6 - West Germany Enters the Fray

Summary

The Saar population, which today supports autonomy under the auspices of a European organization, will be less likely to do so in the future.

—André François Poncet

Saarlanders! You must realize that the Saar = a French colony.

—Pro-German tract, 1952

WHEN THE SAAR'S newly elected Landtag approved the Saar constitution in December 1947, the rest of Germany was an occupied land. Moreover, economic conditions were still desperate. And it was unclear when a new German government would emerge or what shape it would take. As the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies steadily deteriorated between 1947 and 1949, however, the situation in Germany changed dramatically. By April 1949 the United States, Britain, and France had merged their zones of occupation in western Germany and signed an Occupation Statute. This formally ended the military occupation and gave limited sovereignty to a new German government under the oversight of an Allied High Commission. The promulgation of the Basic Law in May 1949, which effectively served as a constitution, as well as the election of a new Bundestag that same August, resulted in the establishment of a new state, the Federal Republic of Germany. By one vote, the Bundestag in turn elected Konrad Adenauer to be the Federal Republic's first chancellor. In contrast to the democracy that emerged in the West, the Soviets ultimately rigged the political process in their zone of occupation in favor of Communists loyal to Moscow. In October 1949 the Soviets formally established a new state in the East, the German Democratic Republic.

With Germany divided, Konrad Adenauer's main concern as chancellor was reintegrating West Germany into the Western world. Adenauer was a member of the Center Party and mayor of Cologne from 1917 until 1933. Despite his opposition to Nazism, he refused to take part in the failed July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. In the aftermath of this plot, the Gestapo still arrested him and his wife, although he was released in November 1944 and reentered politics after the war, eventually becoming the leader of the Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) party.2 Adenauer was a devout Catholic, a firm supporter of democracy, and deeply anti-Communist.