After The Breakdown
As the Control Council could only act with the agreement of all four members, this move basically shut down the institution, while the Cold War reached an early high point during the Soviet blockade of Berlin. The Allied Control Council was not formally dissolved, but ceased all activity except the operations of the Four-Power Authorities, namely the management of the Spandau Prison where persons convicted at the Nuremberg Trials were held until 1987, and the Berlin Air Safety Center.
The Western powers instituted the Allied High Commission by September 1949 which remained in operation until 1955. In Eastern Germany, the Soviet administration with its representative of the ACC was the highest authority, later this position was converted to a High Commissioner as well, until the German Democratic Republic gained sovereignty.
Germany remained under nominal military occupation until 15 March 1991, when the final ratification of the Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany (signed on 12 September 1990) was lodged with the German Government. This, as the final peace treaty signed by the four powers and the two German governments, formally restored full sovereignty to a reunified Germany. It also meant the official end of the Allied Control Council, insofar as it still existed at all.
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Famous quotes containing the word breakdown:
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)