The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Allied Control Council

in Germany the joint body of the USSR, USA, Great Britain, and France established by agreement in 1945 after the capitulation of fascist Germany for the exercise of supreme authority during the occupation. The aims by which the council was to be guided were defined by the Potsdam Conference of 1945. The council consisted of the supreme commanders of the four zones of occupation. Its competence included questions affecting Germany as a whole and the establishment of a uniform policy among the supreme commanders. The council issued a number of laws and directives on the eradication of German militarism, the breakup of monopolies, and de-Nazification. However, the Western Powers, which had committed themselves to the division of Germany, increasingly sabotaged the work of the council and in March 1948 wrecked it completely.

REFERENCES

Vneshniaia politika Sovetskogo Soiuza v period Otechestvennoi voiny, vol. 3. Moscow, 1947.
Vneshniaia politika Sovetskogo Soiuza, 1945–1948. Moscow, 1949–1950.
Alliierter Kontrollrat und Aussenministerkonferenzen. Berlin, 1959.
Badstübner, R., and S. Thomas. Die Spaltung Deutschlands 1945–1949. Berlin, 1966.

L. I. GINTSBERG

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

Three days before my birth, on June 5, the Allied Control Council, the military occupation governing body of Germany, formally took power.

Our education system was born in 1945 - has it grown up yet?

In a letter penned to the Allied Control Council in 1946, Asmussen captured the spirit of many of his countrymen when he pleaded with occupation authorities to grant his conquered nation a chance to move on and escape troubling questions about the Nazi past--a chance "to forget it all and begin anew." As Schroeder makes clear, however, the Allies had no intention of permitting the German people to "forget," but instead made the acknowledgment of responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era a prerequisite for any steps toward national self-determination.

To Forget It All And Begin Anew: Reconciliation in Occupied Germany 1944-1954

The so-called Allied Control Council, an arm of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France, assumed all powers of sovereignty for defeated Nazi Germany.

His first task was to achieve consensus with the other members of the Allied Control Council on many difficult matters.

The Tribunal was to operate under a charter, promulgated by the Allied Control Council, comprised of statutory law defining the crimes to be prosecuted at Nuremberg and the procedures to be used.

For me, Robert H. Jackson is alive

Dear Allied Control Council: I see by the papers that you are going to hang the Nazi War Criminals unless, after communing with the God of Love, you decide that hanging is too good for them....

You know, dear Allied Control Council, how I hated the Nazis.

Let Me In On the Kill

An Allied Control Council made up of the supreme commanders of the occupation forces was to settle `questions relating to Germany as a whole' from the former capital of the Reich, now divided into four sectors.

To preserve Germany's unity as a state it had been planned at Potsdam to create some `important central administrative offices' at the Allied Control Council which were to be run by German `Secretaries of State', with responsibility for transport and traffic, finance, external trade and industry.

A people without a state: post VE-Day Germany

In 1946, at a meeting of the Allied Control Council, the group that had jurisdiction in occupied Germany, American officers formally objected to the use of German scientists by the Soviet Union.

United States: their Nazis, our Nazis