Out of all the four zones, the British had the largest population and contained within it the heavy industry region, the Ruhr, as well as the naval ports and Germany's coast lines.

The "Big Three" (Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin) met at the Yalta Conference between 4 and 11 February 1945 to discuss Germany's post-war occupation, which included coming to a final determination of the inter-zonal borders.

On 4 May 1945, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepted the unconditional surrender of the German forces in the Netherlands, in north west Germany and Denmark.

[4] The British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) was formed on 25 August 1945 with the headquarters in Bad Oeynhausen and Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer serving as Director of Military Government.

George Ayscough Armytage and Governor Henry V. Berry identified with the city and worked through indirect rule, asking prospective Hamburg inhabitants to resume office in the administration.

46: In March 1946 the British zonal advisory board (Zonenbeirat) was established, with representatives of the states, the central offices, political parties, trade unions, and consumer organisations.

The British initially used them as watchman and labour units, but set up the Mixed Service Organisation, using these displaced persons as drivers, clerks, mechanics and guards.

By late 1947, over 50,000 Germans were employed and organized in units that were attached to parts of the British Army or the RAF as labourers, drivers, mechanics and in many other roles.

Violence however failed to mobilize a spirit of popular national resistance, largely due to war-weariness of the populace, and as a result Werwolf attacks were low and relatively few reprisals took place in the British zone.

The British had already prepared a plan from 1942 onwards, assigning a number of civil servants to head the administration of liberated territory with extensive powers to remove from their post, in both public and private domains, anyone suspected, usually on behavioural grounds, of harbouring Nazi sympathies.

[22] During the early months of occupation, the British were at the forefront of bringing to justice anyone, both soldiers and civilians, who had committed war crimes against POWs or captured Allied aircrew.

[25] Between November 1945 and October 1946, the Nuremberg trials also took place, this being an 'International Military Tribunal' in the American zone of occupation but with all four allied powers being involved.

[28] British forces had to dispose of numerous German war material: many aircraft, tanks, ships, and submarines and a huge amount of ordnance had to be destroyed.

In July German cruiser Admiral Hipper which had been severely damaged by RAF Bomber Command and then scuttled in port was raised and towed to Heikendorfer Bay and subsequently broken up for scrap between 1948 and 1952.

FIAT was authorized to "coordinate, integrate, and direct the activities of the various missions and agencies" interested in scientific and technical intelligence but prohibited from collecting and exploiting such information on its own responsibility.

Operation Surgeon was also created: a list of 1,500 German scientists and technicians was drawn up, with the goal of forcibly removing them from Germany to lessen the risk of their falling into Soviet hands.

[39][40] The biggest discovery was the "Russian FISH", a set of German wide-band receivers used to intercept Soviet high-level radio Teletype signals.

[41] Over 300,000 Germans (non-Nazi officers and men) were released from captivity by the British between June and September 1945 to work on the land and bring in the harvest, in a project named Operation Barleycorn.

[42] The destroyed German transportation infrastructure created additional logistical difficulties, with rail lines, bridges, canals and terminals left in ruins.

A Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) officer Major Ivan Hirst revived the factory soon after, which had been badly damaged by allied air attacks.

[55] In Hanover, Major John Seymour Chaloner who was assigned to the Public Relations and Information Services Control, a unit rebuilding the German media industry under the supervision of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office helped set up a magazine titled Diese Woche (meaning This Week in English), which had first been published in November 1946.

Challoner worked with recently released German prisoner of war Rudolf Augstein and the magazine was later renamed Der Spiegel which was first published on 4 January 1947.

They controlled a 200 kilometres (120 mi)-strip from the Belgian-German border at the south of the British zone, and covered the cities of Aachen, Cologne, Soest, Siegen and Kassel.

[58] A Danish Brigade in Germany of 4000 men, under British command, was sent to occupy Oldenburg in the summer of 1947, after an agreement, signed at Copenhagen in April 1947, between Denmark and United Kingdom.

So, at 12 noon that day, Dutch troops moved to occupy an area of 69 km2 (17,000 acres), the most relevants parts were Elten (near Emmerich am Rhein) and Selfkant.

Subsequent agreements in 1947 led to the exchange of similar missions between the Soviet zone and those controlled by French and US forces, although the British–Soviet arrangement was significantly larger than either of the others.

[63] BRIXMIS maintained a permanent presence in its nominal home, the Mission House in Potsdam, but its actual headquarters and operational centre were in West Berlin.

Spandau Prison was also located in the British sector but was operated by the Four-Power Authorities to house the Nazi war criminals sentenced to imprisonment at the Nuremberg Trials.

It could fly additional aircraft in from Britain in a single hop, bringing the RAF fleet to about 150 Douglas Dakotas and 40 of the larger Avro Yorks with a 10-ton payload.

Its officers were called to the scene of border incidents or unusual activity to defuse disputes and provide an independent British view of situations.