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4 - In Action for OMGUS and Currency Reform in Germany 1946–1948

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2024

Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich
Affiliation:
Freie Universität Berlin
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Summary

I start with the international political setting after VE-day and the disagreements, also over reparations, that the four Allied Powers ran into after the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945. This stipulated that Germany should be treated as a single economic unit by the Allied Control Council. The Council of Foreign Ministers was established to prepare a peace treaty with Germany. It failed despite its several conferences 1945 to December 1947. For US Military Governor in Berlin, General Lucius D. Clay, Gerhard Colm and Raymond Goldsmith, Jewish economists who had emigrated from Germany 1933/34 to the US, had produced a currency-reform plan already in May 1946. Clay tabled it in the Allied Control Council in September 1946, where it got stuck. These developments progressively increased the danger of a partition of Germany. A separate currency reform would automatically entail political partition. I pinpoint the day the dice were cast in Washington DC 1. on giving up on a currency reform with the Soviets: 11 March 1948, and 2. on printing Deutschmarks in the USA: 13 October 1947. I then deal with Tenenbaum’s leading roles among all Western currency experts and in the top-secret meeting with eleven West German financial experts at Rothwesten. Lastly, I analyze the reform of 20 June 1948, C-day, itself, its consequences, and assessments.

Type
Chapter
Information
Edward A. Tenenbaum and the Deutschmark
How an American Jew Became the Father of Germany’s Postwar Economic Revival
, pp. 310 - 546
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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