AFTER ADOLF HITLER DEATH IN 1945,ALLIED PREPARATIONS FOR OCCUPATION OF GERMANY,AS RUSSIA DOMINANCE IN THE EAST.THE RED ARMY HAD MARCHER IN TO BERLIN ,WHICH WAS DIVIDED IN FOUR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE ,USA,BRITAIN,FRANCE AND SOVIET.EVEN IF ALL THESE SECTORS WHERE SO CLOSE TO EACH OTHER,THEY STILL HAD ENORMOUS DIFFERENCES.

Preparations for the Allied occupation of Germany in Washington and London created the blueprints not just for the British and American zones but for the entire occupation of Germany. They bound the other two occupiers, the Soviet Union and France, to priorities they did not always share and arrangements they did not always support. Both Soviet and French attempts to develop plans of their own were hampered by internal disagreements over aims, a lack of resources, and, most acutely for the French, a lack of time.After many years of neglect, there is now renewed interest in the Allied occupation of Germany. The conference showcased new international research by both established academics and early career historians. Since there had been few opportunities within the last two decades for scholars of the different zones of occupation to meet and discuss, the conference created a forum for future exchange.The conference focussed on the Western zones because significant differences between the Western zones had previously been neglected as historians focussed on the emergence of a Cold War Europe, divided between West and East. The panels covered a broad range of themes: ideology and ruling strategies, interactions between occupiers and occupied, the handling of crimes and punishment, and the experience of occupation in daily life, which is now emerging as a major new research area explored by early career historians. Although most of the papers focussed mainly on one of the three Western zones, the conference aimed at bringing together those researching the postwar occupation of Germany and starting formulating comparative questions. Until now, historians have rarely undertaken an inter-zonal analysis of the occupation, and there have been few in-depth comparisons of the policies, activities, impacts, and legacies of the Western occupiers. As a result, the conference attempted to disseminate and encourage novel research that could contribute to a new integrated history of occupation.General guidelines for the political treatment of Germany crystallized in the course of the wartime meetings and conferences of the Big Three. Within these parameters planning staffs in London and Washington worked out detailed directives for specific issues. From the start there were tensions between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, but some basic purposes and assumptions bound them together: they agreed that, in the interest of world security, Nazism had to be defeated and Germany's war potential had to be destroyed. The principle of an ‘unconditional surrender’, announced at Churchill and Roosevelt's meeting in Casablanca in January 1943, signalled that the Allies would fight until they had achieved Germany's total defeat; no successors to the National Socialist government would be able to negotiate the terms of peace. Fears that this formula would prolong the war notwithstanding, Roosevelt and Churchill insisted that the mistakes of the First World War were not to be repeated, that the German population would be dealt with firmly.But, apart from these general premises, the conferences of Casablanca, Moscow, and Teheran left open many questions of future Allied policy in Germany. Even the work of the inter-Allied European Advisory Commission (EAC), a body set up to coordinate future occupation policy, suffered from a general lack of certainty as to what should happen.Separate British and American bodies, such as the British Foreign Office and its Research Department (FORD) and the US War Department's Civil Affairs Division, conducted research on Germany's existing governmental structures and drafted plans for future administration. These plans were integrated and coordinated in Anglo-American organizations such as the offices of the Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), later turned into the G5 Division of the Anglo-American joint command Supreme Headquarters Allied Epeditionary Force (SHAEF). Public health came under the aegis of ‘civil affairs’. Some of these preparations began immediately after the outbreak of war, but the early work concentrated almost exclusively on war strategy. From the end of 1941, much of the planning work was overseen by the newly created Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee. This body, responsible to the British prime minister and the American president, produced plans for an invasion of the European continent and the shape of military governments.Some of this work concerned itself with the training of future military government officers. Barely half a year after the United States had entered the war, the first School of Military Government opened its doors on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to train officers for work in civil affairs headquarters. Here, the ‘stress was on military government problems and their solution in terms applicable to a large variety of local situations, but under conditions basically like those in Burma and Bulgaria in that they involved an occupying army and an indigenous enemy—or allied—population’. Foreign language instruction was not part of this training, and the ‘foreign area study’ was ‘sketchy and only suggestive of many possible situations in different parts of the world’.By June 1943, less generic training commenced in (eventually) ten Civil Affairs Training Schools, known as CATS, all based at universities who appointed a civilian director. Courses were taught by specialists in fields such as local government, farming, industry, commerce, public welfare, public safety, and public health. Courses for work in Europe lasted between eight and twelve weeks, and up to six months for the Japanese programme. The director of the Central European area programme of the CATS at Stanford, John Brown Mason, explained that ‘attention was paid to the kind of knowledge and local points of view that would help the civil affairs officer to understand the people with whom he must deal and to meet effectively the problems which he was likely to encounter. These needs called for special attention to the study of national psychology, political customs and philosophies, religious convictions and outlooks, inherited attitudes, pattern of thought (or nonthought) acquired under the monopolistic propaganda of Nazism, recent history, and so forth.’ However, even here, Mason argued, not enough consideration was given to the particularities of individual countries. More seriously, Mason argued in 1950 that the differences between military government in enemy and Allied countries were ‘not sufficiently appreciated during training’, and ‘while the occupation of Allied countries would be necessary, it would also be temporary and of a basically different character [from that in enemy countries]’. Here, ‘problems would be quite different from those encountered in enemy states, they called for other attitudes and methods.After relatively slow beginnings, planning for the occupation and training of military government officers accelerated rapidly in the aftermath of the Casablanca conference of January 1943, which confirmed that Germany's borders would be changed as conquered territories would be returned, that dismemberment or some kind of division into zones was likely, and that the Allies would occupy the country for a significant but unspecified period of time. The Casablanca meeting also made clear that occupation forces would have to supervise basic administrative functions until a central German government could be reinstalled.After Casablanca, preparations concentrated on the division of responsibilities within the military government machinery. Initially, it was to be based on the organization of the British and American armies, and then to be turned into a Control Commission, mirroring the organization of German local government. The term ‘military government’ originally referred to the sum of all occupation troops in Germany, but was increasingly used to describe occupation officers in the different zones.6 These bodies quickly produced a deluge of acronyms: the British contingent was the Control Commission for Germany (British Element), or CCG(BE); the American the United States Group Control Council, USGCC, later turned into the Office of Military Government, United States, known as OMGUS. The Soviet operation was to be the Sovietskaya Voyennaya Administracia v Germanii, SVAG, or Soviet Military Administration in Germany, SMAG. When at the last minute the French were added, they administered their zone through the Commandement en Chef Français en Allemagne, the CCFA, and the Gouvernement Militaire de la Zone Française d’Occupation, referred to as GMZFO.

The British at that time was also nearly as bankrupt as the Germans so they didn’t have much to spare and the French and Soviet still hold some grudge when their territory and people get occupied by the Germans.The commanders-in-chief from each of the occupying powers Dwight Eisenhower, Bernard Montgomery, and Georgy Zhukov eventually joined by Pierre Koenig were to form the highest authority in each zone. They were to decide Germany-wide questions within the Allied Control Council (ACC). The ACC's directorates and the departments of the occupation authorities in each zone were to mirror the relevant German authorities, to which they would leave the execution of policy. German ministries were to be seized on surrender and continued under Allied control. The administration of civil affairs (which included public health) was to be part of the many responsibilities of the Internal Affairs and Communications Division.As plans for these structures emerged during the second half of 1943 and 1944, planning staffs also began to compile manuals and handbooks to familiarize officers with German history, major German institutions, and Allied policy. Most were not overtly political, but they frequently incorporated popular and academic analyses of the German problem, such as the identification of Prussia as the source of fascism and authoritarianism, the existence of a pervasive militarist tradition, and the psychological nature of Nazism, analogous to the mental state of schizophrenia of which the carrier was often unaware. A guide on ‘The Mentality of the Germany Officer’, for example, set out to ‘trace the development of [the German's] curious mentality through earlier years’. It discussed issues such as the influence of German traditions on military officers, German attitudes to the Versailles treaty, German officers’ obsession with ‘honour’, and how to manage German soldiers after defeat. It concluded that while Allied troops had to prepare themselves for dealing with the Germans’ ‘ferocious fanaticism’ and ‘contempt of moral restraint’, their assignment was assisted by the likelihood of ‘fierce factional splits among them’, which, ‘combined with the fact that the Germans as liars are clumsy and transparent (far inferior to the Latins)’, would make their work easier.A paper entitled ‘The German Character’ explained to Allied troops some of the attributes of the German psyche, such as ‘an abnormal respect for authority’, ‘an inferiority complex due in part to Germany's late start as a nation, a guilt complex resulting from misdeeds, and at the same time an awareness of great gifts and talents’. The ‘average German’, this paper stated, had a tendency towards ‘fanatical extremist tendencies’ and an ‘unswaying loyalty’ to leaders, which meant defeat was likely to lead to reactions such as ‘hysteria, running amok, killings and destruction of others or self’. In what was later to become an important theme in the selection and appointment of Germans to administrative jobs, the paper insisted that the population could not be ‘divided into two classes, good and bad Germans’. Rather, there were ‘good and bad elements in the German character, the latter of which generally predominate’. The paper also warned that Allied officers should not be deceived by Germans’ attempts to befriend occupation officers, as they would try to divide the occupation powers.The paper also included a list of ‘Some Do's and Don’t's’, spelling out how Allied officers were to conduct themselves.In the last year of the war, instructions and guidelines were displayed most prominently in the SHAEF Handbook for Military Government. Drafts from April and June 1944 attempted to lay out concisely the methods by which military government officers were to administer and supervise German affairs.11 Officers would have to ensure that the German governmental machinery ran efficiently, and this would best be achieved if the centralized German administrative system was retained. It was likely that the Allies would have to subsidize German economic development for some time, and that a range of commodities and relief supplies would have to be imported.12 Although these drafts acknowledged that food would be scarce all over Europe, they nonetheless set the target for German rations at 2,000 calories per person per day, i.e. at the same level set for the populations of the non-Axis liberated countries. An August 1944 draft of another handbook, the Manual for Administration and Local Government in Germany, made similar recommendations: it stated that because the war damage in Germany was likely to be extensive, it was in the interests of Allied officers to focus on resolving housing and economic problems.13 A number of scholars’ recommendations strengthened this conclusion. The Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, for example, argued in 1944 that lasting ‘institutional change’ demanded ‘a policy of fostering a highly productive, full-employment, expanding economy for Germany. The inherent tendencies of the modern, industrial economy are such that if this is achieved its influence on institutional change will be automatically in the right direction.’However, a number of factors complicated and slowed the preparation of concrete plans. Germany's future was just one of many Allied preoccupations. Numerous strategic decisions had to be made regarding campaigns and operations in North Africa, France, Italy, Poland, and the Soviet Union, and arrangements for the redeployment of troops to the Pacific. Britain was heavily dependent on American credits and would have to urgently rebuild its export trade. The future of Germany was vital, certainly, but as Michael Balfour, a member of the British Element of the Control Commission in Berlin, remarked: ‘Giving the German question the importance due to it was easily confused with favouring the cruel enemy at the expense of the unfortunate victim.’The coordination of the different Allied governments’ diverging interests was at times difficult, but internal divisions were also significant. The Roosevelt administration was divided by a long-running struggle between the Department of State and the War Department, which centred largely on the role of the armed forces in occupation and military government. The War Department argued that ‘the demands of military necessity and unity of command’ precluded civilian responsibilities, and that it was impossible for civilian agencies to operate independently until military operations had been completed.16 To counter that, ideological objections about the wisdom of giving political power to soldiers were voiced repeatedly, but by November 1943 Roosevelt eventually directed the War Department to take charge of planning, because it was ‘quite apparent that if prompt results are to be obtained the Army will have to assume the initial burden’.17 While it had not been proven that civilians would not perform occupation duties better than soldiers, the argument that they could not perform them at all during a world war and its aftermath was powerful and influential.

During this time, Joseph Stalin actively worked to create and place in power the Socialist Unity Party in the Soviet zone. It was his intention that all of Germany should be communist and part of the Soviet sphere of influence. To this end, the Western Allies were only given limited access to Berlin along road and ground routes. While the Allies initially believed this to be short-term, trusting to Stalin's goodwill, all subsequent requests for additional routes were denied by the Soviets. Only in the air was a formal agreement in place which guaranteed three twenty-mile-wide air corridors to the city.

Mana

One of the major problems faced by the Western Allies in 1945 was due precisely to the differences in the sectors. The Soviet sector (including areas ceded to Poland) by and large was the main food producer of the four regions. The western sectors were the primary industrial and population sectors. There was an extreme food deficit in the west which the allies - read the Americans - would have to make up. This situation was aggravated by the fact that large numbers of refugees flooded into the western sectors from the east - both the Soviet sector, former German areas ceded to Poland and German communities further east. The Czechs for instance settled the Sudeten German question but putting them all in boxcars and sending them west. There were similar expulsions all across central europe.The American debates over occupation responsibilities were mirrored, to a lesser degree, by differences between the British government's War Office and Foreign Office. Responsibility for the administration of Germany was tossed back and forth between them because of changing ideas on the nature of military occupation. Until March 1944, the occupation was to be supervised by the War Office; then a revision handed responsibility to the Foreign Office, until in June 1945 the War Office took over again. In October 1945 a special agency, the Control Office for Germany and Austria (COGA) was set up to coordinate the two. However, military government officers continued to report directly to the Foreign Office, bypassing the War Office and particularly COGA, which was dissolved soon after its establishment.19 However, British officials, just like their American colleagues, ultimately came to the conclusion that civilian responsibility for the administration of an occupied country was, for the near future at least, not viable.As a result of these divisions, both governments were constrained by the prevailing uncertainties and displayed great unwillingness to commit to any specific directions too early. Both Roosevelt and Churchill delayed firm decisions. In October 1944, Roosevelt told his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that it was ‘all very well for us to make all kinds of preparations for the treatment of Germany, but there are some matters in regard to such treatment that lead me to believe that speed on these matters is not an essential at the present moment … I dislike making detailed plans for a country which we do not yet occupy.’Churchill voiced similar reservations. As late as February 1945, he argued that it was ‘much too soon for us to decide these enormous questions. I shall myself prefer to concentrate upon the practical issues which will occupy the next two or three years, rather than argue about the long-term relationship of Germany to Europe .There is  wisdom in reserving one's decision as long as possible and until all the facts and forces that will be potent at the moment are revealed.’‘Practical issues’ such as war strategy and specific operations in France and Germany were prioritized, and preparations for the future of a defeated Germany were marked by a lack of direction and an unwillingness to commit.Up to this point, preparations were conducted by two well-oiled bureaucratic machines, while the political leaderships were distracted by more urgent problems and unwilling to commit to any specific proposals. In both Washington and London, civil servants drew upon a familiar set of procedures while preparing for the German occupation: they trained staff, conducted research into likely scenarios, compiled handbooks. The result was a set of preparations similar in tone and substance to plans produced for other countries, with little strategic thought about what the Allies wanted to achieve in Germany.It was in this context that in August 1944 the Morgenthau Plan entered the planning arena, when Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the US Treasury, prepared a comprehensive scheme on the political and economic treatment of Germany after surrender.He criticized what he perceived to be a widespread emphasis in American circles on German ‘reconstruction’. Such tendencies, he maintained, could be identified in the official memoranda.The SHAEF Handbook seemed to convey the impression that a transformation of Germany could be achieved by forbidding National Socialism and improving living conditions. If these directives were to guide American conduct, Morgenthau argued, any change of German society was going to be superficial and temporary. Germany's participation in a third world war could not be prevented by the kind of controls that had been imposed after 1918. Experience had shown that factories converted to peacetime production could always be converted back; that the destruction of industries only had a temporary effect; and that banning Nazism would only drive it underground. Allied military governments would not be able to supervise Germany for ever.Policy in Germany would have to be fundamentally different from operations in countries liberated from Nazi control.The key to the German problem, according to Morgenthau, lay in economics. Germany would only become peaceful if it was transformed into an agrarian society, if its industrial base was stripped away, and if the industries vital to military strength were dismantled and transported to other nations as a form of restitution. A military occupation would have to prevent their re-establishment, and would have to continue for at least twenty years. During this time Germany should receive no economic aid. In fact, the Allies should not ‘assume responsibility for such economic problems as price controls, rationing, housing, or transportation, or take any measure designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy, except those which are essential to military operations’. Conditions should not be allowed to be better than those prevailing in Germany's poor and war-ridden neighbours.The fate of the Morgenthau Plan is well known. Roosevelt initially supported it, but the Foreign Office, the State Department, and a series of economic advisers objected to at least some of its proposals. Reparations would have to be extracted in a more viable way, they argued, or else Germany would become a heavy burden on Allied governments and taxpayers. Although the plan was never fully or even partially implemented, a number of (primarily German) historians have ascribed to it great influence.It did have a number of consequences. Most importantly, the debates it triggered signalled to planners that the occupation of Germany was different from other Allied projects. Some of the plan's premises and specific clauses were taken up in later policy. The notion of a ‘Carthaginian peace’ (similar in spirit to the settlement imposed by the Romans on Carthage), gave some shape to the vague formula of ‘unconditional surrender’. Specifically, German living conditions (and features such as the health service) were now treated as part and extension of the German state's war machine, to be dealt with accordingly. This proved to be of fundamental importance for the planning of public health operations. In the absence of other clear directions, the plan signified a move towards a ‘hard peace’. Aspirations of toughness predominated thereafter, and handbooks and outline plans were rewritten to conform to these new standards. Planning staff's wariness of going beyond the political premises of a ‘hard peace’ resulted in a lack of policy in many areas, which was preferable to the accusation of having exceeded ‘the bounds of strict military necessity’.From September 1944, preparations were different in tone. They emphasized the differences between liberated countries and Germany, and declared that the standard of living could not be allowed to be higher in Germany than elsewhere.  First, no steps towards the economic rehabilitation of Germany were to be undertaken; the responsibility for maintaining existing conditions lay exclusively with German authorities. Second, no relief supplies were to be imported or distributed beyond the minimum necessary to prevent disease and disorder, and only insofar as these might hamper military operations. This was particularly crucial to the planning of health work. Third, all Nazis and Nazi sympathizers were to be punished systematically and all Nazi organizations were to be dissolved .As a result, the later drafts of the public health section of the Handbook focused on the pervasiveness of Nazi ideology in the health service, rather than, as before, the achievements and successes of German public health and social medicine before 1933.At the same time, General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, instructed his forces in September 1944 in just these terms about the conduct of the occupying forces in Germany. A few months later, a December 1944 directive on the ‘procedures to be employed in the military government of occupied Germany’ spelled out the new guiding principles. The ‘essence’ of Allied policy was that ‘no effort will be made to rehabilitate or succor the German people.

Soviet built upon the main principles for the treatment of Germany agreed at the wartime conferences: after defeat, Germany would be demilitarized, its industries decartelized, and its institutions and public life denazified. However, the Big Three's public accord disguised discord behind the scenes. Soviet policy prioritized military and economic security in a manner frequently distrusted or openly rejected by the British and Americans, particularly in matters of reparations. In view of the devastation of large parts of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government was determined to demand the payment of a huge reparations bill. In a proposal presented at the Yalta conference, Stalin called for German reparations of $20 billion, of which $10 billion were to go directly to the Soviet Union. They were to come from a variety of different sources: dismantled German industrial installations, direct deliveries of goods from current German production, and German manpower. The Morgenthau Plan, although not implemented, marked a shift within Anglo-American thinking to a more tough-minded handling of Germany. By contrast, there were clear economic reasons why the Soviet Union supported proposals to deindustrialize Germany. Later, at the Nuremberg Trials, Roman Andreyevich Rudenko, chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union, presented staggering figures of damage, loss, and destruction as part of the Soviet Union's case against the Third Reich. He maintained that 679 billion rubles of damage had been caused as a result of the war, and 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages had been completely or partially destroyed, as well as 6 million bridges, 65,000 kilometres of railway tracks, over 100,000 farms, and 40,000 hospitals. At least 25 million people had been made homeless and 88 million Soviet citizens lived under occupation. His estimates went down to the last heads of livestock: 7 million horses, 17 million cattle, 20 million pigs, 27 million sheep, 110 million poultry had been killed or stolen.By the time Rudenko presented this evidence, Soviet planners, economists, and politicians had been compiling estimates of damage and calculations on reparations claims for several years. One of them was the Hungarian-born economist and communist theoretician Eugen Varga director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute for International Economics and Policy, and secretary of its Department of Economic Science and Jurisprudence, and, in the words of one West German scholar, ‘one of the most significant and influential economists in the Soviet Union’.Throughout the war, Varga prepared papers and reports on subjects such as the economic consequences of total mobilization in Germany, the Third Reich's exploitation of the countries it occupied, and the post-war legacy of Hitler's new order in Europe.Soviet reparations policy began to take shape in a series of publications and memoranda Varga composed for the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. In early 1942, he presented the basic premises of Soviet policy in a paper entitled ‘Lessons from the First World War’.In a September 1943 report addressed to Maxim Litvinov, the former Soviet ambassador to the United States and then deputy foreign minister, Varga examined the economic consequences of divisions of German territory into three, four, or seven separate states. Each scheme, he concluded, would lead to the substantial weakening of Germany's—and particularly Prussia's military and economic potential. His conclusion was that reparations programmes would have to be comprised of German industrial installations, to be rebuilt in the Allied nations by German labourers. In addition, the Soviet Union should receive income from current industrial production and raw materials. Where Morgenthau had concluded that German industry would have to be dismantled not simply to prevent another war but also because of justice and pedagogy, Varga and other Soviet economists saw reparations as a means for rebuilding the economies of Germany's former victims, above all that of the USSR. This was a crucial difference.Apart from material reparations, Soviet planners also saw the occupation as a means to acquire German military technology and scientific knowledge for application at home. It was clear from the beginning that German resources were to provide for the maintenance and upkeep of the Soviet troops on German soil.These pillars of the Soviet Union's agenda security and Soviet economic recovery were explicit enough, as was the fact that public health among the Germans did not rank highly in this project. But matters were complicated by the sheer variety of politicians and government institutions which took an interest in Germany. Just days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the chief of the Red Army's Political Administration instructed the newly created Soviet Bureau for Military Propaganda to begin preparations for the aftermath of the war. The bureau was staffed with renowned individuals such as the former secretary of the Communist International, Dimitry Manuilsky; the deputy people's commissar for foreign affairs (under Vyacheslav M. Molotov), Solomon Lozovksky; the head of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs’ press department and from 1943 director of the Soviet news agency Tass, Nikolai Grigoryevich Palgunov; and Eugen Varga. From 1941, and with renewed vigour after autumn 1943, the bureau examined various problems of the post-war occupation, for example by studying the British and American occupation of Sicily.In parallel, a number of technical departments of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee worked on similar questions, also directed by the Red Army's Political Administration. Individual ministries of the Soviet government also set up their own committees and planning staffs. During 1943, the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs created three specialist commissions on the problem of post-war Germany: one, headed by Maxim Litvinov, worked on ‘war aims’ and prepared for the peace settlement and post-war order; a second one, headed by Marshall Clement Voroshilov, former commander of the north-western front, prepared for the terms of the armistice and German capitulation; while a third commission, headed by Ivan Maisky, the former Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, prepared for matters of reparations and the dismantling of German industry. Together, these various bodies and commissions provided the means for politicians to begin to stake out their interests in the occupation of Germany. But there was little or no coordination between the ministries and the Bureau for Military Propaganda, or between the different ministries themselves and many of their preparations were not widely read or distributed beyond the circles of their authors. There was no coordinating authority able to mediate between them.

West Germany (UK, USA, France sectors) was most desirable than the Soviet sector, for two reasons. First, the Soviets had suffered an immense amount during WWII, and many German civilians in East Germany were harmed out of revenge. The Western Allies had suffered too, of course, but the Soviets suffered over 20 million deaths, while the western allies lost under a million for the European theatre the war. The other reason was that human rights and quality of life were better in West Germany, and so was the economy. These two reasons why West Germany was preferred to East Germany lead to a mass exodus from EG to WG starting when the Soviets started to take over Germany and ending when the Soviets began to restrict movement and harshly treat attempted escapees.And for many future occupation problems there were simply no preparations or instructions whatsoever. That quickly became a subject of concern and complaints. In December 1943, Andrei S. Smirnov, former Soviet ambassador to Iran and then head of the Foreign Ministry's third European Department, warned that the absence of clear instructions for the conduct of the Soviet military in the occupied territories could lead to catastrophic mistakes and miscalculations. He remembered from his time in Iran, he wrote, that the Soviet army leadership had not been familiar with ‘local particularities, customs and conventions, state and administrative structures, legal regulations, and so on’. The situation would be little better in Germany, Hungary, or Romania. ‘We know only very little about the organisational structures of the administrative system in Germany’, he noted, nor about its ‘tax system and agricultural levies arrangements, price policy, local supply of the population, structure of ministries, banks and other organisations’. It was necessary to compile information dossiers and handbooks on Germany, produce maps, compile lists of local facilities and businesses, and familiarize officers with the local administrative organs, the Nazi Party, the German army, and other organizations. All this was urgent, he added, because the war was already moving into its last decisive phase. Since the occupation of Germany involved extensive negotiations between the three occupying powers, Soviet military leaders would have to come prepared for ‘complicated diplomatic discussions’ requiring detailed knowledge of conditions, and the Foreign Ministry's diplomatic apparatus had to be ready to assist the military authorities. He suggested that members of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs who had worked in Germany in the past should now be recruited for occupation duties.Half a year later, Smirnov complained again that guidelines for the selection and training of personnel for the occupation had still not been produced.By autumn 1944 the training of Soviet specialists for the occupation had evidently still not begun.To make up for these deficiencies, Soviet analysts studied British and American press reports, transcripts of speeches, memoranda, briefings, policy instructions, and reported conversations with Western leaders both to track approaches hostile to, or in contradiction with, those of the Soviet Union, and to identify practices and policies which could be copied. Smirnov thought an analysis of previous British and American military occupations could assist Soviet preparations. ‘I have to say that we have no experiences in this area’, he noted, ‘whereas the [Western] Allies already possess a well-rehearsed system, with roots going back to the previous war. They have people who carried out the military administration of enemy territories after the defeat of Germany in 1918.’ When the EAC suggested that the Soviet government dispatch ‘45 to 55’ Soviet officers to London to take part in joint Allied preparations, Soviet officials saw this primarily as an opportunity for their personnel to study and familiarize themselves with Anglo-American methods, systems of training, and concrete policies. Some Soviet instructions therefore drew explicitly on Anglo-American documents and duplicated their premises. When the Americans agreed in late March 1945 to give their military government handbooks to the Soviet authorities, a number of SHAEF guidelines found their way into Soviet instructions to their troops. Beria's recommendations in April 1945 for the organization of a military administration for civilian affairs essentially restated SHAEF's instructions to use existing local German administrations for matters of police, law, finance and tax, and other local problems such as public health.The Soviet readiness to copy Anglo-American approaches meant that the premises underlying future public health work also extended to the Soviet zone. At the same time, however, gaps and shortcomings in Soviet plans were filled by very different preparations, namely by those of exiled German communists, whose plans for post-war Germany were conducted under the direction of Georgy Dimitrov. Dimitrov had been secretary-general of the Comintern, and after its dissolution in 1943 became chief of the Soviet Party's Department of International Information known as the ‘foreign department’. In both capacities, he coordinated the work of foreign communists in Moscow. In spring 1944, Dimitrov instructed the German communists in exile to prepare for vital questions of post-war Germany, while his Comintern colleague Dmitry S. Manuilsky took over the training of German POWs. By March 1945, the German communists had drawn up guidelines for future political work in Germany, using Soviet information.These guidelines, sent by Dimitrov to Molotov, proposed that German antifascists were to accompany the Red Army and assist its progress through newly liberated areas by calling on German troops to surrender and urging the population to cooperate. They were to assist Soviet officers in the administration of urgent work such as the clearing of rubble, epidemic control, the revival of radio and newspapers, and the appointment of local officials.