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.

This chapter examines the development of Allied policy toward German courts in all four occupation zones. The chapter begins by analyzing the limitations in the denazification of the German legal profession. It then turns to the policies adopted by the four occupying powers toward granting German courts jurisdiction over Nazi crimes. Allied Control Council Law No. 10 of December 1945 allowed the occupation authorities to grant German courts jurisdiction over Nazi crimes against humanity, which included crimes against German citizens. In the British and French Zones, German courts were granted general jurisdiction over Nazi crimes against humanity. In the American zone, fears of German pushback led the Americans to authorize the Germans to prosecute Nazi crimes only under domestic law, not as crimes against humanity. In the Soviet Occupation Zone, a complex process of politicization took place. At first the Soviets allowed Germans to proseucte Nazi crimes against humanity in criminal courts. They the folded crimes against humanity prosecutions into the broader program of denazification. This led to an increased politicization of these trials, though they did not become complete sham trials until the so-called Waldheim Trials of 1950.

This chapter outlines Allied efforts at justice for Nazi crimes. It describes how the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg prioritized the prosecution of aggressive war and rendered Nazi atrocities secondary. The chapter then analyzes how subsequent American trials at Nuremberg did focus on Nazi atrocities, but how the defense attorneys successfully shaped the German public perception of the trials, so that they largely failed in their liberalizing pedagogy. The chapter also evaluates the national trial programs conducted by the Americans, British, French, and Soviets for “ordinary” German war crimes. It argues that these trials received only modest public attention, in comparison to the Nuremberg trials, and that, because these trials were focused overwhelmingly on crimes against Allied nationals, they had very limited impact on German political culture. Overall, the chapter concludes that the Allied trials did not have the kind of democratizing impact suggested by transitional justice theory.