After WWII, how come Germany wasn't dissolved?

by rook2pawn

I mean after WWI, the rest of Europe wanted reparations, repayment, etc. for a costly war that obliterated France.. after the Treaty of Versailles it was clear that Germany at that point had no intention of backing down. If they were just permantly occupied by Britain, France and the US there would never have been a Hitler to come power and instead they were allowed to grow and re-collect their might. After WWII why wasn't Germany just dissolved and re-occupied and new boundary lines decided by the victors get to consume Germany?

DeSoulis

Well, it was, Germany was effectively divided into 3 parts, East German, West Germany, and Austria. Two of those states had military forces on the border facing each other. Furthermore, all Germany territories east of the Oder was forfeited to Poland, with massive deportation of ethnic German population. France also got the Saarlands until 1956. The allies also started off the occupation by implementing the morgenthau plan, which was to turn Germany into a completely agarian country. It was only the start of the cold war which put a halt to it and the rebuilding and remilitarization of west Germany was a front-line state against Communism began. Also by no means was reunification inevitable in the context of the cold war.

ramak__

In Post War, Tony Judt talks about why the Allies wanted to 'rebuild' Germany after WW2. The main reason was economics. Before the war Germany was a large economic power, and other allies, UK and France, needed those raw materials and market. French industry needed the coal (or iron?) from Germany, and the UK needed someone to buy their industrial products. Germany wasn't dissolved because that would harmed UK & France.

eccentrus

actually it was the hefty reparations demanded by Versailles that concluded into the economic crises of pre 1939 Germany. Well as is almost all of the world at the time, Germany was also impacted by the Great Depression pretty bleakly, but even before that the people was starving and there was hyperinflation abound in Weimar Germany, prompting all the weaknesses of this new state that led to Hitler's takeover.

If anything a partition of Germany would lead to a very brutal and bloody revolutionary war under the psychopaths we knew so well from our history books. Hell, in the timeline that Germany got partitioned post-WWI, Hitler et al. can openly call for massacres and genocides without much resistance of the population, and the effects of the WWII will be more longlasting and there might even be a nuclear wasteland after all. The reason the Nazis didn't have The Bomb is mainly due to Werner Heisenberg's goodwill and pacifist attitude, now imagine if his childhood is that of poverty and missed opportunities, will that man still be as pacifist as in our timeline? I don't really think so.

wunderbra

Do you even realize what you are asking for here? The idea that it would make sense, let alone be in any way legally justified to simply "dissolve" a country is outrageous.