The economic policy the United States pursued in occupied Germany combined politically motivated security considerations with the provision of humanitarian aid. This duality accounted for its often striking inconsistency. Both aspects, however, had evolved unavoidably from a single cause: Hitler's aggression. That seemed to have stemmed from a peculiarly German mind-set and a corresponding set of political, social, and economic conditions that had to be fundamentally changed if mankind were to be spared yet another outbreak of German aggression. At the same time, the war Hitler unleashed had recoiled on Germany itself, leaving the country in ruins and inhabited by a population incapable of supporting itself. The Allies, therefore, confronted the problem of having to provide the German people with the means of subsistence while destroying the economic base of Germany's potential for war. The Americans, moreover, were determined not to let either of these imperatives become a long-term obstacle to the liberalization of world trade, the foundations of which were laid at Bretton Woods in 1944.

From European Economic Revolution to the Reconstruction of Traditional Trade Patterns

Germany was nonetheless the principal reason for the initial failure of American plans for a multilateral world economic system. Before the war, Germany had been the workshop of Europe, exporting finished products and capital goods while providing a market for food, raw materials, and semifinished products from other European countries. In 1938, 69.7 percent of all German exports went to other European countries, which in turn supplied 54.5 percent of Germany’s imports. Even after the aggressive intentions of Hitler’s Germany had long been apparent,Western Europeans were still spending twice as much on capital goods from Germany as from the United States. American postwar planners initially hesitated to tamper with these traditional flows of trade – which, indeed, they regarded as an important prerequisite for a swift reconstruction of Europe.