At the conference of Yalta (Crimea) held in February 1945, France was coopted as the fourth controlling power and allocated its own occupation zone. In Yalta the only Allied intention which remained valid was that of terminating Germany’s existence as an independent state but keeping the country intact. Stalin especially was keen to preserve Germany’s economic unity. He demanded such huge reparations for the Soviet Union’s terrible sacrifices as a result of Germany’s invasion that they could not possibly have been made by one occupation zone alone. Moscow wanted 20 billion dollars and control over 80percent of all of Germany’s factories.

In contrast to the original plans, the British and Americans, too, wanted to preserve a viable rump Germany, not out of greed for reparations but because, after about the fall of 1944, U.S. President Roosevelt aimed to establish a stable Central Europe as part of a system of global equilibrium. Germany’s economic base was indispensable to this plan. He had therefore quickly discarded the notorious Morgenthau Plan (September 1944), which would have reduced Germany to an agricultural country and would have divided it into a north German and a south German state.

Soon the only common aim remaining to the victorious powers was that of disarming and demilitarizing Germany. The original idea of partitioning the country quickly became no more than “lip service to a dying idea” (Charles Bohlen) when the Western powers watched with dismay as Stalin, immediately upon liberating, that is to say conquering, Poland and Southeastern Europe, launched a massive operation to sovietize those regions.