3 - Supervised Democratization: American Occupation and German Politics

Summary

allied tensions as the motor of democratization

In mid-May 1945, General Lucius D. Clay stated that the first and overriding goals of American occupation policy were to render Germany totally powerless and to punish those guilty of war crimes. Not until those goals had been achieved would it be possible to plan any farther ahead. In any event, he added, the vanquished could expect to be kept on a tight rein. Although the United States military government (OMGUS) would be unable to avoid setting up a German administrative machine to assist it, this would for many months to come be no more than an instrument of the real sovereign power in Germany - a low-level administrative apparatus run and supervised by the Allies.

Clay was responsible for the civil aspects of the occupation and exerted a strong influence on American occupation policy. The attitude toward the “defeated enemy nation” he voiced in May 1945 (JCS 1067) hardly suggested that he would soon be urging swifter progress toward giving Germans more responsibilities and toward democratization. The urgent tempo set by Clay sometimes alarmed not only his political advisers but even the Germans. Clay's decision to hold elections as early as January 1946, for example, was greeted as skeptically by the Germans themselves as it was by most of his own officers. Not without good cause, both occupiers and occupied had their doubts whether Germany's “post-Hitler” society had yet progressed that far.