In Europe, the year begins not only with famine, but with a deepening division that runs down the middle of Germany. On March 5, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill refers in a speech to an “iron curtain” that Stalin has drawn through Europe. In turn, the Soviet Union disapproves of the Western powers’ policies in Germany and feels threatened by the U.S. atomic monopoly.
The Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) is formed out of a merger between members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) who live in the Soviet occupation zone.
The Nuremberg trial concludes in April; among those sentenced to life imprisonment or death are Martin Bormann (in absentia), Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Alfred Jodl.
The inability to consistently implement the Potsdam Agreement, which regulates the occupation and reconstruction of Germany, inevitably leads to the breakdown of the four-power government in Germany and, eventually, to two Germanys that will go their separate ways.
1946 Separate Paths
As part of the Allied program of de-Nazification and reeducation, Germans are taken to films about the concentration camps; Burgsteinfurt, May 1, 1945.
Wilhelm Pieck (KPD, left) and Otto Grotewohl (SPD, right) shake hands to seal the merger of the KPD and SPD into the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in April.
