Editing The Cold War (section)

==The Partition and Reunification of Germany==

The end of the Nazi regime in Germany, a country that at this point had kickstarted two of the most devastating wars in recorded history, left the victorious Allies with the lingering question of what the hell even to do with this place. A number of propositions, ranging from the most extreme ones like the Morgenthau-Plan (ethnically clease Germany and turn it into a big farm) and more moderate ones like the Stalin-Note (an eternally neutral zone in the center of europe) were put forth, but the shadow of the competition between the US and the Soviets over whose society was the best for mankind put them all to rest, so Germany ended up being partitioned between the US, Britain, France and Soviets. When the Cold War really started to be set in stone, both blocs built their own Germanies as frontier states for the anticipated World War 3. The Germans themselves were quite unhappy about the fact that they had to live in only partially independent client states, with the western liberal Federal Republic of Germany (BRD in German, FRG in English) and the Communist German Democratic Republic (DDR in German, GDR in English) but had little leverage to change anything about the fact. The German partition itself arose from an intermediary solution becoming permanent when the GDR leadership closed down the border with the infamous Berlin Wall, the strongest fortified border in history (complete with concrete walls, trenches, mine fields and guards with orders to shoot to kill). Reunification between the two countries became a prime political goal for the West German governments, less so for the East Germans who saw themselves (at least officially) as a new independent German state in a new historical tradition. Since the irreconcilable interests of both sides of the Iron Curtain made Reunification impossible, it remained a pipe dream for generations to come, until on one fateful day in November 1989, the GDR leadership declared that citizens could now cross the border between West and East Berlin freely. 

The reasons for this was deeply intertwined with the economic stagnation in the wider Eastern Bloc at that point and other movements, like the founding of the Polish Labour Union Solidarnosc that increased pressure on the other Communist states to reform. Furthermore, by 1989, the GDR was faced with a number of problems, the most of pressing of which was that the state was flat out broke, with no foreign currency to ever repay them. The decades of East Germany being little more than a colonial outpost of the Soviet Union, with its economy built around exporting goods to the USSR in exchange for Oil and Gas came to an abrupt end during the Oil Crisis of the 1970s. Since their Products had no buyers in western countries, they had to fill in with taking loans from western countries until the minister for the Economy named Schürer put together a comprehensive report about the state of the GDR economy that flat out stated that they could never hope to ever repay the loans, much less keep up with industrial and technological developments in the west and that the extreme debt would eventually pose a serious threat to the stability of the state. Faced with two choices, either open up to the west and hope that this could help mitigate the coming economic collapse, or double down and install a nightmarish North Korean Style dictatorship, the GDR leadership opted for the former. This started a dynamic that ended in the GDRs downfall and it being subsumed into the Federal Republic of Germany, which stands to this day.