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1 he e ole allacy When the rain began Pooh was asleep. It rained, and it rained, and it rained, and he slept and he slept and he slept. You remember how he discovered the North Pole; well, he was so proud of this that he asked Christopher Robin if there were any other Poles such as a Bear of Little Brain might discover. “There’s a South Pole,” said Christopher Robin, “and I expect there’s an East Pole and a West Pole, though people don’t like talking about them.” Pooh was very excited when he heard this . . . —A. A. Milne, The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh n 7 may 1945, Admiral Karl Dönitz, recently appointed Führer of the Third Reich by Hitler’s last will and testament, approved the signing of documents accepting an unconditional German surrender (Botting 1985: 89). The following day, three representatives of the German High Command signed an “Act of Military Surrender” in Berlin, bringing the Second World War in Europe formally to a close (Ruhm von Oppen 1955: 28–29).1 The country was in shambles, having been devastated by Allied strategic bombing and the “scorched earth” policy pursued by the retreating German army, as well as by the damage in›icted by the victorious armies themselves. “Out of a total of 16 million houses” in the occupied areas of Germany, “2.34 million had been completely destroyed and 4 million had sustained 25 percent (or more) damage . . . . In western Germany as a whole 20 million people were homeless. . . . Less than half the locomotives in Germany were in working order and only a third of the coaches were reparable” (Botting 1985: 122–25). A month later, on 5 June 1945, representatives of the four Allied governments —Eisenhower for the United States, Zhukov for the Soviet Union, Montgomery for the United Kingdom, and de Lattre de Tassigny for the Provisional Government of the French Republic—issued a “Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority with Respect to Germany,” in which they proclaimed: There is no central government or authority in Germany capable of accepting responsibility for the maintenance of order, the administration of the country 1. The second surrender signing was necessitated by some controversy about the actual legal status of the document signed on 7 May and by Stalin’s strong desire to have Marshal Zhukov accept the German surrender for the Red Army (Botting 1985: 89–100). [To view this excerpt, refer to the print version of this title.] and compliance with the requirements of the victorious Powers. . . . The Governments of the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Provisional Government of the French Republic, hereby assume supreme authority with respect to Germany, including all the powers possessed by the German Government, the High Command and any state, municipal, or local government or authority. (Ruhm von Oppen 1955: 29–30) Germany thus ceased to exist as an independent member of international society , with responsibility for and authority over the lands it had occupied being assumed by the victorious Allies (Kelsen 1945). On 5 May 1955, almost ten years to the day after the unconditional surrender of the Reich, Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD),2 signed documents of‹cially making the BRD a party to the North Atlantic Treaty and terminating the occupation regime, except for a few residual rights pertaining to the status of Berlin (Ninkovich 1988: 100–11). Shorn of some of its eastern territories, the former enemy state was now a staunch military ally of many of the countries that had been bitterly ‹ghting against it a decade previously, and it was bound by treaty to come to their defense—and vice versa. Unlike the declaration of ten years before, the Soviet Union was not a part of the festivities, except as the implied opponent of both the BRD and of the other members of the North Atlantic Alliance, against which the Alliance had been erected. Commenting on that occasion, Adenauer declared, We had won the friendship of our former opponents. . . . The treaties were a serious commitment for us, and corresponded to our deepest inner conviction that there was only one place for us in the world: a place on the side of the free peoples of the world. This also conformed to the sense of German history and the striving, if in vain, of earlier governments...

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