Plan for a Continent

How to keep Germany from making war again was the central question at Potsdam. To destroy Germany utterly and forever might put Europe back a century economically and leave a political vacuum into which Big Three rivalries would rush. To preserve the old Germany was to run an all-too-familiar risk. The

Potsdam conference had to thread a way between.

The Plan. The Potsdam plan called for complete demilitarization. Germany in the future will not be allowed to make weapons or aircraft. But the main German threat lay in quickly trainable citizen-soldiers and in factories that could be quickly converted to armaments. What to do about them was not so easy.

Politically, the Potsdam planners put their trust in 1) that vague and aleatory something called "re-education," 2) a determination to permit no central German government to function for a long, long time.

Economically, said the communique, "primary emphasis shall be given to the development of agriculture and peaceful domestic industries." The fact that agriculture was placed first did not mean that Germany was to be completely de-industrialized. Perhaps the most significant point in the Potsdam communique was its provision for a Germany forbidden to put its energy into armaments, and restricted to commercially necessary and productive industry. Whether such a Germany will actually be weak depends more upon the execution of the plan than upon the plan itself.

The Collectors. Reparations were keyed to economic control. The Potsdam conference adopted a plan drawn up by a Big Three commission in Moscow, providing that the bulk of reparations was to come out of Germany's present industrial equipment. By these removals, Germany's basic industrial capacity would be reduced to a calculated point -- one at which the German living standard would be no higher than that of the average European.

(Before Hitler, when the Germans were working only half of their productive capacity, they lived better than most Europeans.) In the actual division of reparations, Russia deserved to fare well. She fared extremely well. The industrial resources in the areas of old Germany given outright to Poland and the U.S.S.R. were not counted as payments against Russia's total bill. Russia alone would get the equipment in her own occupation zone.

Up to 25% of all machinery and other capital goods taken from the British, French and U.S. zones would also go to Russia -- 10% outright, 15% in return for payments (over five years) in shipments of food, coal, potash, etc. Britain, the U.S., France and such other claimants as Holland, Belgium and Norway would share the remaining 75% of loot from southern and western Germany.

German assets abroad were also divided and, more important, placed under rigid control. Russia took the assets in eastern satellite countries (Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Finland); the Western Allies got the much greater share in the rest of the world.

Will It Work? Victors before have destroyed the vanquished, or punished them, or enslaved them. Potsdam, which laid on the vanquished the hardest peace of modern times, represented an effort to change the Germans fundamentally; at least something was left on which they could build a smaller, weaker, but better Germany. It was also a plan for a new continent: an effort to redistribute Europe's greatest industrial concentration in a man ner bound to change the economic face of Europe. Nobody knew whether such a plan would work. No victor -- much less three very different victors -- had ever tried such a plan.

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