In December 1940 Roosevelt, having won an historic third term as president declared that the U.S. would become the "Arsenal of Democracy", providing the weapons Britain and her Commonwealth needed without entering the war herself. Dieter-Mueller et al. By late 1943 the Germans became so desperate for supplies of key commodities that in one incident they sent a large destroyer force out into the Bay of Biscay to protect ships bringing a cargo into Bordeaux, and lost three vessels (Z27, T25 and T26) to Allied action (Operation Stonewall). Post-War Italy Republic & Recovery | What Happened to Italy After WWII? By now the V1 and V2 launch sites were being increasingly overrun, and with the Allies moving towards the Rhine and the Soviet armies rapidly closing in from the east, large numbers of refugees began to congregate in the cities, creating utter chaos. Although the US managed to secure alternative non-Arabian oil supplies mainly from Venezuela synthetic oils are widely used today, mainly in specialised areas such as the airline industry and as lubricants. The decision was made to take away any military capabilities from Germany and divide the country into four zones of Allied occupation. But, following the British attack on the French fleet at Oran on 4 July to prevent it from falling into German hands, the British were proving they would do whatever was necessary to continue the fight, and Roosevelt was now winning his campaign to convince Congress to be even more supportive of Britain, with the Destroyers for Bases Agreement[40] and with the approval of a British order for 4,000 tanks. The supreme commander of Allied forces, U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted to advance on a broad front to overcome the West Wall (Siegfried Line), but instead accepted British General Bernard Montgomery's Operation Market Garden, the plan to try to outflank the West Wall and drive into northern Germany to encircle the industrial Ruhr via the Netherlands. After World War II, according to the Potsdam conference held between July 17 and August 2, 1945, Germany was to pay the Allies US$23 billion mainly in machinery and manufacturing plants. During the last 12 months of peace, Britain and France carried out a vigorous buildup of their armed forces and weapons production. In the first four weeks of the war, official figures stated that the Royal Navy confiscated 289,000 tons of contraband and the French Marine Nationale 100,000 tons. Germany was forced to send 40 freight cars of emergency supplies into occupied Belgium and France, and American charities such as the Red Cross, the Aldrich Committee, and the American Friends Service Committee began gathering funds to send aid. [10], The Netherlands sought to annex large parts of Western Germany as reparations for WWII. [15] Despite the success in evacuating a third of a million men at Dunkirk and the later evacuations from St Malo and St Nazaire, the British army left behind 2,500 heavy guns, 64,000 vehicles, 20,000 motor cycles and well over half a million tons of stores and ammunition. Though very few people knew of it at the time, the new organisation, the earlier version of which carried out the attempt to dynamite the Iron Gate on the Danube, marked a new direction in the Economic War that would pay dividends later on, providing vital intelligence on potential strategic targets for the offensive bomber campaigns that came later in the war. Also, the report noted that according to the minutes of the Council of Ministers of 19 August 1953, the renunciation concerned only the German Democratic Republic not the Federal Republic, and that no diplomatic note was ever sent to the East German government officially informing it of Poland's decision. As the Cold War ended, Germany was quickly reunified, but the legacy of the division still remains in Germany today. In an ominous foreshadowing of the unrestricted submarine warfare to come, the Kriegsmarine (navy) sent out battle instructions in May 1939 which included the ominous phrase "fighting methods will never fail to be employed merely because some international regulations are opposed to them".[7]. February was an important month. [citation needed], In the U.S., with its tradition that "the mail must always get through", and where armed robbery of the mail carried a mandatory 25-year jail term, there were calls for mail to be carried on warships, but the exercise as with all such journeys was repeated on the homeward leg as Contraband Control searched the ship again for anything of value that might have been taken out of Germany. The US military was not prepared to fight a global war in 1941. Norway, with extensive mountainous areas relied on imports for half its food and all its coal; shortages and hunger quickly affected Belgium which, despite being densely populated and producing only half its needs, was still subjected to the widespread confiscation of food. In the early months of the war Japan launched a series of stunning conquests in the region, among them Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Burma and the East Indies, and soon threatened Australia far to the south. "[45], On 2 October 2022, the Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau signed a diplomatic note asking the German government to undertake an official negotiation process between Poland and Germany, and on 3 October presented the diplomatic note to the visiting German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. Immediate steps were also taken towards the appropriation of the best of the conquered nation's food. Once new supplies of oil, rubber, and tungsten began flowing from the newly occupied Far East, mutually beneficial barter agreements were agreed whereby the Germans would acquire these vital commodities in exchange for the precision tools, blue prints and ball bearings which Japan badly needed. In Britain it was widely believed that the bombing of big cities and massive civilian casualties would commence immediately after the declaration. In Germany, where Hitler had warned his generals and party leaders that there would eventually be another war as early as 1934,[8] there was great concern about the potential effects of a new blockade. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. [6] Germany was also forced to send the Afrika Korps to Libya in early February, led by General Erwin Rommel, to help its Axis partner in its North African campaigns against the British and Commonwealth forces. By late October 1943, the MEW believed that German productivity was down 30%,[74] and that half the drop had occurred in the previous six months, but the figures showed the limitations of all bombing, saturation or precision. On 11 May 1940 the RAF bombed the city of Mnchengladbach. Nearly all of this territories were returned to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957. From early December 1939 the British began preventing German exports as a reprisal for the damage and loss of life caused by the German magnetic mines. In early February, Hugh Dalton of MEW told the House of Commons that Britain and America would send 8,000 tons of wheat to Greece, although there was no guarantee that the relief supplies would find their way to the starving. [35] By this early stage of World War II, her gold reserves were down to around half a billion marks and her credit was almost nil, so any imports had to be paid for by barter, as with the high-technology equipment sent to Russia or coal to Italy. #11. A democratic government with a capitalist economy was established, which allowed West Germany to experience economic and industrial growth. With the food supply reduced by 15% by the blockade and another 15% by poor harvests, starvation and diseases such as influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhus and cholera were a threat. Passenger ships were also subject to Contraband Control because they carried luggage and small cargo items such as postal mail and parcels, and the Americans were particularly furious at the British insistence on opening all mail destined for Germany. [32] Over the weekend of 1821 November six other neutral ships were sunk off the English coast, including a 12,000 ton Japanese liner.[27]. Heavy investment had been made in building up the bomber force, but faith in its potential was beginning to wane, and Harris realised a major propaganda success was vital to demonstrate his belief that bombers could be decisive in defeating the enemy. The mining and manufacturing region of the Ruhr, often likened to the Black Country in the Midlands of England, was one of the world's greatest concentrations of metal production and processing facilities as well as chemical and textile factories; the Ruhr was also home to several synthetic oil production plants. [46][47] According to the German government, there is no legal basis for further compensation payments. During World War II, Zurich industrialist and armaments exporter Emil Georg Bhrle began amassing one of the twentieth century's most important private collections of European art. These efforts were mostly thwarted by the Western Allies and ultimately only approximately 69 square kilometres (27sqmi) of German territory was annexed in 1949. [clarification needed] The ships were based in the Rhine port of Basel, which gave access to the seaport of Rotterdam, until Allied bombing of a German dam interrupted it. Indeed, due to Germany's willingness to fight until the very last man and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin's insistence on Germany's unconditional surrender, the Allies had fought their way through the German heartland, wreaking devastation along the way. The British blockade of the Mediterranean immediately cut Italy off from 80% of its imports. Political Reconstruction in Europe After WWII: History & Impact, Economic Reconstruction in Europe After WWII: Recovery Programs & Their Effect, US After WWII: Politics, Culture & Counter-Culture, Federal Republic of Germany | Government, History & Structure. The Big Blockade starred John Mills as "Tom", a member of a bomber crew over Hanover, Leslie Banks as an efficient Ministry of Economic Warfare civil servant, Robert Morley as the Nazi U-boat Captain Von Geiselbrecht, Michael Redgrave as a Russian based in Germany, and various others, such as Will Hay, Ronald Shiner, and Bernard Miles in bit parts.[88]. On 7 December 1942, Combined Operations launched one of the most famous raids of the war; Operation Frankton, better known as the 'Cockleshell Heroes' mission, in an attempt to sink the ships by sending a 12-man team of Royal Marine Commandos to paddle up the Gironde in canoes to place delayed action bombs on their exposed hulls. Steel, iron and wood were so hard to obtain that the work of rebuilding Rotterdam came to a standstill. Eucken helped establish the new German currency, argued for large tax cuts, and oversaw the removal of price controls. In early November the MEW published a summary of the position in the occupied lands, giving an assessment of what the Germans were believed to have appropriated from the territories they conquered in 1940 and 1941. Controlled by the socialist economic policies of the communist Soviet Union, East Germany suffered a decline in the standard of living. [59], For the Nazis, the capture of the Russian landmass, one-sixth of the Earth's land surface or 8,000,000 square miles (21,000,000km2), not only provided the Lebensraum they demanded, but also provided the answer to all their raw material problems. John Gimbel comes to the conclusion in his book, Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Post-war Germany, that the "intellectual reparations" taken by the U.S. and the UK amounted to close to 10 billion dollars, equivalent to around 100 billion dollars in 2006. If the Ministry found something suspicious, the team returned to examine the load. Each division required 600700 tons of supplies per day while artillery and mortars used 8 million rounds per month. The operation, known as Counterscorch, involved sending radio operators into Belgium to liaise with the resistance, keeping them informed of Allied movements and supplying them with weapons and ammunition. The first territories to be conquered included the most productive. The Soviet Union received compensation under the Paris Peace Treaty in 1947 from four Axis allied powers, in addition to the large reparations paid to the Soviet Union by the Soviet Occupation Zone in Germany and the eventual German Democratic Republic in the form of machinery (entire factories were dismantled and shipped to the Soviet Union) as well as food, industrial products, and consumer goods. Canada held a whole year's surplus of wheat, while the U.S. reserve was estimated to be the greatest in history, but Britain was suffering very heavy shipping losses as a result of expanding U-boat numbers. In the Soviet Zone of Occupation (later the German Democratic Republic) virtually all double tracked rail lines were reduced to a single track with the material being taken to the Soviet Union. Although the Germans had been able to find numerous ways of beating the blockade, shortages were now so severe that on 30 March 1940, when he was gearing up for his renewed Blitzkrieg in the west, Hitler ordered that delivery of goods in payment to Russia should take priority even over those to his own armed forces. [37] On the night of 15/16 May 1940, RAF Bomber Command, which until that point had been used for little more than attacking coastal targets and dropping propaganda leaflets, set off on a night time raid on oil production and railway marshalling yards in the Ruhr district. The United States, France and Britain maintained control of West Germany. German industry was rebuilt. At this point Franco saw that the Royal Navy had reduced the German navy in Norway to an impotent surface threat, the Luftwaffe had lost the Battle of Britain, the Royal Navy had destroyed much of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kbir, had also destroyed Italian battleships at Taranto and the British Army was routing the Italian army in North & East Africa. At the beginning of the war, Germany possessed 60 U-boats, but was building new vessels quickly and would have over 140 by the summer of 1940. Millions of German prisoners of war were for several years used as forced labor, by both the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. [64] In January 1944 the MEW estimated that Spain was still selling Germany 100 tons of tungsten a month. West Germany also paid 8 million German marks as reparations for forced human experimentation on Yugoslav citizens. Try refreshing the page, or contact customer support. Nazi Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. The Allies agreed as part of the Potsdam Agreement, that the Soviet Union collects and distributes the Polish share of reparations. Wanting to create economic reforms, he instituted a policy of glasnost, an openness allowing greater economic freedoms. Mass attacks a few days later left a large part of the city in ruins, reportedly killing 42,000 people.[16]. [citation needed], During the first six months the Soviets were in almost complete disarray,[61] and lost whole armies of men, over 70% of their tanks, a third of their combat aircraft and two-thirds of their artillery. During a debate in the House of Lords about the economic war on 9 May 1944, just before D-Day, Lord Nathan told the House:[43]. After three years of war Britain had spent 10 billion, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kingsley Wood, had to ask the House of Commons to find another 1 billion to continue. To stop the people of East Berlin from migrating to West Berlin, the Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961. Instead, East and West Germany grew in wildly different directions depending on which side of that global battle they fell on. On 16 September Time magazine wrote "Even if Britain goes down this fall, it will not be Lord Beaverbrook's fault. In order to force Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles, the original blockade was extended for an additional nine months after the end of the fighting in October 1918. Berlin Wall History & Timeline | When was the Berlin Wall Torn Down? [32] Pork, veal and beef were rare, but in the early months there was still adequate venison, wild pig and wildfowl shot on estates and in forests. Like Germany, Japan was heavily deficient in natural resources, and since 1931 had become increasingly nationalistic, building up her military forces and embarking upon a series of ruthless conquests in Manchuria, China and French Indochina to create an empire. [59][57] While more German politicians and members of the Bundestag are calling on the federal government to compensate Greece financially for the effects of the Nazi occupation,[60][61] the German government replied that the stipulations of the Two Plus Four treaty still stand and the issue was resolved in 1990. [48], In an effort to force Britain into submission, the Luftwaffe concentrated its efforts on factories, ports, oil refineries and airfields. The enormous rail marshalling yard at Hamm was badly hit, leaving some 9,000 workers permanently engaged carrying out running repairs. The intense fears of retribution that Germans articulated during the immediate post-war period contradict this statement. On 9 February Albert Speer became the new head of the German Armaments Ministry. The speed of advance often meant there was no time to build up an orderly logistical structure and, despite the use of a truck system called the Red Ball Express, for 5 days at the end of August virtually the entire American and British advance came to a complete halt due to a lack of fuel. These ports froze in the winter, but an alternative route was available from the Norwegian port of Narvik from which the ore was transported down a partially hidden sea lane (which Churchill called the Norwegian Corridor) between the shoreline and the Skjaergaard (Skjrgrd), a continuous chain of some 50,000 glacially formed skerries (small uninhabited islands), sea stacks and rocks running the entire 1,600km length of the west coast. [4] The Germans had used mines against freighters from the beginning, but now began laying a new type, which did not need to make contact with a ship to destroy it, off the English coast, using seaplanes to drop them in British harbours, channels and estuaries too narrow or shallow for submarines to navigate. However, many factories maintained production right up to the moment Allied forces arrived at the gates. [23][40] Przemysaw Sobolewski, head of the Bureau of Research of the Sejm, said that the political decision of 1953 was made by the Polish Council of Ministers, even though under the Constitution of the Polish People's Republic, which came into force in 1952, it was the Polish Council of State, which had the sole authority to undertake such a decision. In the years following World War I, there was spiraling hyperinflation of the German currency (Reichsmark) by 1923.The causes included the burdensome reparations imposed after World War I, coupled with a general inflationary period in Europe in the 1920s (another direct result of a materially catastrophic war). From there it was transferred to small coastal vessels and ran the blockade to French Mediterranean ports by night.
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