Towards a ‘Western’ Strategy: The Making of British Policy Towards Germany 1945–46

Abstract

Germany was both a major cause of the European cold war and one stage upon which the early cold war drama was played out. It has often been argued that, for two years after the war ended, Britain genuinely sought to achieve agreement to control Germany within the framework of the 1945 Potsdam Protocol, and that only by the end of 1947, as the clouds of the cold war gathered, did Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and his senior officials regretfully conclude that four-power cooperation would not be possible because of Soviet intransigence. However, the documentary evidence paints a rather different picture of British priorities and policy-making in these early postwar years of ‘armed truce’¹; and also enables researchers to look at the way in which policy decisions were arrived at in Whitehall and therefore to re-examine some of the assumptions about the foreign-policy process in the early postwar period.