Cold War Crash Course III

In our latest installment of the series, we look at the person of Josef Stalin, a dominant figure for our wider Korean War series, and his security blanket he was in the process of creating in Eastern Europe. The spread of communism in Europe's shattered cities, combined with the looming threat of the Red Army and the sweeping impact of its soldiers into the East, created a new dynamic in Europe. At the head of this new dynamic was the will and ambition of Stalin, who had a direct hand in everything that occurred.

Stalin was critical in his creation of the Soviet Union bloc, but he was also critically important to any arrangement which would be reached on the future of Germany. Exactly what form Germany would take, whether it was feasible or sustainable to preserve Germany in its divided state - these were questions that the post-war governments in Britain, the US and France all grappled with. Without Stalin, they initially believed, any progress on this question would be impossible.

With Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, and Stalin's pronouncement of the West's hostility to the needs of Eastern Europe's citizens, the Cold War lines were clearly being drawn. Several conflicts lay ahead, but the more immediate questions, such as how to rebuild the continent and what to do about the continent's integral centrepiece - the Germans - remained a sore point for some and pressingly urgent for others. Here we find out how the post-war allies of east and west attempted to cooperate in spite of the looming divisions into the different ideological camps.The German question, as we'll see, could not be answered in a year, (or one episode!) it was instead a question based fundamentally on Berlin's past behaviour, where German revanchism and a repeat of the post-WW1 experience remained at the forefront of many minds.

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