selection 1 of 1 01118331 ORDER NO: AAD9024071 MANAGING THE WEST GERMANS: THE OCCUPATION STATUTE OF 1949 FROM GESTATION TO BURIAL, 19451955 Author: MEIER, DAVID AARON Degree: PH.D. Year: 1990 Corporate Source/Institution: THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON (0262) SUPERVISOR: ROBERT L. KOEHL Source: VOLUME 51/04A OF DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS INTERNATIONAL. PAGE 1350. 519 PAGES Descriptors: HISTORY, MODERN; HISTORY, EUROPEAN Descriptor Codes: 0582; 0335 Managing the West Germans required a good working relationship between British, French, and American governmental and occupation authorities. It required a single organ to replace the functionally defunct Control Council. It required the legal formulation of a common policy towards western Germany and the means to realize policy goals. Finally, it required German agencies capable of delegating authority normally exercised by sovereign states. The London Conference of 1948 gave the green light to this program. Within eighteen months the program had been fully implemented. The Occupation Statute functioned as the pole around which events turned. The process of its drafting paralleled the process of its realization. Within its brief nine paragraphs were the residual elements of JCS 1067, the agreements reached at Potsdam in 1945, the Marshall Plan, as well as a program for the systematic dissolution of the authority of the occupying powers. Digesting the issues confronted in its clauses and their implications effected the policies and anticipations of the parties involved. The final text of the Occupation Statute, consequently, emerged as a mature living document. Its birth constituted the beginning of its death. Conceived to bridge a gap between war and peace, its completion announced the coming systematic closure of the gap. The General Treaty of 1952 (Deutschlandvertrag) returned all German sovereignty to German authorities with reservations over issues regarding Germany as a whole. The incorporation of West Germany into NATO in 1955 provided the program outlined in London in 1948 with the occupying powers' stamp of approval. Placed in the shadow of the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the Occupation Statute provided the necessary foundations upon which the new state was built.