The division of Germany (German division or split of Germany) refers to the existence of two German states on German territory in the period from 7 September 1949 until the annexation of the GDR on 3 October 1990.
“Poor man and rich man stood there and looked at each other; then the poor man, pale, said: If I were not poor, you would not be rich.” (Brecht)
This is the face of capitalism in the Federal Republic of Germany. It rests on a social principle of exploitation of the absolute majority of the population by a minority that has appropriated the means of production as owners and knows only one principle:
Greed for profit!
The working people, as non-owners of the means of production, are forced to sell their labor power to the owners of the means of production, who determine the value of the commodity labor power of the working people.
The GDR had transferred the means of production into social ownership. As a result, the results of labor came directly and through social funds—such as social benefits and healthcare, housing construction, education, supply facilities, defense, expanded reproduction, and through investments for the establishment and expansion of enterprises—to the benefit of the working people for the constant raising of their standard of living. This is not forgiven to the state of the GDR.
Through lies, slander, and half-truths, the achievements of the GDR are to be discredited and defamed with the terms dictatorship, Wall, and Stasi.
This year it is 77 years since the FRG was formed on 7 September 1949 and thus the division of Germany was completed.
In response to this, the GDR was founded on 7 October 1949.
These events are taken by the ruling forces of the FRG and their media as an occasion to increase agitation against the GDR in a particularly massive way. In doing so, they target schoolchildren and young people with deliberate manipulation. And they complain that the influences of parents who still experienced the GDR with its achievements for its citizens still have an effect and that the image of the GDR has been idealized.
The defamation of the GDR as a state of workers and peasants is pursued all the more at a time when it becomes visible to all that capitalism, with its crises and its misanthropic system of exploitation, oppression, and nationwide surveillance of citizens, is not the last word of history.
The history of the GDR is therefore all the more essentially reduced to “Wall construction,” “dictatorship,” “Stasi,” “prisons,” “persecution,” and defamed.
The real achievements of the GDR and its citizens, as well as their life in peace and social security, are kept silent. Every thoroughly thinking person must ask questions such as:
Why did the GDR regard its supreme commandment “Never again shall war emanate from German soil” as the maxim of its actions and take part in no war missions?
Have you ever thought about who divided Germany? That is historically proven solely by the date of the founding of the two states.
Even if, as here, lies are again told and the founding of the GDR is to be made responsible for the division, and the date of the founding of the FRG, which was earlier, is simply concealed.
It is also expressed in Adenauer’s statement: “Better half of Germany whole – than all of Germany half!”
Was it not for this reason that the FRG was formed first and admitted into the Paris Treaties of rearmament and militarization, whereby existing offers by East Germany to form an all-German government became illusory? Only in response to this was the GDR founded out of the anti-fascist democratic order.
So it was not the “Wall” (anti-fascist protective rampart), which was part of the state-recognized border of the GDR, that divided Germany, but the separate formation of the West German state and its incorporation into the NATO war alliance were the cause.
How did the GDR come into being?
The Second World War, started by Hitler’s Germany, ended in 1945 with unconditional surrender. Already some years earlier, the Allies—the Soviet Union, the USA, and Great Britain—had agreed on the territorial division of Germany into corresponding occupation zones.
At the Potsdam Conference (17 July to 2 August 1945), Stalin (USSR), Truman (USA), and Churchill (Great Britain), who during the conference was replaced by Attlee as a result of elections, deliberated how things should continue with Germany.
The differing opinions of the conference participants are documented at Cecilienhof Palace / Potsdam.
Ultimately, they agreed on the following provisions in the final document called the “Potsdam Agreement”:
Germany is to be transformed into a peace-loving democratic state that cannot unleash any new aggressions against others;
German fascism and militarism are to be destroyed;
the large armaments concerns are to be broken up;
Germany is to be regarded as an economic unit and—the establishment of central German administrative bodies is to be provided for.
Unfortunately, these provisions were consistently implemented only in the Soviet occupation zone, which comprised the territory of the later GDR. With the support of the occupying power, that is, the Soviet comrades, the construction of an anti-fascist democratic order began.
The basis of this development was the appeal of the KPD of 11 June 1945 and, as a result, the establishment of the unity of the working class and its parties, the KPD and SPD, into the SED.
It was different in the western occupation zones. First the British and American zones merged into the so-called Bizone, later, with the inclusion of the French zone, into the Trizone. With the currency reform of 1948 in the western zones, including the parts of Berlin assigned to the Western Allies, the division of Germany began contrary to the provisions of the “Potsdam Agreement.”
The FRG came into being through the USA and Great Britain in close alliance with the old fascist and reactionary forces as well as their puppets Adenauer (CDU), Heuss and Blücher (FDP), Schumacher and Ollenhauer (SPD), to name only a few.
Old forces of the “German Reich” again built up the FRG state. Konrad Adenauer: a man of capital, admittedly dismissed by the Nazis, but also provided by them with a good pension for 10 years.
Theodor Heuss: Federal President from 1949 to 1959; as a Reichstag deputy he voted in 1933 for the Enabling Act that secured the Nazis’ power.
Heinrich Lübke: concentration camp construction manager, Federal President of the FRG.
Ludwig Erhard: chief planner of the fascist armaments economic leadership, Economics Minister of the FRG.
Wilhelm von Opel: old Nazi and general director of the Opel works.
Reinhard Gehlen: old and new leading figure in espionage.
The Brown Book proves: Among the supports of the Hitler dictatorship, the pioneers and beneficiaries of the persecution of Jews, the organizers and commanders of the attacks on almost all countries of Europe, and the convicted murderers of anti-fascists and resistance fighters who are again active today in West Germany, are counted: the Federal President, 20 members of the Federal Cabinet and state secretaries, 189 generals, admirals, and officers in the Bundeswehr or in NATO leadership staffs as well as officials in the War Ministry, 1,118 high judicial officials, public prosecutors, and judges, 244 leading officials of the Foreign Office, the Bonn embassies and consulates, 300 officials of the police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as well as other federal ministries… (Brown Book, National Council of the National Front, Berlin 1968)
After the appropriate people had been placed by the USA, Great Britain, and France and progressive-democratic forces had been sidelined, these reactionary forces were able to raise their friends and accomplices again into politically influential government posts in order to complete their policy of dividing Germany. After 1945 Konrad Adenauer put the old aforementioned fascist commanders of Germany back in the saddle and entrusted them with leadership positions.
In 1955, of 38 Bundeswehr commanders, 33 of the old German Reich were again at the helm of war. The formation of the government on 7 September 1949 by order of the Western powers definitively established the completion of the division of Germany.
As a logical consequence of this development, on 7 October 1949 the German Democratic Republic was founded in the territory of the Soviet occupation zone. The founding of the state was preceded by an intensive and thorough discussion among the population. This, too, distinguishes it from the FRG. Nevertheless, in the years that followed there were again and again efforts on the part of the GDR to establish state unity (historical documents exist on the GDR’s offers), which were really only abandoned in the 1960s after completely different social orders had emerged.
During this time the division had deepened more and more, especially since in the meantime the two German states belonged to two different military alliances and economic communities.
The GDR was for four decades—from 1949 to 1989—the state framework in which, on just under a third of the former German territory, the lives of approximately 17 million inhabitants, a quarter of the Germans, developed in an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and socialist way.