The Soviet Occupation Zone, 1945–1949: Building New Structures of Conformity

The Soviet occupation authorities had five chief objectives in the years they governed the eastern provinces of Germany: denazification, involving especially the dismissal of judges, public prosecutors, and teachers tainted by past membership in the Nazi Party; reparations and expropriations, in which an estimated 3,400 factories were disassembled, transported to the Soviet Union, and reassembled there; the establishment of the communist Socialist Unity Party as the dominant party in the zone; the purge and removal of independent-minded anti-communists, even if they had also been outspoken anti-Nazis; and the reshaping of the educational system, especially with an eye to excluding religious instruction—against the opposition of the country’s Protestant and Catholic bishops. The Soviets and their East German communist allies also sought to control art and music, imposing the doctrine of socialist realism.