April 2014 < http://www.coldwar.org/articles/50s/berlin_tunnel.asp#bt2>