Adenauer's Foreign Office: West German Diplomacy in the Shadow of the Third Reich

2. The Foreign Affairs Question inOccupied Germany,1945–49

2 The Foreign Affairs Question in Occupied Germany,1945–49 When The ThIRD ReIch collapsed in May 1945, the victorious Allied Powers shut down its central government, including the Auswärtiges Amt, and prepared to rule Germany themselves. The consequences for German foreign relations were both obvious and dramatic. Allied Control Council Declaration No. 2 of September 20, 1945, summed them up by announcing that “the diplomatic, consular, commercial, and other relations of the German State with other States have ceased to exist.”1 Total defeat plus Allied occupation created a “vacuum” in Germany’s international relations.2 Yet just as nature abhors a vacuum, it quickly became clear that Germany could not be kept isolated from the rest of the world. Almost immediately, the Four Powers (France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States) found it necessary to take joint steps to monitor Germans living abroad as well as to promote international trade. The onset of the Cold War in 1947 put an end to these quadripartite efforts but also raised the prospect of two new German states, East and West, that would have at least some effective control over their own foreign relations. Developments in the Western occupation zones are of central interest to our story. Especially following the US announcement of the Marshall Plan to aid Europe’s postwar economic reconstruction on June 5, 1947, the Western Allies carefully began to delegate responsibility for foreign affairs to German offices. In the process they also noted what John Gimbel described as the “German momentum”—not just the increasing participation of German actors in the Western zones in the 42 A D e n A u e R ’ S F O R e I G n O F F I c e reconstruction of their country but also their rising hopes and expectations of exercising as much influence as possible on future developments.3 German elites, including former diplomats, advocated the gradual acquisition of equal rights within the international community. By 1948, there even were open discussions about whether a new West German state would possess a foreign ministry. When the Federal Republic of Germany was constituted in the late summer of 1949, there were no definitive answers about when the new state would receive the right to manage its own international relations or about what type of administrative apparatus the Western Powers would allow. But in this uncertain situation lay the origins of the future West German Auswärtiges Amt, as well as many of the problems it would experience in its initial years. unsuccessful Four Power Attempts to regulate germany’s Foreign Affairs, 1945–47 In 1945 the victorious Allied Powers decided to divide Germany into four military occupation zones to be administered by France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States respectively. That summer the Four Powers also formally agreed at the Potsdam Conference to reunify Germany under its own government in the future. To work toward that goal, they would create central administrations in a variety of policy areas, including foreign trade, that would operate across zonal boundaries.4 However, they would make little progress. Disputes over reparations and the treatment of Germany as one economic unit brought inter-Allied tensions to a head in 1946 and 1947. Not only did the USSR insist on taking reparations out of current German production, it also took early steps toward an independent political administration in its own occupation zone. The forced merger in the Soviet Zone of the SPD with the German Communist Party in April 1946 reflected the Soviet desire to make Communists the leading political force there.5 Moreover, France, which had not been a party to the Potsdam Accord, objected to central administrations in principle. They might lead to a revived, unified German state that could threaten its neighbors and provide a conduit for the extension of Soviet influence . The French “veto” played a significant role through mid-1946, when the other three powers seemed to be cooperating well enough to keep hopes of an agreement on central administrations alive, even though French obstructionism also permitted the British and Soviets to disguise their own dislike of such administrations.6 The Foreign Affairs Question in Occupied Germany,1945–49 43 Concerns about the costs of a continued occupation and about French and, increasingly, Soviet policy led the British and Americans to openly abandon the Potsdam formula for governing...