Bizone
The Soviet deliveries – desperately needed to provide the eastern expellees with food, heat, and basic necessities, and to increase agricultural production in the remaining cultivation area – did not materialise.
After Potsdam, in the summer of 1945, the Control Commission for Germany – British Element (CCG/BE) in Bad Oeynhausen created central offices (Zentralämter) for its zone.
After 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.
At a conference of representatives of the states (Länder) within the American and British zones of occupation during 5-11 September 1946, decisions were taken on administrative bodies for the economy (Minden), transportation (Frankfurt am Main), food and agriculture (Stuttgart), postal and radio communications (Frankfurt am Main), and a German Finance Commission (Stuttgart).
Allowing the states in the Soviet zone to govern the central administrations, then still subject to the SVAG, would have meant the end of communist rule in the east.
The Soviets had begun mass expropriations of entrepreneurs, real estate owners, and banks in September 1945, a process that had continued ever since.
The Bizone was the first step in coordinating the policies in at least two zones of occupation in Germany, which up to that time had operated mostly unconnected due to French obstructionism.
On 29 May 1947, the American and British military governments signed an agreement creating an Economic Council for the Bizone, to be based in Frankfurt am Main.
Lewkowicz argues that the establishment of the Bizone was the most significant factor in the creation of two blocs in Europe and therefore in the configuration of the Cold War international order.
Bizonia governance was extended to include the French occupation zone on 1 August 1948[2][3] and the resulting structure was unofficially called either Trizonia or Trizonesia.
[2] The Bizone included the Länder Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Bavaria, and Württemberg-Baden – the northern part of the later Baden-Württemberg – but not the states of the French zone, to wit Württemberg-Hohenzollern, Baden, Rheinland-Pfalz, or those in the Soviet zone Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Saxony.
