May 12, 1949, the Soviet Union lifted the Berlin Blockade
Following the Yalta Conference in February 1945 and the Potsdam Conference later that year, the defeated Germany was divided into four occupation zones by the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Being abandoned by political forces with a different worldview alarmed the Soviet Union.
BERLIN: Theatre of Ideological Contest.
But while the Soviet Union and its Western Allies’ goals had coincided throughout the war, they soon started to differ, especially regarding the future of Germany. The Soviet Union, under the direction of Joseph Stalin, planned to economically punish Germany by making it pay war reparations and provide its industrial technology to aid the Soviet Union’s postwar reconstruction.
The Allies, on the other hand, believed that for Germany to remain a democratic barrier against the spread of communism from Eastern Europe, where Stalin had established his Soviet sphere of influence, its economy needed to revive.
The Berlin Blockade was an effort by the Soviet Union in 1948 to restrict access for travellers from the United States, Great Britain, and France to their respective parts of Berlin, which were wholly located inside Russian-occupied East Germany. The Soviet Union blocked all rail, road, and canal access to the western zones of Berlin out of concern over the new American policy of providing economic aid to Germany and other economically struggling European countries, as well as the Western Allies’ efforts to impose a single currency in the zones they occupied in Germany and Berlin. Suddenly, around 2.5 million residents were without access to critical necessities like food, medication, gasoline, and electricity.
Now unable to freely distribute supplies to the whole of Berlin, western countries resorted to airlifting those goods across the blocked road and waterways. West Berlin received essential supplies and assistance for nearly one-year through this airlift launched by Western countries. Seeing the fruitlessness of the blockade, the Soviet Union ended it on May 12, 1949.
The Truman Doctrine
In a speech to Congress delivered in March 1947 in response to communist uprisings in Greece and Turkey, U.S. President Harry S. Truman declared that going forward, the country would “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” by providing them with military assistance. This strategy, which came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, ushered in a new era of American global participation and contributed to the clarification of the widening gap between Western democracies and the Soviet Union.
The Truman Doctrine so helped to scare the Soviets into seeking more protectionist measures to secure herself and her global political power of a Communist takeover of the world, even though the Soviets and the USA fought together against Hitler.
Then another “omnious policy” was implemented. Representatives from the US, UK, and France gathered in London during the first half of 1948 to talk about Germany’s future. In that summit, the occupied territories of the United States and Britain were combined to form Bizonia, with the eventual aim of creating a single, unified West German state that included the occupied territories of the United States, Britain, and France in Germany and Berlin, as well as a single, stable currency.
The Soviet Union felt misled when they learned of these preparations in March 1948. They then left the Allied Control Council, which had been convening ever since the war’s end to coordinate occupation strategy amongst zones.
In June, U.S. and British officials introduced the new currency, the Deutschmark, into Bizonia and West Berlin, without informing their Soviet counterparts. The Soviets promptly introduced their own currency, the Ostmark, into Berlin and eastern Germany since they saw this as a breach of their postwar agreements. The Berlin Blockade started on June 24, 1948, the same day. They terminated the four-way administration of the city on the same day by closing all roads, railways, and canals leading to the Allied-occupied portions of Berlin.
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