Four generals form a council to rule Germany; the German Army ceases to exist
Three weeks after Potsdam split Germany into four occupation zones, the country still had no single body speaking for all of them. On August 30, 1945, the Allied Control Council formally constituted itself in Schöneberg, Berlin, with Marshal Georgy Zhukov, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny as its first members. Its opening proclamation told Germans the council now existed, and its Order No. 1 banned the uniform of the German Army, which the council declared had ceased to exist. Directive No. 9, issued the same day, handed the council's legal division the job of prosecuting German war criminals under the London Agreement.
Eisenhower's seat on the council put the American commander who had led the invasion of Europe directly in charge of governing the defeated enemy's capital, a role with no precedent in U.S. military history. The arrangement previewed the Cold War division that split Berlin and Germany a few years later, and it set the template for the American zone that became the economic and political core of West Germany.
QWhat four languages did the Control Council officially recognize for its own paperwork?
Directive No. 11, issued September 20, 1945, declared English, French, Russian and German the official languages of the Allied Control Council and set up an official gazette to publish its acts. That gazette published the council's laws, orders, and directives in the four languages. The choice to include German alongside the Allies' own languages was itself a small statement: the council intended its rulings to be legible to the people living under them, not just to the four governments issuing them. Every law, order, directive and instruction had to clear translation into all four before it counted as official.
QHow did the council formally sort its own paperwork into categories?
Directive No. 10, issued the same day as the language rule, September 20, 1945, split every official act of the Control Council into five distinct types: Proclamations, Laws, Orders, Directives, and Instructions. Proclamations carried the most public weight; Instructions were the narrowest, aimed at occupation officials rather than the German public. This bureaucratic sorting mattered because the council had no enforcement arm of its own; getting the classification right was one of the few tools it had to make its output function as something like a legal system across four zones run by four different armies. The scheme stayed in use for as long as the council itself functioned.
QWhich German political party did the council formally dissolve, and under what law?
Law No. 2, enacted October 10, 1945, ordered the total and permanent dissolution of the National Socialist Workers' Party, the formal name of the Nazi party the council was tasked with erasing from German public life. The law arrived barely six weeks after the council first convened, making it one of the earliest substantive legal acts to follow the opening proclamations and orders of August 30. Where Order No. 1 had targeted the army's uniform, Law No. 2 went after the party's legal existence itself, closing off any claim that the party still existed in any form. It set the pattern for the denazification laws that followed over the next two years.
