THE OCCUPATION: Toward Control

In six hours and 45 minutes it was all over. Eisenhower, Montgomery and Delattre had landed at Tempelhof, met Zhukov in the Berlin suburb of Köpenick, signed the papers.

After the signing, the four-power Allied Control Council was in formal existence, and its over-all plan for the control of Germany was released to the world. But not much had happened: the Council did not even begin to function, and some sections of the plan, written when the occupation was more of a prospect than a fact, already seemed out-of-date.

To the Fourth Power. Nevertheless, the administrative plan was worth a look. In some ways it resembled the man on the road to St. Ives who had seven wives, 49 sacks and 343 cats. All the inevitable ramifications of the control structure were multiplied by four.

The Control Council at the top has four members, the military representatives of the four powers. Each has his own political adviser, his own executive agent on the coordinating committee which will implement council decisions, his own counterpart on the revolving authority which will govern greater Berlin as a four-power city. On a lower level are twelve administrative divisions, roughly corresponding to the ministries of the Third Reich. Each division has four bosses—U.S., Russian, British, French.

The Control Council is supposed to coordinate all four administrations and make this quadruped walk like a man. But, according to a previously unknown provision, the Council can do nothing unless its decision is unanimous. Lacking unanimity, the four powers may proceed independently in their individual zones. By withholding agreement, any member power could free itself to pursue its own policies & purposes in its zone.

The Russians clearly were not ready to begin cooperative control in their area, and as usual their way of saying so irritated the other occupiers. But the representatives of the western powers on the whole felt better rather than worse after the first meeting. Marshal Zhukov showed them every courtesy in Berlin, visited (and decorated) General Eisenhower at Frankfurt five days later. Some of the U.S. officials got the impression that a grievous lack of administrative personnel and preparation, rather than a deliberate secretiveness, accounted at least in part for the Soviet reluctance to admit U.S. and British representatives to the Russian area.

Even Moscow’s one-way announcement of its zone’s boundaries, before the U.S. and Britain had divided theirs with France, actually represented an important step toward understanding (see map). The Soviet Government flew U.S. and British correspondents from Moscow to Berlin, later let Harry Hopkins inspect Berlin on his way from Moscow to London and the U.S.

The military men who must work with the Russians recalled that it had taken U.S. forces a long time to learn how to work with the British. The Russians were different, too. Said a high U.S. official, pondering the chances of getting along with Russia in Germany: “In 90 days we will know the answer.”