This handbill advertises the Christian Democratic Union; it was one of the first new political parties in post-war Germany.

Organizing Germany into four occupation zones was just the first step in creating a new Germany. The plan was for the Allies to leave Germany once the German people had successfully completed the program of demilitarization, denazification, and democratization outlined earlier in this lesson. Once Germans rejected war, Nazism, and dictatorship, and proved that they could form a democratic, peaceful state by holding free elections, the Allies would leave, and the zones would be reconnected into one sovereign state. New political parties sprang up in Allied occupation zones, including the Christian Democratic Union party, which would come to dominate non-Soviet occupied Germany in the years after the war.

The steps in forming a new Germany included Germans agreeing to

• help prosecute Nazi war criminals
  
  
• give up all lands seized by Germany under the Nazis
  
  
• welcome back German people who had moved into those seized lands (They would now have to leave them and return to Germany.)
  
  
• manufacture and sell only those goods that the Allies approved, such as coal, beer, toys, and textiles (No war materials could be exported.)
  
  
• pay war reparations to the Soviet Union

That last step was a tricky one. World War II had begun in part because Nazi leaders led the German people in a rebellion against the large war reparations, or payments, that the Allies had demanded after the First World War. The U.S. and Britain did not want to force Germany to make huge war payments again and risk the same rebellion happening again. But the Soviets insisted that the Germans pay for their invasion of the Soviet Union. The Allies worked out a plan that allowed the Soviets to take 10 percent of the goods manufactured by German industry. Since Soviet manufacturing had always been small and had been completely dedicated to war materials, this was acceptable to the Soviets.

Complete this activity to test your knowledge of the plan to build a new Germany after World War II.