Stalin executed a "Morgenthau Plan" on steroids, taking everything of industrial value.
Morgenthau said the Ruhr area:
His idea was at first endorsed by both Roosevelt and Churchill, but later rejected by Truman & others, after it became clear we needed a strong Germany to bulwark against Soviet expansion.
Part of the justification for the Marshall Plan was that if we didn’t give the Western Euopeans jobs and food, the communists were going to take over by promising them. That included the Germans. We’ve already seen news articles in the Times about the French communists doing exactly that. I believe that even this early, there is a sense that we can’t reduce the Germans to serfs without handing them over to the Soviets. Of course the Soviets didn’t care about this in areas occupied by the Red Army. Nobody was going to promise those peoples anything.
The Cold War began in 1944.
Grandpa's detachment will ultimately be assigned to Giessen, a middling size university town. It was also a military headquarters and rail junction suffering heavy bomb damage. The planners believed that after Germany was conquered civil administration would have completely broken down and a lengthy occupation would be needed.
In actuality, civil administration survived surprisingly intact. By November and December 1945, the kreis detachments were being pulled out with liaisons being left in place. In January, 1946 local counsel elections were held with a heavy turnout.
With the Russians refusing to cooperate in organizing a unified German state and the pressing need for a bulwark against them, the German Federal Republic was organized in 1949.