In mid-September the Ministry published a list of 278 pro-German persons and companies throughout the world with whom British merchants and shipowners were forbidden to do business, subject to heavy penalties. In Britain it was widely believed that the bombing of big cities and massive civilian casualties would commence immediately after the declaration. [citation needed] This course of action, which Hitler called "the greatest breach of faith of all time",[9] caused horrendous suffering among the German people and, according to some authors, led to an estimated half a million deaths from starvation. [55] He described how the "warrior caste" were given the most, followed by essential workmen (in Berlin, William Shirer and the other foreign journalists were classed as "heavy labourers" and received double rations) while at the bottom prisoners, Jews and the insane got the least. German soldiers got double rations, but this was still only a modest daily diet, similar to that served to inmates in American prisons. As in World War I, a combined War Council was formed to agree strategy and policy, and just as the British Expeditionary Force, which was quickly mobilised and sent to France was placed under overall French authority, so various components of the French navy were placed under Admiralty control. But perhaps the most important measure taken at this time was the setting up of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) As Professor William MacKenzie recounts in his book The Secret History, the official government history of the organisation written in 1946 with access to SOE files later destroyed, but classified until 2000, its origins go back to March 1939 following the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. Following the end of the war in Europe in early May 1945, large parts of Europe lay completely smashed. Furthermore, the Soviet Union would extract its share of reparations mostly from the territory in its own occupation zone. [citation needed] Schacht also proved adept at negotiating extremely profitable barter deals with many other nations, supplying German military expertise and equipment in return. After the fall of France Hitler, intending to invade Russia the following year, declared that the trade need continue only until the spring of 1941, after which the Nazis intended to take all they needed.[8]. They advised neutrals to shun British waters and trade with Germany, declaring that because of the defensive minefields and contraband control, British waters were not mercantile fairways subject to the Hague Convention regulating sea warfare, but military areas where enemy ships of war must be attacked. Make a poster, chart, or some other type of graphic organizer that depicts how the Allied powers went about ensuring that Germany would not cause another world war. [citation needed] As Germany's most important industrial region, it had been equipped with strong air defenses Hermann Gring had already declared, "The Ruhr will not be subjected to a single bomb. These losses included 112 British and 12 French vessels, but also demonstrated the disproportionate rate of loss by neutral nations. [16] In early March the USAAF raided the Erkner ball-bearing works, scoring 75 direct hits, stopping production for some time, and commenced the "Plan for Completion of Combined Bomber Offensive". [19], Germany concluded a variety of treaties with Western and Eastern countries as well as the Jewish Claims Conference and the World Jewish Congress to compensate the victims of the Holocaust. [39], The reparation issue arose again in late 2017 with comments made by Polish government officials from the ruling Law and Justice. There were turf wars from time to time with SIS who did not want to risk sources being compromised by SOE sabotage of enemy targets. The explosions caused by the commando mission ruined the preparations of the SOE team, who might well have achieved a far more effective destruction of the blockade running vessels but for the Combined Operations raid. Although U-boats were the main threat, there was also the threat posed by surface raiders to consider; the three "pocket battleships" which Germany was allowed to build under the Versailles Treaty had been designed and built specifically with attacks on ocean commerce in mind. But it was growing fast, and had begun to achieve good results. In December 1940 Roosevelt, having won an historic third term as president declared that the U.S. would become the "Arsenal of Democracy", providing the weapons Britain and her Commonwealth needed without entering the war herself. immediately after the war, millions (~7.7m) of German soldiers were kept in POW camps. They ranged from small 200lb (91kg) mines dropped dozens at a time to large one-ton versions dropped by parachute on shoal bottoms which were almost impossible to sweep, equipped with magnetic triggers activated by a steel hull passing above. Supplies of copper from Turkey and Spain had been cut off, and the Germans had lost contact with sources of copper ores at Bor in Yugoslavia and Outokumpu in Finland. "[38] Because of the smog and the lack of aircraft fitted for aerial photography, the British were unable to determine how effective the raid had been; in fact the damage was negligible. Later, German agents bought non-portable assets such as farms, real estate, mines, factories and corporations. Allied air power was now unstoppable. [8], On 2 August 1941 the British signed the Atlantic Charter with the U.S. and extended the blockade to cover Finland, which was now fighting on the side of Germany. Instead, East and West Germany grew in wildly different directions depending on which side of that global battle they fell on. [1][pageneeded], The blockade had four distinct phases:[1][failed verification], At the beginning of the First World War in 1914, the United Kingdom used its powerful navy and its geographical location to dictate the movement of the world's commercial shipping. The Hungarian border was opened, which allowed East Germans to travel to escape to the West via Hungary. Likewise the Netherlands, with its 2.7m cattle, 650,000 sheep, half a million pigs, and huge surplus of butter, cheese, meat, milk, margarine and vegetable oils, depended on Britain for its animal fodder. Loss of the Yugoslavian and other Balkan mines took away the last supplies of chromium and reduced the supply of lead by approximately 40 per cent the position being worsened by the loss of substantial amounts of scrap which were collected in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. At the Potsdam Conference, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Unionthe "Big Three" powers who had defeated Nazi Germanymet in the city of Potsdam . The MEW became concerned at the "steady trickle" of Japanese blockade runners reaching Europe, which one estimate put at 15 ships by the end of 1942,[41] and on the anniversary of the German and Italian declarations of war on the US, General Tojo expressed his pleasure that Japan was able to contribute the resources captured in the South Pacific to the Axis cause. Since a peace conference never took place, the areas were effectively ceded by Germany. Although the MEW tried to prevent it, neighbouring neutral countries continued to trade with Germany. [73] A Norwegian smelting works was also destroyed by British and Norwegian commandos on 21 November 1943. The Allied response to the blockade was the Berlin Airlift, in which the Allies supplied West Berlin by bringing in food and supplies on airplanes. Germany sits in the heart of Europe, and many of the industrial raw materials she can't supply herself can be imported from her European neighbors. The airlift allowed the Allies to support West Berlin with food and other goods via airplanes for over a year. The US plan to completely destroy Germany after World War II. Before very long, livestock was being slaughtered because of a lack of fodder the pigs so undernourished that they broke their legs walking to slaughter. With its economy and infrastructure ruined by the war with Italy, Greece was compelled to pay occupation costs and to grant Germany a "war loan", and was subjected to the same confiscation of food and raw materials practiced elsewhere. Despite the humanitarian efforts, by late January 1942 between 1,700 and 2,000 men, women and children were dying in Athens and Piraeus each day, and Italy, which then occupied Greece, was forced to ship 10,000 tons of grain from her meagre domestic supplies, secretly to avoid unrest from her own people. Explore the reconstruction and economy of post war Germany. On 12 November the battleship Tirpitz was sunk by RAF Tallboy bombs near Troms, Norway. Unoccupied France ( Zone libre ) was left with only the rubber industries and textile factories around Lyon and its considerable reserves of bauxite, which because of the British blockade ended up in German hands anyway, giving her abundant supplies of aluminum for aircraft production. RAF assaults on medium-sized industrial towns to the east of the Rhine, the Ruhr and Berlin from mid-1942 also did little to weaken Germany economically. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. As D-Day approached, the Allies prioritised attacks on Ploieti and the artificial fuel sites. By 1917 this had almost swung the war the way of the Central Powers. In 1942 the RAF dropped 37,000 tons of bombs on German targets, probably three times the weight dropped on Britain in 1940 and early 1941. Romania's production was about equal to that of Ohio, ranked 16th producer in the US, then a major oil-producing nation. In the first week of the war, Britain lost 65,000 tons of shipping; in the second week, 46,000 tons were lost, and in the third week 21,000 tons. With the appearance of more durable destroyers and new light escort carriers which could provide convoys with constant air cover, the 'Mid-Atlantic Gap', where ships could not be provided with air cover, was closed, and from mid-1943 the U-boats were all but defeated in the Battle of the Atlantic,[7] although Contraband Control at sea still continued. From the beginning of the war, Germany experienced massive labour shortages and as time went by the occupied nations labour forces were virtually enslaved, either to work in factories to supply the Reich or sent to Germany to work in the factories or farms there. Britain and the US again had the option of launching an oil embargo on Spain but hesitated for fear of pushing Franco to side with Germany militarily. in the invasion of Germany from 1944 to 1945, many German cities were bombed extensively. Furthermore, the main industrial sector of Germany, the Rhine Valley in the southwest, was turned into a quasi-police state under French control. A disgruntled captain could dispute the seizure as illegal, but the list of banned goods was intentionally made broad to include "any goods capable of being used for or converted to the manufacture of war materials". A large force, known as the Dover Patrol patrolled at one end of the North Sea while another, the Tenth Cruiser Squadron waited at the other. [56][58], In 1990, West Germany and East Germany signed the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany ('Two Plus Four Agreement') with the former Allied countries of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union. Despite these initial setbacks, the Soviets were able to relocate large portions of their industry from cities near the Dnepr River and Donbas regions further east to the Urals and Siberia. [77] German commanders increasingly put their faith in the new Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter and the V-weapons to turn the tide. in history and taught university and high school history. The Soviet Union received compensation under the Paris Peace Treaty in 1947 from four Axis allied powers, in addition to the large reparations paid to the Soviet Union by the Soviet Occupation Zone in Germany and the eventual German Democratic Republic in the form of machinery (entire factories were dismantled and shipped to the Soviet Union) as well as food, industrial products, and consumer goods. In a bitter school we soon learnt differently. [23][40] Przemysaw Sobolewski, head of the Bureau of Research of the Sejm, said that the political decision of 1953 was made by the Polish Council of Ministers, even though under the Constitution of the Polish People's Republic, which came into force in 1952, it was the Polish Council of State, which had the sole authority to undertake such a decision. The MEW believed that the first Japanese shipment of rubber reached Germany during the summer of 1942, having initially sailed from Indo-China to West Africa. West Germany also paid 8 million German marks as reparations for forced human experimentation on Yugoslav citizens. Housewives soon spent hours standing in line for supplies; shopkeepers sometimes opened otherwise non-perishable goods such as tinned sardines in front of customers when they were bought to prevent hoarding. (German government Statistical Office), The Statistisches Jahrbuch fr die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1960, pp. Some items shown on the coupons, such as bed sheets, blankets and table linen could in reality only be obtained on production of a special licence. [2][3], The Allies finally agreed for German reparations to be paid in the following forms:[2], To oversee the extraction and distribution of the German reparations in their control zone, the Western Allies established the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency (IARA). The Turkish chromite ore, which like tungsten was an irreplaceable and essential war material, was the only supply available to Germany, who paid using iron and steel products and manufactured goods in order to draw Turkey into her sphere of influence. The US now accepted that it needed to increase spending for its own defense, especially with the growing threat of Japan, but there was real concern that Britain would fall before the weapons were delivered. [4] News of the successes achieved by the men of Contraband Control were rarely out of the newspapers, and provided useful propaganda to shore up civilian morale. After World War Two, many didn't want Germany to have any armed forces at all So successful have outsiders been in demilitarising Germany - so sensitive are Germans about their warlike past -. Her resources in gold and foreign currency are smaller; her stocks of industrial raw materials are far smaller. It came to represent the different political and ideological barriers between the two areas. Of secondary importance was the defence of trade in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. The Germans tended to prefer to sink the ships themselves rather than allow the Allies to capture them, even at risk to those aboard. The long-awaited Spitfire fighter began to enter service, the first of the new naval vessels ordered under the 1936 emergency programme began to join the fleet, and the Air Ministry made the final touches to the Chain Home early warning network of radio direction-finding (later called radar) stations, to bring it up to full operational readiness. They bow humbly in fear of German threats of violence, each one hoping that if he feeds the crocodile enough the crocodile will eat him last and that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. [citation needed], On 3 July Stalin announced a "scorched earth policy"; as Soviets forces and people retreated in the face of the Wehrmacht, everything that could not be moved east was to be destroyed. But by far the biggest hole in the blockade was in the Balkans. This exacerbated the already stark disparities in wealth between eastern and western Germany, a situation that is still somewhat present today. Understand the division of Germany following WWII, Discuss what led to the reunification of Germany. [21] Because of the terrible suffering and starvation caused by the original use of the strategy, a formal declaration of blockade was deliberately not made,[22] but the communiqu listed the types of contraband of war that was liable for confiscation if carried. Despite the effects of her blockade, there was no debate about America's resolve to feed Britain herself, and she was able to, with record harvests. As soon as 1945, the Allied forces worked heavily on removing Nazi influence from Germany in a process dubbed as "denazification".[5]. They had already lost 23 ships, with many more attacked and dozens of sailors killed, while Sweden, Germany's main provider of iron ore, had lost 19 ships, Denmark 9, and Belgium 3. The Germans maintained an aggressive strategy at sea in order to press home their own blockade of the Allies. Although the Allies kept up the round-the-clock pressure, raiding countless lines-of-communications targets in the build-up to the invasion, they were slow to grasp what German commanders were all too aware of that Germany had plenty of tanks and aircraft and their real achilles heel was the oil supply. [53] Under the plan, the Germans agreed to supply 1m bushels (1 US bushel = 8 US gallons, about 27kg for wheat) of bread grains each month, and the committee was to provide 20,000 tons of fats, soup stock and children's food. [85] From 1951 onwards, France, West Germany, Italy and the Benelux nations began moves towards the unification of Western Europe with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the forerunner to the Modern European Union. These were all available to be reconditioned, cannibalised or stripped down for scrap by the men of Organisation Todt. In November heavy damage was caused by the USAAF to the most important industrial site in Norway, the molybdenum mine at Knaben, 50 miles (80km) from Stavanger. Many historians claim that the combination of a harsh treaty and subsequent lax enforcement of its provisions paved the way for the upsurge of German militarism in the 1930s. Nearly all of this territories were returned to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957. Germany established new airfields and U-boat bases all the way down the West Norwegian and European coasts. In the early months of the war Japan launched a series of stunning conquests in the region, among them Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Burma and the East Indies, and soon threatened Australia far to the south. Contraband Control patrols dotted all practical sea routes, stopping all neutral ships, and making life very difficult for any who tried to slip by, forcing them into ports and laying them up for days before inspection, in some cases ruining perishable goods. [28] Even more was done at the other two contraband stations at Orkney and Kent.