proved.The congeries at Potsdam also decided that each occupying power was to receive reparations in the form of goods and industrial equipment in compensation for its losses during the war. Because most German industry lay, outside its zone, it was agreed that the Soviet Union was to take industrial plants from the other zones and in exchange supply them with agricultural products. The Allies, remembering the political costs of financial reparations after World War I, had decided that reparations consisting of payments in kind were less likely to imperil the peace of World War II. The final document of the Potsdam Conference, the Potsdam Accord, also included provisions for demilitarizing the denazifying Germany and for restructuring the German political life on democratic principals. German economic unity was to be persevered. The boundaries of the four occupation zones established at Yalta generally followed the borders of the former German states. Only Prussia constituted an exception: it was dissolved altogether, and the remaining German Lander in northern and western Germany absorbed its territory. Prussia’s former capital, Berlin, differed from the rest of Germany in that it was occupied by all four Allies—and thus had so-called Four power status. The occupation zone of the U.S. consisted of the Hesse, the northern half of the present-day Baden- Wurttemberg, Bavaria and the southern part of Greater Berlin. The British zone consisted of Schleswig- Holstein, Lower Saxony, North Rhine- Westphalia, and the western sector of Greater Berlin. The French were appointed Rhineland- Palatinate, the Saarland- which latter received a special status—the southern half of Baden- Wurttemberg, and the northern sector of Greater Berlin. The Soviet Union controlled Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony, Soxony-Anhult, Thuringia, and the eastern sector of Greater Berlin, which constituted almost half the total area of the city.The Allied...
