Events Related to Establishment of NATO

Division of Germany to Achieve Anglo-American Imperialist Aims

– Dougal MacDonald –

According to Anglo-American and anti-communist historians, the so-called Berlin Blockade and Berlin Airlift of 1948-49 marked the Soviet Union's initiation of the Cold War. But in March 1946, Winston Churchill had already started the Cold War by attacking the Soviet Union in his warmongering "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe."[2] Churchill was echoing his mentor, Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who had stated a year earlier: "If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the Reich. An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered."[3]

Post World War II occupation of Germany from 1945-49.

What then are the facts about the 1948-49 "Berlin Blockade" and "Berlin Airlift?" At the end of the Second World War, by the 1945 Potsdam Agreement, the four allies divided defeated Germany into four zones: Soviet, American, British and French. The city of Berlin was located in the Soviet Zone but all four countries' military governments were represented in its administration. A main provision agreed upon at Potsdam for the setting up of a new post-war German democratic state was economic unity among all zones. From the beginning, the U.S. imperialists pursued a policy of splitting rather than unifying Germany and of trying to isolate the Soviet Union, first merging the U.S. and British Zones into Bizonia and then into Trizonia by including the French Zone.

In 1948, the U.S. and the other Western Powers announced their intention to form a separate West Germany, which was created in May 1949. "East Germany" did not yet exist. The Soviet Union called for renewed four-power talks to resolve the issue, but the Western Powers ignored the call and instituted a separate Western currency reform, even though the Potsdam Agreement called for economic unity, which required unified currency. The goal of the Western introduction of the new deutsche mark currency into Berlin was to try to destabilize not only the economy of part of Berlin but also of the whole Soviet Zone of which Berlin was a part. It was warfare on the economic front. To prevent economic disruption of the people's lives, the Soviet Union instituted restrictions on traffic to and from Berlin, which the Western Powers labeled a "blockade."

The Western Powers responded to the justifiable restrictions by initiating the "Berlin Airlift" of food on June 24, 1948, after falsely alleging that the people of Berlin were starving and were "victims of a famine." For purposes of anti-Soviet propaganda, the completely unnecessary airlift delivered food to the supposedly blockaded people in the non-Soviet zones of Berlin until May 12, 1949. To show its good faith, the Soviet Union immediately offered to supply enough food for the entire Berlin population (rather than just the Soviet zone), which it began doing daily in July 1948. Meanwhile, the Western powers continued to pour out a stream of false allegations such as that the Soviets refused to negotiate, that the Soviets planned to overthrow the Berlin municipal government, that the Soviets wanted a new world war, and so on.

In August 1948, in Moscow, the four powers finally agreed on lifting the travel restrictions and introducing a uniform currency in Berlin but the U.S. imperialists quickly broke the agreement and stayed their course because such changes would interfere with their plans to partition Germany and create a separate West German state. The imperialists wanted to form an aggressive military bloc directed against the Soviet Union and the people's democracies and divert attention from questions of peace, disarmament and denazification. A divided Germany was the plan of the U.S. imperialists from the start, a policy that they later also carried out in Korea and Viet Nam, as the British had done when they partitioned India in 1947.

What happened in the past reveals that all the modern-day imperialist hosannas about Germany finally being reunified are complete rubbish because it was the imperialists who deliberately divided Germany in the first place.

The history of Berlin shows how historical falsification worked at that time by repeatedly presenting lies about the objective past and by suppressing -- including by force -- the presentation of the facts. Hitler once said, "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it." Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels was a master of the big lie technique. The Nazis constantly backed up their lies with force; Hitler's lie that Poland had attacked Germany was followed by the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, resulting in the deaths of more than three million Polish people. The U.S. imperialists learned well from Hitler and the Nazis. They inherited the big lie technique and used it during the Cold War to block the peoples of the world from having an outlook on the basis of which they could pursue their own movement to preserve the peace, instead of being divided into two camps according to which the danger of war was posed by one or the other, while the real problems of achieving peace remain unaddressed.

Notes

1. Said at the war-time conference of Allied leaders in Potsdam, 1945.

2. Churchill's infamous Iron Curtain Speech was made at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946.

3. From the article "Das Jahr 2000" in the newspaper Das Reich, February 25, 1945, pp. 1-2.

(Extracted from the article "First They Fake Berlin" by Dougal MacDonald, originally published in TML Daily, November 9, 2010)

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This article was published in

Volume 54 Number 40 - July 8, 2024

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2024/Articles/MS54408.HTM

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