The entirety of Germany was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II, from the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945 to the establishment of West Germany on 23 May 1949. Unlike occupied Japan, Nazi Germany was stripped of its sovereignty and its government was entirely dissolved. After Germany formally surrendered on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, the four countries representing the Allies (the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France) asserted joint authority and sovereignty through the Allied Control Council (ACC).
Germany after the war was a devastated country – roughly 80 percent of its infrastructure was in need of repair or reconstruction – which helped the idea that Germany was entering a new phase of history ("zero hour"). At first, Allied-occupied Germany was defined as all territories of Germany before the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria. The Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945 defined the new eastern German border by giving Poland and the Soviet Union all regions of Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line (eastern parts of Pomerania, Neumark, Posen-West Prussia, East-Prussia and most of Silesia) and divided the remaining "Germany as a whole" into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the Allies.
