US doesn't evacuate Thuringia, Halle, Leipzig in 1945

In looking at the final state of the front lines in Germany in May 1945, one notices that American forces held about 30% of the territory that would become East Germany, including the cities of Leipzig, Halle, Weimar all of Thuringia, much of Anhalt and the westernmost part of Saxony. Had Truman decided to hold onto these areas, which apparently Churchill was suggesting he do, the implications are interesting. The US evacuated Leipzig on July 2, 1945.
Soviet countermeasures would likely be to not allow the Western Allies any part of Berlin, and perhaps to set up a Communist East Austria. Also, would the Soviets then want to take some land slated to go to Poland in Pommerania/Silesia and put it back in their Germany zone to make for a bigger Communist zone, and make up for their loss of this territory to the US?
I wonder if they would go back to the Oder as the border all the way to Breslau perhaps, and thus the Soviet zone would incorporate maybe half of Silesia?
 

Adler

Banned
I don't think a rest-GDR could survive on their own. Yes, east Germany and East Austria would be under their control including Vienna and Berlin. However, they were not able to survive alone. The GDR would have become Pommerania and parts of Silesia.

On this way the Berlin crisises would have been avoided as well. But then new would have come. In the end however, the result of the Cold War would not have changed much.

Adler
 
I don't think a rest-GDR could survive on their own. Yes, east Germany and East Austria would be under their control including Vienna and Berlin. However, they were not able to survive alone. The GDR would have become Pommerania and parts of Silesia.

On this way the Berlin crisises would have been avoided as well. But then new would have come. In the end however, the result of the Cold War would not have changed much.

Adler
Is Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt so important for the existence of East Germany?
 

iddt3

Donor
It looks like the East German Uranium mines were there, so that will certainly have an outsized effect on the cold war, and cold weaken the soviets substantially
 
Whatever happened the German-Polish border wouldn't have changed, Stalin was far less interested in making East Germany a viable state than he was in weakening Germany full stop by handing large chunks of it to the Poles, enabling him to take most of Eastern Poland for himself.
 
One effect would be that Leipzig might become this intriguing cold-war era city, as it would have been located just a few miles from the border, perhaps taking on some attributes that Berlin and Vienna did in terms of espionage, kidnappings, prisoner exchanges, US presidential visits (Kennedy announcing "Ich bin ein Leipziger" as he points to the East German border just ten or so miles to the east). Trieste and Lubeck were also border cities but much smaller of course, so Leipzig might have been a more interesting border city.
Also, how does this effect the West German political scene?
 
...In the end however, the result of the Cold War would not have changed much.

Adler

I don't know. There is such a thing as moral high ground after all. The Western allies had made certain agreements with Stalin; if they egregiously and unilaterally broke those agreements without any obvious cause, then the East/West relationship starts off on a very different footing.

Keeping faith with the West was of concern to Stalin only when he couldn't get away with it of course. But for the Western Allies to pull something like this would make Stalin seem completely justified.

In a world where a deal is a deal only until one side or the other finds it somewhat advantageous to break it, perhaps a full-on war is unavoidable, and the perception that might be so accelerates its onset.

I think it might lead to a very different post-war world indeed. One post-WWIII, where perhaps the Soviet Union is broken some decades earlier, but at the cost of reducing Europe to a radioactive charnel house.

Or less dramatically, one where the NATO alliance is hamstrung by the lack of faith in each other, where it is impossible for any Western European nation to trust either its neighbors or the United States, and is therefore weaker.

It might lead to starker political class struggle in Europe, with the Socialists of various nations desperate because they think it that much more likely the capitalist powers that be in the USA and even to some extent Labour Britain (still more Tory Britain!) will knife them at any possible turn, therefore more liable to go for absolute and irreversible takeovers of power which will alienate the USA and possibly drive them straight to Stalin for protection.

As things are, the Americans and British could honestly say they kept their side of the bargains, until Stalin's violations of his quid pro quos obviously absolved them of them. I think that counted for quite a lot in terms of stabilizing the post-war mess in Europe.
 
Maybe Stalin could give what left of Germany to Poland? Berlin will be again Slavic and Germans in what we now as Eastern Germany will be Polonized? Or deported. As a result we don't have reunification. Vienna wil be in Soviet hands. What they will decide to do with it god nows.
 
Much of the Czech Republic goes Allied along with large parts of Eastern Germany. Vienna remains a part of the ComBloc but might get attached to Slovakia for ease of administration, otherwise it's a valuable city-state for proaganda purposes only. Not much changes overall though Berlin is certainly a ComBloc city with no crisis to bear. Overall a free Czech republic and control over its weaponsmiths and industry does the Western Powers some good and a defensive network around the mountains would be easier than the geography in some of the other areas from OTL. And I concur that Poland will likely miss out on annexing chunks of Silisia and Prussia in this case if only to make Eastern Germany a functional state.
 
Most of East Germany's coal mines and power plants were in Thuringia and West Saxony in OTL. Leipzig is a major city, losing it certainly hurts.
 
One effect would be that Leipzig might become this intriguing cold-war era city, as it would have been located just a few miles from the border, perhaps taking on some attributes that Berlin and Vienna did in terms of espionage, kidnappings, prisoner exchanges, US presidential visits (Kennedy announcing "Ich bin ein Leipziger" as he points to the East German border just ten or so miles to the east). Trieste and Lubeck were also border cities but much smaller of course, so Leipzig might have been a more interesting border city.
Also, how does this effect the West German political scene?

Thüringia was pretty red as was Saxony during the Weimar period. Leipzig will take the place of Berlin.
 
Much of the Czech Republic goes Allied along with large parts of Eastern Germany. Vienna remains a part of the ComBloc but might get attached to Slovakia for ease of administration, otherwise it's a valuable city-state for proaganda purposes only

The Allies have only a very small part of the Czech Republic at the end of play in May 1945. They stopped roughly on a line Karlsbad-Pilsen-Budweis. Quite a bit of that territory is part of the Sudetenland, try and form a free Czech Republic out of that and it will be dominated by Germans, expel the Germans and you'll have a very, very depopulated rump Western Bohemia.

Wien as part of Slovakia, I love the irony.
 
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