London Protocol (12 September 1944)
런던 의정서 (1944년 9월 12일)
The document signed in London by the European Advisory Commission of the three leading Allies (the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union), settling the division of defeated Germany into three occupation zones and the partition of Berlin into three sectors under joint occupation. The USSR was already assigned the eastern zone and the north-eastern sector of Berlin, while the allocation of the north-western and south-western zones and the remaining Berlin sectors was left blank and filled in by the supplementary protocol of November 1944. Berlin's location deep inside the Soviet zone was not an oversight but a feature the Western Allies accepted.
In depth
The London Protocol (formally the Protocol on the Zones of Occupation in Germany and the Administration of "Greater Berlin") was signed on 12 September 1944 at Lancaster House in London by the European Advisory Commission (EAC) delegates John Gilbert Winant (US), William Strang (UK) and Fedor Gusev (USSR); France was not yet party. Germany's territory was taken within its 31 December 1937 borders, and "Greater Berlin" as defined by the law of 27 April 1920.
The eastern zone, including East Prussia, stretching east of a line from Lübeck Bay to the Czechoslovak frontier, was definitively assigned to Soviet forces, as was the north-eastern sector of Berlin (Pankow, Mitte, Friedrichshain and others). The north-western and south-western zones and the two remaining Berlin sectors were left with asterisks in place of the occupying powers' names, to be filled in by Britain and the United States under the supplementary protocol of 14 November 1944; a French zone was carved out of the Anglo-American areas by a third protocol of 26 July 1945.
The document matters as the first geographic skeleton of postwar Germany's division by occupation, and it is the source of the arrangement that placed Berlin deep inside the Soviet zone, a structural precondition of the 1948-49 Berlin Blockade.
Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) signatories, date, Lancaster House, 1937 borders, eastern zone assigned to USSR, blank spaces for western zones, supplementary protocols of 14 Nov 1944 and 26 July 1945
- germanhistorydocs.org full text, formal title, three zones and special Berlin area under joint occupation, Berlin sector districts, asterisks in original