isfied with a formula that left each of the occupy-
ing powers to take reparations from its own zone.
The reparation claims of Poland, too, would have
to be met from the Soviet share. In addition, the
Soviet Union would receive 10 per cent of indus-
trial capital equipment taken as reparations by the
West and a further 15 per cent in exchange for
food and raw materials from the east. The agree-
ment soon led to bitter recriminations.
Stalin did better on the question of the recon-
stituted Polish government. The London Poles
were pressurised into accepting a settlement that
incorporated some London ministers in the
communist-dominated government in Warsaw.
Poland would not emerge again from communist
rule and Soviet domination for two generations.
The redrawing of Poland’s frontiers only rati-
fied what had already happened on the human
level. Millions of Poles moved west to the Polish
side of the Curzon Line. Millions of Germans,
too, had fled westward from the Red Army and
the Polish forces, as well as from the German
territories now under Polish rule and from the
Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia. Young and old
were driven out with only the possessions they
could carry. The Russians, Poles and Czechs, after
the way they had been treated under Nazi occu-
pation, were now indifferent to the suffering of
the Germans. Retribution fell on guilty and inno-
cent alike and many Germans perished from the
hardships of migration. When, at Potsdam, the
Allies recorded their agreement that the ‘transfer’
of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and
Hungary should be carried out ‘in an orderly and
humane manner’, the West was therefore doing
no more than expressing a pious hope largely after
the event.
A central issue at Potsdam was the need to
reach agreement on the treatment of Germany.
The idea of dividing Germany into a number of
separate states was finally abandoned. But the
principles on which control of Germany were
based were contradictory from the start: the Allies
sought to treat Germany as one while at the same
time partitioning it into zones of occupation. The
Allied Control Council was supposed to oversee
Germany as a whole, but each of the commanders-
in-chief in his own zone had complete authority
as well. The plan to establish ‘central German
administrative departments, headed by State
Secretaries... in the fields of finance, transport,
communications, foreign trade and industry’,
but under the direction of the Control Council,
proved impossible to carry through as long as
each occupation zone fell under the separate
control of one of the four Allies. There was to be
‘for the time being’ no central German govern-
ment, but local self-government and democratic
parties were encouraged. On the one hand, the
Allies agreed that during the occupation ‘the
German economy shall be treated as a single eco-
nomic unit’; on the other, reparations were a mat-
ter for each occupying power to settle in its own
zone.
In practice, the immediate consequence of all
these decisions was to move towards the division
of Germany into four separate zones. Four years
later, the three Western zones would combine
and create a democratic Western central govern-
ment, and a communist regime would be
imposed on the Soviet Eastern zone. There were
some areas of agreement, however; the trial of war
criminals, the destruction of Nazi ideology, the
complete disarmament of Germany, and control
of such German industry as could be used for war,
led to no real differences at Potsdam. But already
the West and the Russians were compromising
these principles. German scientists were too valu-
able a ‘war booty’ to be punished as Nazi war
criminals. Rocket scientists who had perfected the
V-1 and V-2 in Peenemünde were, despite their
past, seized by the Americans and bribed to con-
tribute their know-how to Western military tech-
nology. Many who should have been convicted of
war crimes prospered instead in the West and
worked for the US in the space race. Other
German rocket scientists were captured by the
Russians and assisted in Soviet missile develop-
ment. In the Cold War, ex-Nazis with expertise
in military intelligence were recruited by both
sides. Former Wehrmacht officers served both
NATO and the Warsaw Pact armies. These were
some of the darker aspects of what happened in
the aftermath of the victory over Germany.
Austria was separated once more from
Germany and was fortunate to escape reparations.
1
THE VICTORY OF THE ALLIES, 1941–5 301
