policy. There were two reasons for this failure: 1) interdepartmental disputes over the future of Germany; and 2) President Roosevelt's desire to avoid making political decisions regarding the postwar world while military operations were still under way. The departmental disputes concerned the question of whether a policy of rehabilitation or repression would be the one to best assure that Germany would be pacified after the war. Some felt that the rise of Hitler and the beginning of World War II could be traced to the harshness of the Versailles peace after World War I, while others thought a repressive policy was necessary, viewing Germany as an inherently aggressive nation that required strong controls (Ireland, 1981, pp. 10-11).
Discussions on this matter took place at several points during the war. It was discussed in 1943 at the Tehran Conference and again at Yalta in 1945. Throughout, Roosevelt remained unwilling to decide until the war was over, and he died before that occurred. When Truman assumed the presidency, the U.S. had no clearly defined policy to govern the treatment of the defeated enemy or to guide relations with the allies. The revised occupation directive signed in 1945 by Truman was therefore a series of bureaucratic compromises reflecting the uncoordinated nature of American thinking on Germany (Ireland, 1981, pp. 13-14). The various allies had different views of the matter even after it had been decided and reacted differently to the need for overseeing the pacification of Germany. The U.S. remained tenuous, vague, and
uncoordinated in its reaction. The French political scene was
unstable, and the fact that the U.S. wanted to restore France and prevent a collapse of the Fourth Republic meant that U.S. policies for Germany could be held hostage by French political instability. The French were obstructionist and intransigent about the issue of Germany after the war for a variety of reasons, but...