Allied Control Council
The Allied Control Council (ACC) or Allied Control Authority (German: Alliierter Kontrollrat), and also referred to as the Four Powers (Vier Mächte), was the governing body of the Allied occupation zones in Germany (1945–1949/1991) and Austria (1945–1955) after the end of World War II in Europe. After the defeat of the Nazis, Germany (less its former eastern territories) and Austria were occupied as two different areas, both by the same four Allies. Both were later divided into four zones by the 1 August 1945 Potsdam Agreement. Its members (Four-Power Authorities) were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. The organisation was based in Schöneberg, Berlin.
The council was convened to determine several plans for postwar Europe, including how to change borders and transfer populations in Central Europe. As the four powers had joined themselves into a condominium asserting supreme power in Germany, the Allied Control Council was constituted the sole legal sovereign authority for Germany as a whole, replacing the civil government of Germany under the Nazi Party. In 1948, the Soviets withdrew from the ACC due to its conflict with the western Allies, who then established the Allied High Commission. In 1949, two German states (West and East Germany) were founded and, along with the state of Austria, were granted sovereignty in 1955.
Incapacitation of the council[edit]
From the first, the French sought to exploit their position on the Control Council to obstruct aspects of Allied policy they saw as contrary to their national interests. De Gaulle had not been invited to the Potsdam Conference and accordingly the French did not accept any obligation to abide by the Potsdam Agreement in the proceedings of the Allied Control Council. In particular, they resisted all proposals to establish common policies and institutions across Germany as a whole and anything that they feared might lead to the emergence of an eventual unified German government.[12] For example; France created the Saar Protectorate in Saarland of its zone but was never recognized by the Soviet Union, one member of the occupying ACC.
Relations between the Western Allies (especially the United States and the United Kingdom) and the Soviet Union subsequently deteriorated and so did their cooperation in the administration of occupied Germany. Within each zone each power ran its own administration, such as the Gouvernement Militaire de la Zone Française d'Occupation en Allemagne (GMZFO) in Karlsruhe, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (Russian: Советская военная администрация в Германии, СВАГ; Sovetskaia Voennaia Administratsia v Germanii, SVAG) in East Berlin, the Control Commission for Germany - British Element (CCG/BE) in Bad Oeynhausen and the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) in West Berlin and Frankfurt. In September 1946, disagreement arose regarding the distribution of coal for industry in the four occupation zones and the Soviet representative in the council withdrew his support of the plan agreed upon by the governments of the United States, Britain and France.[13] Against Soviet protests, the two English-speaking powers pushed for a heightened economic collaboration between the different zones and on 1 January 1947 the British and American zones merged to form the Bizone. Over the course of 1947 and early 1948, they began to prepare the currency reform that would introduce the Deutsche Mark and ultimately lead to the creation of an independent West German state. When the Soviets learned about this, they claimed that such plans were in violation of the Potsdam Agreement, that obviously the Western powers were not interested in further regular four-power control of Germany and that under such circumstances the Control Council had no further purpose. On 20 March 1948, Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky walked out of the meeting of the council and no further Soviet representative attended until the 1970s, thus incapacitating in practice the council.