Previous Next

Within a year, MacArthur and the Japanese drafted a new democratic constitution, and the United States pledged military protection in exchange for a promise that Japan would not rearm. The new constitution and reforms allowed Japan to recover quickly from the war and eventually boast one of the largest economies in the world.

Rebuilding Germany

Rebuilding Germany proved to be a far more difficult task. At the time of the German surrender in 1945, British, French, American, and Soviet troops occupied different regions of the country. Although located deep within the Soviet-occupied zone in the east, the German capital city of Berlin also contained troops from each of the other three countries, occupying different districts.

Although all four nations agreed that it was necessary to punish the Nazi leadership for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials, none of the powers wanted to relinquish control of its occupied territory. It quickly became clear that the problem of control in Germany would simply remain unresolved. The British, French, and American occupation zones eventually merged into the independent West Germany in 1949, while the Soviet half ultimately became East Germany. All four powers, however, continued to occupy Berlin jointly—likewise splitting it into West Berlin and East Berlin—until Germany was finally reunified in 1990.

The Marshall Plan

The Soviet Union in particular wanted to exact revenge on Germany by dismantling its factories and demanding outrageous war reparations. Truman realized, however, that punitive action would only destabilize Germany further, just as it had after the signing of the unforgiving Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I.

In 1947, Truman’s secretary of state, George C. Marshall, pledged that the United States would grant more than $10 billion to help rebuild Europe if the European nations themselves worked together to help meet this end. Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany complied and came together to lead postwar Europe—an early precursor to the European Community and European Union that would come later. The Marshall Plan, as it came to be known, stabilized Western Europe financially and prevented economic collapse. Within ten years, European factories had exceeded prewar production levels, boosting the standard of living and ensuring that Communism would not take root.

The Iron Curtain

Although the United States and the Marshall Plan controlled West Germany’s fate, Stalin dictated policy in occupied East Germany. Determined to build a buffer between Germany and Moscow, the Soviet Red Army established Communist governments in the eastern capitals it occupied at the end of the war. As a result, the USSR created an “iron curtain” that effectively separated East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania from the West.

Previous page The Postwar World: 1945–1949 page 1 Next page The Postwar World: 1945–1949 page 3

Popular pages: The Cold War (1945–1963)

Take a Study Break