| February 11 |  |
Editor says, what if the Western Allies had given up Berlin at the Yalta Conference? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the August 2012 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1945, on this day at the Livadia Palace near Yalta the shape of the post-war German occupation zones was laid down at the Argonaut Conference. The result was the quadrapartite decision to create a contiguous Soviet Occupation Zone with an undivided Berlin as its capital.
Achilles HeelAlthough this ruthless decision was the source of bitter controversy, and indeed blamed for the creation of a Soviet Prussian State by the German dissident Willy Brandt1, it was based upon sound, reasoned logic. Because the truth was that the Soviet Union had steadfastly refused to offer sufficiently firm guarantees to maintain a Western garrison. But instead of gaining this "Achilles Heel", the Western Allies had wrung some important concessions; the retention of Saxony and the Thuringia; the scrapping of plans to grant the lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers to Poland and the absorption of northern East Prussia into the Soviet Union.
This blog is a reboot of an article with the Berlin Airlift Begins World War III.
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© Alternate Historian, 2004-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Generals Source: History World Labels: Yalta, Berlin, Allies, Occupation, Germany. Editor says, in reality it was Soviet dissident Solzenitsyn who presented the Achilles Heel argument and 1) Willy Brant wbecame Governing Mayor of West Berlin later Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. In authoring this post we have re-purposed content from Wikipedia, Google Groups and JLA Forums web sites.
~ Fewer expulsions from the East (most of which wound up in West Germany) and a bigger BRD. Of course a more truncated Poland could be a bigger problem.
One big change is that a lack of a western exclave in Berlin would seriously hamper people defecting and photogenic examples of the murderous need to keep people from defecting. The other would be to make the idea of a permenant western German capital at least a bit more palatable (IOW Frankfurt has a shot of getting the nod over "Bundesdorf" Bonn)
~ Just to start with, I think that the American voters would have been so outraged that Truman would have been defeated in the presidential election.
~ Defeated? Impeached, more than likely, years before the '48 election. But there's no way Truman would have agreed to all of Berlin being ceded to Soviet control, precisely because he'd have known how this would be seen both at home and abroad.
~ I don't think this would have flown with the Western electorates. If Stalin wouldn't give them good enough guarantees, they might have decided to take Berlin themselves, the Russians be damned.
~ But, Eric, Roosevelt was alive, although very ill, at the Yalta Conference, so Truman could not have been impeached...although the voters could have gone for Thomas E. Dewey as a way of expressing their outrage against Truman as Roosevelt's former vice president.
~ Bonn was chosen as it was the home of Konrad Adenauer and he was the first post-war chancellor of Germany.
~ No Berlin Wall, meaning two of the most famous speeches by US Presidents don't exist. Maybe fewer yet if the US continues on an isolationist stance.
~ One question, 21249.23 square miles cannot be sold as a tolerable trade for half of Berlin?
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
