A Glimpse of Freedom: Allied Occupation and Political Resistance in East Germany

Luis Martinez (), Jonas Jessen and Guo Xu

No 1863, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: This paper studies costly political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, 40% of the designated Soviet occupation zone was initially captured by the western Allied Expeditionary Force. This occupation was short-lived: Soviet forces took over after less than two months and installed an authoritarian regime in what became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We exploit the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within the GDR to show that areas briefly under Allied occupation had higher incidence of protests during the only major episode of political unrest in the GDR before its demise in 1989 - the East German Uprising of 1953. These areas also exhibited lower regime support during the last free elections in 1946. We argue that even a “glimpse of freedom” can foster civilian opposition to dictatorship.

Keywords: East Germany; political resistance; protest; autocracy; spatial RDD; World War II (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F51 H10 N44 P20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67 p.
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-his, nep-pol and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.759109.de/dp1863.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Glimpse of Freedom: Allied Occupation and Political Resistance in East Germany (2023)
Working Paper: A Glimpse of Freedom: Allied Occupation and Political Resistance in East Germany (2022)
Working Paper: A Glimpse of Freedom: Allied Occupation and Political Resistance in East Germany (2022)
Working Paper: A Glimpse of Freedom: Allied Occupation and Political Resistance in East Germany (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1863

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().