Four Ds

While the disarmament of the Wehrmacht was accomplished soon after the end of hostilities, the remaining principles were applied to differing outcomes in the individual occupation zones.

In the Soviet occupation zone, society was cleansed of Nazi elements more thoroughly, but a Marxist–Leninist one-party state (East Germany) emerged in the wake of denazification.

In July 1945, delegations from the allied powers convened at Cecilienhof palace in Potsdam near Berlin in order to confer about the reorganisation of Occupied Germany.

[2] Their most immediate measure was to instigate a series of military tribunals at Nuremberg which were to try those responsible for the Holocaust and the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht.

[10] The Allied Control Council, the joint governing body of the occupying nations, sought to reverse this trend by creating federal structures akin to those in the United States.

However, in the long run, allied re-education efforts led to the what Wolfrum terms a "civilising process" of the German population.

[15] In the Soviet occupied territory, a different picture emerges: while denazification was much more thorough than in the West,[2] the promise of democratisation was replaced with a Communist dictatorship.