Cold War Europe — origins and divided Germany (History (2028+) HL)

In May 1945, the USA, Britain and the USSR had just crushed Nazi Germany together. Within four years, those same allies were glaring at each other across a divided continent. This section explains that fast, dangerous shift — and why historians still argue over who was really to blame.

Cause and consequence: an alliance built to fail: The wartime alliance was always a marriage of convenience — a capitalist West and a communist USSR united only by a common enemy. Once Hitler was defeated, the glue disappeared and old suspicions resurfaced fast.

By 1946-47, each side's actions confirmed the other's fears. The USSR tightened its grip on Eastern Europe; the West responded with policies designed to stop communism spreading further — and each response provoked a harder reaction.

The historical debate: who started it?: Orthodox view: Stalin was the aggressor — an expansionist dictator breaking his Yalta promises. Revisionist view: US economic interests (needing open markets for trade) and atomic-bomb confidence pushed Washington to provoke confrontation. Post-revisionist view: both sides reacted defensively to genuine security fears, and misunderstanding — not pure aggression on one side — drove the escalation. A strong Paper-3 essay should weigh more than one of these.

Economic factors mattered just as much as ideology. Europe in 1947 was a wreck — cities in ruins, harvests failed, currencies worthless. Truman's advisers feared that desperate, starving people would turn to communism out of hunger, not conviction.

Don't treat causes as separate boxes: Ideology, personalities (Stalin/Truman) and economics (Marshall Plan) are usually taught separately — but in a real essay, link them. Truman's ideological suspicion of Stalin shaped how he read Soviet actions in Poland; the Marshall Plan was simultaneously an economic and an ideological move. Strong answers show how factors reinforced each other.

No country felt the Cold War more directly than Germany. Defeated in 1945, it was carved into four zones of occupation — American, British, French and Soviet — and became the place where East and West collided most sharply, not once but twice.

The Berlin Blockade, 1948-49

In June 1948, the Western powers merged their zones and introduced a new currency, the Deutschmark, to kickstart economic recovery — including in West Berlin, an island of Western control deep inside the Soviet zone. Stalin saw this as a direct provocation, a step toward a strong, permanently divided Germany allied with the West.

Stalin's gamble: Stalin cut all road, rail and canal access to West Berlin, hoping to starve the Western sectors out and force the Allies to abandon the city. Instead, the US and Britain launched the Berlin Airlift, flying in food and coal around the clock for eleven months. Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949 rather than risk shooting down Allied planes and starting a war he could not win.

The blockade backfired badly for Stalin. It hardened Western resolve, sped up the creation of NATO (April 1949), and directly triggered the formal split of Germany into two states that same year: the Federal Republic of Germany (West, capitalist democracy) and the German Democratic Republic (East, one-party communist state).

The Berlin Wall, 1961

For twelve years after 1949, Berlin remained an open crack in the Iron Curtain. Between 1949 and 1961, roughly 2.7 million East Germans — often young, skilled, and educated — simply walked across to the West through Berlin, since the rest of the inner-German border was already sealed with fences and minefields.

It's easy to paint East Germany as purely grim and the West as purely free — but Paper-3 essays reward nuance. Many East Germans genuinely valued job security, low-cost housing and gender equality in the workplace, even while resenting the lack of political freedom and constant Stasi surveillance.