ABSTRACT
The establishment of a German government logically implied the end of foreign rule and the Western Occupying Powers had therefore agreed, as an integral part of the deal, to change the Control Council into a High Commission and give written definition in an ‘Occupation Statute’ to their rights and obligations towards the new German authorities. The three High Commissioners at one stage intended to deliver the Occupation Statute to the Federal Government in a solemn ceremony and suggested to Adenauer that he should formally present his Cabinet to them at the same time. He, however, demurred: an ‘Occupation Statute’, though an improvement on the situation in which the Germans had no defined rights, was still in his eyes a disagreeable document and its presentation no occasion for festivities. The High Commissioners therefore decided to hand over the Statute on 21 September 1949 in a formal but private ceremony on the Petersberg above Bonn (where Chamberlain had stayed during the Bad Godesberg talks with Hitler in September 1938).
