Unconditional surrender, November 1944

Out of curiosity, what’s behind the specific choice of November 1944 for this hypothetical question?  Just wondering.

Even without advancing deep into German territory the Soviets would’ve wanted their pound of flesh from Germany as well as a say in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

The 1945 scenario in Iron Blitz is a fun hypothetical of WWII rolling right into a US/UK vs USSR/ghost of Japan conflict.

Germany would not have received any different terms. It was a mandate of unconditional surrender. However, Germany would not be totally destroyed and easier to rebuild. On the other hand, most of the leadership would still be floating out there. The Allies would only accept total capitulation. Poland and the Balkans would still be in Soviet hands. Stalin’s reward for being a winner was getting the buffer states between Germany and USSR.

I agree with IL that unconditional surrender was the allied policy and that would not have changed, that Germany would have been better able to rebuild and that Stalin would have been determined to get his buffer states, which the US & UK lacked the will to deny.

That leaves the partition and occupation of Germany itself. But having gained unconditional surrender I cannot see why the allies would do anything different here either.

The one difference that does occur to me is the Battle of the Bulge (and its transfer of troops from the eastern front) may not have happened. Your November timeframe pre-dates this 16th December offensive. That would have altered the finish lines of the 3 allies, so perhaps the partition might have had different boundaries or rules, possibly giving the Soviets less of an opportunity to create East Germany as a separate state? I doubt it though and tend to agree with General Veers.

Others with more knowledge than I will no doubt tell us.

Unconditional surrender was a publicly announced Allied policy from as far back as January 1943, when this concept was included in the Casablanca Conference statement.

@wheatbeer:

Weren’t the occupation zone borders (with the exception of Berlin) basically determined by the de facto lines of military control rather than prior diplomatic agreement on borders?

No.  In the weeks and months following the surrender, the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets redeployed (as applicable) from the areas they had ended up conquering to the areas that were previously assigned for occupation.  For example, I think the Soviets withdrew from Austria and I think that the Americans withdrew from Leipzig, but my memory may not be accurate on those examples.

I’ve been having a busy couple of days, so I haven’t had a chance until now to write more than a couple of lines on a few specific points.  Here are now some thoughts on the larger question.

I guess the effect of an early unconditional German surrender would have depended on when it occurred relative to the finalization of the Allied occupation plans, a.k.a. Operation Eclipse, which Cornelius Ryan discusses in his book The Last Battle.  If the surrender had occured after the finalization (whose date I don’t know) of these plans, then I don’t think the early surrender would have affected much because – as I noted in my earlier post – the Allies did redeploy to those agreed-upon sectors after the fighting stopped even if they didn’t correspond to the final lines of military control.

If the surrender had occured before the finalization of these plans, then the general answer would be that the potential for an altered situation would grow the further and further back you go from the historical finalization date.  In other words, a surrender occuring (let’s say) a year before the historical finalization date would probably have had a much greater effect than a surrender occuring a month before the historical finalization date.  The specifics are impossible to guess because tere are so many variables involved, and because these variables change the further back you go in time.  The compensating factor, of course, is that the further back you go in time, the less probable a German surrender (let alone an unconditional one) becomes in the first place.

One way to think about this subject is in terms of bargaining power. An unconditional German surrender eliminates all German bargaining power. That would leave the Soviet Union and the Western democracies with all the bargaining power, and also in a position to collectively determine what to do with postwar Germany.

It’s also worth considering the level of negotiating determination, and negotiating objectives in the first place. Churchill was interested in a democratic postwar Europe. FDR’s interest in spreading democracy or resisting communism was much weaker than Churchill’s. On the other hand, a Soviet-American postwar alliance was very important to FDR. There is little reason to suppose that FDR would raise strong objections to the Soviets getting about half of Germany’s prewar land territory. (Which was about what they received under Yalta.)

If things went badly for Stalin at the negotiating table, he could always point out that the Red Army had the ability to take what it wanted by force. Between the power of that threat and FDR’s intrinsic lack of interest in stopping the spread of communism, I think it would be very unlikely that the Soviet Union would come away from an unconditional surrender with anything less than half of prewar Germany under its control.