In the London Protocol signed on 12 September 1944, the Allies of World War II (then without France) agreed on dividing Germany into three occupation zones after the war.[1]
The first zone protocol was drawn up at the meeting of the European Advisory Commission (EAC) on 12 September 1944 and signed by John Gilbert Winant (USA), William Strang (UK) and Fedor Gusev (USSR) at Lancaster House in London,[2] and described the first notions of the boundary between the zones to be created: Eastern, Northwestern, and Southwestern zones in Germany, and the three parts of the area of Greater Berlin. The basis of the ideas were the borders of Germany from 31 December 1937 (de) and Greater Berlin from 27 April 1920.
The north-western and south-western zones in Germany and Greater Berlin had not yet been assigned as British or American sub-areas. The relevant text passages provided for this were only documented with spaces, whereas the eastern zone and the north-eastern zone of Greater Berlin were already marked directly with "USSR".
In terms of borders, the western borders of Thuringia, Anhalt and the Prussian province of Saxony were referred to. This meant that the areas east of the Werra and west of the Elbe were not - as was often published - "exchanged for West Berlin", but the areas in the west of the Elbe were already intended to be part of the Eastern Zone.
Original text:
The Soviet zone was supposed to encompass the eastern part of Germany, including the explicitly mentioned East Prussia, and no cession of areas to Poland was planned.
The border between the two western zones (and here not yet assigned to any occupying power) was defined as follows:
This would have meant that the present-day states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg as well as the Palatinate, which previously belonged to Bavaria, and the southern part of the People's State of Hesse would have come to the southwestern (i.e. later American) zone, the Rhine province belonging to Prussia and the province of Hesse-Nassau and the northern part of the People's State of Hesse (Upper Hesse province) to the north-western, i.e. later British. The people's state of Hesse would have been divided by the layout of the occupation zones. This would have cut up the Frankfurt am Main area.
The main points of this smaller protocol, also drawn up in London on 14 November 1944, were:
The demarcation between the two western zones had been corrected as follows:
The description is confusing because the flow direction of the Rhine is reversed in it and the points "where the River Rhine leaves the southern frontier of Hesse-Nassau" are actually the ones where the river flows into this province. However, the People's State of Hesse ("Hessen-Darmstadt") is mentioned for the first time in the Second Protocol, while it did not appear in the first Protocol.
In terms of content, the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau was now assigned to the (now called American) southwest zone, while the Bavarian Palatinate was assigned to the (now officially British) northwest zone. This resolved the above-described conflict of a zone border right through the Frankfurt metropolitan area. By defining the Rhine as a zone boundary in the Hessian people's state, the Hesse state was now divided along the river; the parts of the Rheinhessen province on the left bank of the Rhine were assigned to the British zone, the remaining parts of the state to the American zone. The city of Mainz, situated on both sides of the river, and its half on the right bank of the Rhine, was particularly affected by this the south-west zone, as the districts on the left bank of the Rhine including the city center were assigned to the north-west zone.
The main points of this last of the protocols, written on 26 July 1945, were:
The introduction of a proposed, but not yet planned in detail, French occupation zone was entirely at the expense of the areas of the two previous western zones.
The zone protocol was sent to the governments of the four allied powers on 26 July. Details of the boundaries of the French sector in the northwest part of Greater Berlin were not included, only the statement that this sector should be formed from the two sectors of the United Kingdom and the United States. [8th]
The territories of the new or previous zones (excluding the eastern ones) were planned in the third protocol as follows:
The procedure for planning a French occupation zone deviated massively from the previous orientation towards German state and Prussian provincial borders, the only exception to which was the new Rhine border between Mannheim and Wiesbaden. Instead, completely new borders were planned along previous administrative districts and counties. In addition to Hesse, which was already divided in the 2nd Protocol, other regions were affected by the division: