At first the Western Allies seemed impotent in the face of such outrages carried out by their occupation partners—they registered protests with the Soviet administration but otherwise did nothing. However, by early 1947, as it became impossible to deny that Berlin and Germany were fast becoming prime battlegrounds in the emerging Cold War, the Western powers started taking measures to protect “their” Germany. On January 1, 1947, the Americans and British fused their zones economically into “Bizonia” (France, intent upon keeping Germany divided and weak, kept its zone separate). Now the Soviets were prevented from drawing much-needed reparations from the western zones. A few months later, George C. Marshall, the new American secretary of state, announced his famous plan for European economic recovery, the “Marshall Plan,” in which he pointedly included western Germany. Thus if the Soviets in 1946/47 were bringing down (in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase) an “iron curtain” across Europe, the Western powers were drawing some lines of demarcation of their own.
The Soviets bitterly protested the Western initiatives as violations of the Potsdam Agreement and as steps toward the formal division of Germany. Stalin’s aspiration at this point was not to see Germany officially divided but to win control over all of it. Hence the Soviets retaliated in the most effective way they could: by interfering with traffic into Berlin. Claiming “technical difficulties” on the rail lines, they restricted the number of freight trains allowed to pass through their zone, thereby exacerbating the food shortage. In early 1948, with their Berlin garrisons feeling the pinch, the British and Americans launched a small airlift with a few planeloads of supplies, a preview of the much larger lift to come. Although the Kommandatura continued to meet during this crisis, Robert Murphy, political adviser to the American military government, reported that agreement had become impossible “even on the most routine questions.” General Clay sensed “a feeling of new tenseness in every Soviet individual with whom we have official relationships.” He feared that war might come with “dramatic suddenness.”
Yet heightened tensions with the Russians in Berlin did not prevent the Western powers from taking further steps to ensure the political and economic viability of western Germany. In early June 1948 they instructed German officials in the Western zones to draft a constitution for a new federal state “best adapted to the eventual reestablishment of German unity at present disrupted.” They also announced that they would begin formulating an “Occupation Statute” to define relations between themselves and the new western German government. Finally, on June 18, the Western military governments announced that a new currency, the Deutsche mark, would replace the inflated Reichsmark as the accepted medium of exchange in their zones. The new Westmarks were not designated for use in Berlin, but when the Soviets tried to impose an East-based currency on the entire city, the Americans, having secretly flown in loads of Deutsche marks in case they might be needed, started issuing the new bills on June 24. Since eastern money was still accepted in the western sectors, Berlin now had competing currencies to go along with its competing ideologies. The Westmarks had a large “B” for Berlin stamped on them, while the Soviet-issued bills bore thumb-sized coupons stuck on with potato glue. No sooner had the Russians introduced their “wallpaper marks” (so named by the Berliners) than their representative on the Kommandatura, Major General Alexander Kotikov, stalked out of the Allied body, allegedly in response to the equally abrupt departure of his American counterpart, Colonel Frank Howley. Now even the pretense of cooperation was gone.
The battle of the bills turned into a full-scale battle for Berlin because the Soviets, citing additional “technical difficulties,” stopped most road traffic coming into Berlin from western Germany on June 18, the day the deutsche mark was launched in the western zones. On June 24, they halted barge traffic as well, and they curtailed deliveries of electrical power and coal from the eastern sectors to the West. In the following weeks they also established checkpoints along their sector in Berlin to monitor (but not prevent) the passage of goods and people. The Western powers, it seemed, were about to pay dearly for their failure to guarantee free access to Berlin in early summer 1945, when they still had troops in the Soviet zone.
