ABSTRACT
While authorities in the west were striving to restore essential services, the Soviet Military Administration (SMA) was ambitiously laying the ground work for Soviet domination. Stalin was assisted by an eager cadre of German communists led by Walter Ulbricht. When Stalin met with the German communist leadership in early June, 1945, he insisted on fundamental social change in rural areas as one of the most important tasks in the Soviet Occupation Zone. Land reform-expulsion of owners of large farms and the expropriation of their land-became part of the founding proclamation of the German Communist Party on 11 June 1945. Upon Stalin's insistence, Soviet and German communists moved quickly to restructure rural eastern Germany. At the end of the war, families used the Green Border to pass to the western zones. Families owning farms larger than 100 hectares continued to be evicted from their homes while a draft land-reform decree was being prepared by the SMA.
