American military involvement in or with Germany has followed a mixed course over the past two centuries. Initial American sympathy for German unification in 1871 in appreciation of German support for the Union in the Civil War was transformed as Germany evolved into an autocratic and militaristic state, dominated by a blustering kaiser, Wilhelm II. Imperial Germany soon became a rival of the United States as both nations embarked on rapid industrialization and expansion of their world trade, built large navies, and began to engage in overseas expansion. Although the Americans were concerned with competitive German ambitions in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific, the primary threat was seen as potential German hegemony that would upset the balance of power in Europe.
When World War I broke out in 1914, Americans were divided, and President Woodrow Wilson declared neutrality. Though the United States remained legally neutral until 1917, its trade and financial support with the Allies grew dramatically. Eventually, Berlin's decision for unrestricted submarine warfare brought the United States into the war in April 1917 to prevent German hegemony and to establish a stable world order. The arrival of masses of fresh American troops in 1918 helped halt the German's spring offensive and fuel the Allies’ counteroffensive, which led German military commanders to ask Berlin to obtain an armistice. Wilson refused to deal with the monarchy and a republic was established before the armistice was concluded 11 November 1918. U.S. troops participated in the temporary occupation of the Rhineland, 1918–23.
Although Wilson wanted some leniency for Germany because he supported the new Weimar Republic and because he feared Communist expansion from Eastern to Central Europe, the Allies imposed harsh terms in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Weimar had to accept them, but it then sought American help in the 1920s to ameliorate them. The U.S. Senate rejected the treaty because of provisions for the League of Nations, but made a separate peace with Germany. Politically isolationist in the 1920s, the United States aided Weimar economically by giving it most‐favored‐nation status and reducing its reparations payments, especially through the Dawes Plan of 1924; and American investments helped to stimulate the German economy, but this ended with the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.
The end of the Weimar Republic and the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi dictatorship in 1933 rekindled American concern about the geostrategic and moral threat posed by an aggressively expansionist, antidemocratic Germany, Hitler's Third Reich (Third Empire). Nevertheless, antiwar sentiment led an isolationist Congress to adopt legislation emphasizing U.S. neutrality in 1935, 1936, and 1937.
After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt followed an anti‐German course. The United States became the “great arsenal of democracy,” supplying the Allies, occupying Greenland and Iceland, and patrolling the North Atlantic, even engaging in actions with German submarines. On 11 December 1941, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. Unlike World War I, the United States fully joined the Allies against Germany and gradually took the lead in directing Western military operations. To avoid a resurgent militarized Germany and to reassure the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the land war, the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender. Roosevelt considered postwar dismemberment and deindustrialization of Germany (the Morgenthau Plan of 1944), but abandoned the idea as creating a power vacuum in Central Europe.
After the Battle for Germany and Berlin's surrender in May 1945, Allied policies included occupation, denazification, and demilitarization in order to eliminate the threat of a resurgent aggressive Germany. Gen. Lucius Clay was the U.S. military occupation commander. Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union led the United States to seek German economic revival and press the Western Allies to merge their occupation zones. Soviet resistance through a blockade of divided Berlin in the Russian zone in 1948 was overcome by the Berlin Airlift (1948–1949).
In May 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was established as much as possible in the political image of the American republic. Initially, West Germany had limited domestic and foreign authority, and the Allies retained supervision and military bases. Under Konrad Adenauer (chancellor, 1949–63), West Germany received massive Marshall Plan aid, was rearmed, and was made a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1955; U.S. policy was to integrate Germany into Europe as a bastion against the expansion of Soviet influence and control. The Soviets converted their zone into the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949 and made it part of the Warsaw Pact in 1955.
Beginning in the 1950s, as part of the U.S. commitment to NATO, large numbers of American troops and weapons were stationed in Germany. These included nuclear weapons by the mid‐1950s. In the Berlin Crises (1958, 1962) President John F. Kennedy protested but acquiesced when the Russians built a wall around Berlin in 1961. With the growth of U.S. and Soviet nuclear ICBM arsenals in the 1960s, the American troops in West Germany took on the added role of guarantor of the U.S. commitment to Central European defense, with the partnership between the United States and West Germany becoming the military core of NATO after France withdrew in 1966. That partnership became strained in the early 1980s when the USSR and the United States deployed a new generation of intermediate‐range nuclear missiles in the two Germanies.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and the reunification of Germany with the consent of the four former occupying powers, accompanied the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War. As the United States reduced its military prescence in Germany, NATO expanded its original political purpose of linking the United States to Europe and Germany to the West by expanding that linkage beyond Germany into newly democratizing states in Eastern Europe.
Bibliography
- John Gimbel, The American Occupation of Germany: Politics and the Military, 1945–1949, 1968.
- Keith L. Nelson, Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1989–1923, 1975.
- David Calleo, The German Problem Reconsidered: Germany and the World Order, 1870 to the Present, 1978.
- Hans W. Gatzke, Germany and the United States: A “Special Relationship”?, 1980.
- Manfred Jonas, The United States and Germany: A Diplomatic History, 1984.
- Wolfram F. Hanrieder, Germany, America, Europe: Forty Years of German Foreign Policy, 1989,
2nd ed. 1991. - Frank Ninkovich, Germany and the United States: The Transformation of the German Question Since 1945, 1995
