After the war the frontier dividing Germany from Poland moved west , as part of a larger political settlement one result of which was many millions of Germans being forced or obliged to relocate in order to avoid living in Poland or the Soviet Union ( where they had become acutely unpopular due to Nazi-inspired atrocities ) . What remained of Germany was divided into four zones of occupation to be administered by the army of one of four of the powers that had won the war . The future for Germany looked very uncertain and very bleak , but there was a general assumption that at some stage the foreign armies would go home and what remained would become a single country . The one-party state of the Nazis would be replaced by some for of multi-party democracy not totally dissimilar from the pre-Nazi system that Hitler , at a party conference back in 1929 in had disparagingly dismissed as the " Weimar Republic " . These were the assumptions and goals for Germany shared by Hugo Hickmann , whose home region now found itself in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany . However , at the beginning of May 1945 a team of former Communist exiles landed in Berlin headed up by Walter Ulbricht . As matters turned out they arrived with a detailed plan of their own , supported by Moscow , which did not envisage a single German state
larger political settlement
Potsdam Conference
Hugo Hickmann