Abstract

Why this selection of cases? There were three main considerations which guided us in selecting the cases to be investigated. • Sources accessibility was the first and most important condition. • The second requirement was to have a set of cases well suited for the purpose of comparative analysis. • Finally, the cases that we selected illustrate an interesting and historically fairly new phenomenon, namely the ability for a great power A to transform a temporary military occupation of a country B into a lasting controlling influence over B. Let us explain these points in more detail. Accessibility of sources Why, for instance, did we study the occupation of Western Germany by Western Allies rather than (or along with) the occupation of East Germany by the Soviet Union? The reason is very simple: because I know English but do not know Rus-sian. For the three Western zones of occupation all military archives are in English (or in French, a language that I also know of course). Needless to say, most1 Russian military archives regarding the occupation of the GDR (German Democratic Repub-lic), Poland or other Eastern European countries would be in Russian. This would have been an insurmountable obstacle. Language was not the only criterion as far as accessibility was concerned. For in-stance, why did we not (so far) study the French occupation zone in West Germany? The answer is to be found in another accessibility condition namely the availability of online catalogs of the national archives. In 2005, when we began to plan this study, there was no catalog of French military archives available on the Internet. In contrast the online catalog of NARA (National Archives and Records Administration i.e. the American National Archives) became available around this date; even though it contained fairly few files at the beginning there was the expectation that year after year it would include a greater percentage of the files. Apart from the question of sources, there was another reason for concentrating on 1We say “most ” rather than “all ” because Mr Vladimir Putin who has spent part of his career in the GDR speaks German very fluently in spite of the fact that he is not of German ancestry. So it seems that Russian was not the only language of communication used among the occupation personnel