0000144640 00000 n At the Potsdam conference, with the U.S. operating under influence of the Morgenthau plan,[16] the victorious Allies decided to abolish the German armed forces as well as all munitions factories and civilian industries that could support them. West Berlin's morale was sustained, and its industrial production considerably surpassed the pre-war level. Under the Monnet Plan, France—intent on ensuring that Germany would never again have the strength to threaten it—began in 1945 to attempt to gain economic control of the remaining German industrial areas with large coal and mineral deposits; the Rhineland, the Ruhr and the Saar (Germany's second largest center of mining and industry, Upper Silesia, had been handed over by the Allies to Poland at the Potsdam conference and the German population was being forcibly expelled). 0000137197 00000 n The initial demand for housing, the growing demand for machine tools, chemicals, and automobiles and a rapidly increasing agricultural production were the initial triggers to this 'Wirtschaftswunder' (economic miracle) as it was known, although there was nothing miraculous about it. However, Paragraph 175 which made homosexual acts illegal remained on the statute books and was not repealed until 1994, although it had been softened in 1973 by making gay sex illegal only with those under the age of 18. Even more controversy was caused by Reagan's statement that all of the SS men killed fighting for Hitler in World War II were "just kids" who were just as much the victims of Hitler as those who been murdered by the SS in the Holocaust. The SPD fell to 37%; long-time SPD chairman Brandt subsequently resigned in April 1987 and was succeeded by Hans-Jochen Vogel. Following the defeat of the Third Reich at the conclusion of World War II in Europe, the party was "declared to be illegal" by the Allied powers, who carried out denazification in the years after the war both in Germany and in territories occupied by Nazi forces. Finally, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall was opened, and East Germans were allowed to travel freely. With the exception of 45,000 French troops, Allied forces were under NATO's joint defense command. 0000002930 00000 n Over 250 strikers were killed, around 100 policemen and some 18 Soviet soldiers died in the uprising;[53]:459 17 June was declared a national day of remembrance in West Germany. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, confessed during his trial after World War II that approximately 1.1 million prisoners, mostly Jews, had been killed at Auschwitz by Hitler’s SS over a 4 1 /2-year period. The conclusion was that there were several weaknesses in the system. In March 1952, the Soviet government proposed the Stalin Note to hold elections for a united German assembly while making the proposed united Germany a neutral state, i.e. Thousands poured through the wall into the western sectors of Berlin, and on 12 November, East Germany began dismantling it. Only after a heated 1991 debate did the Bundestag conclude on moving itself and most of the government to Berlin as well, a process that took until 1999 to complete, when the Bundestag held its first session at the reconstructed Reichstag building. Adolf Hitler Joins the Party. [citation needed], Despite or perhaps because of the Bitburg controversy, in 1985 a campaign had been started to build a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Berlin. The most notorious of the underground groups was the 'Baader-Meinhof Group', later known as the Red Army Faction, which began by making bank raids to finance their activities and eventually went underground having killed a number of policemen, several bystanders and eventually two prominent West Germans, whom they had taken captive in order to force the release of prisoners sympathetic to their ideas. Thousands of East and West Germany in NATO was of key importance local elections May. 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