Seems like they could have drawn the boundaries to give the allies something else instead of half of a city so far from their own zone.
In: 10
The occupation zones were agreed to while fighting was still going on until just after it ended in Europe in 1943-45. The Allies were negotiating to an outcome that could be agreed and keep the big three powers on side with each other at that time. They all had some ideas of the future outcome they would prefer but they weren’t sitting down to decide the exact nature of East and West Germany as they would come to be for the next 40 years because no one foresaw that exact outcome at the time.
Berlin was symbolically important as Germany’s capital, so splitting it meant each allied power could share in the prestige of occupying it. And it was practically important as the largest city in Germany, one of its main financial and industrial centres and the centre of rail networks in northern and eastern Germany. There was nowhere else comparable in Germany and definitely not in the Soviet Zone, America and Britain wouldn’t have accepted full Soviet control of Berlin in return for some much smaller eastern German city.
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