Wayne Geerling, Gary B. Magee, and Russell Smyth Occupation, Reparations, and Rebellion: The Soviets and the East German Uprising of 1953 The occupation of territories by foreign powers is a common aftermath of modern warfare. For example, Vishwasrao et al. identified at least thirty-three major examples of extended military occupation between 1950 and 2013 alone, and this list is not exhaustive. A shared feature of such occupations, irrespective of their scale, duration, or intent, is that almost all of them at some point undergo resentment and resistance from sections of the local population. Such was certainly the case in the provinces of postwar eastern Germany formally administered by the Red Army until the formation of a successor state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), in October 1949. Despite beginning the process of restor- ing a degree of German sovereignty over eastern Germany at this time, the Soviet presence in, and influence over, the new state con- tinued, evoking high levels of local anger ever since. Indeed, one of the problems that the new regime confronted was its perceived, and actual, association with the Soviet occupiers. 1 Wayne Geerling is Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Monash University. He is the author of, with Gary B. Magee, Paul A. Raschky, and Russell Smyth, “Bad News from the Front and from Above: Bombing Raids, Military Fatalities and the Death Penalty in Nazi Germany,” Economic Inquiry, LVIII (2020), 1450–1468; with Magee and Smyth, “Sentencing, Judicial Discretion, and Political Prisoners in Pre-War Nazi Germany,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVI (2016), 517–542. Gary B. Magee is Professor of Economics, Monash University. He is the author of, with Geerling, Quantifying Resistance: Political Crime and the People’s Court in Nazi Germany (Singapore, 2017); with Andrew Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge 2010). Russell Smyth is Professor of Economics and Deputy Dean (Research), Monash Business School, Monash University. He is the author of, with Geerling and Magee, “The Evolution of Democratic Tradition and Regional Variation in Resistance in Nazi Germany,” Southern Economic Journal, LXXXIV (2021), 1320–1344; with Geerling, Magee, and Vinod Mishra, “Hitler’s Judges: Ideological Commitment and the Death Penalty in Nazi Germany,” Economic Journal, CXXVIII (2018), 2414–2449. © 2021 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01698 1 For the prevalence of occupations, see Sharmila Vishwasrao, Matthew Schneider, and Eric P. Chang, “The Effects of Military Occupation on Growth,” Kyklos, LVII (2019), 183–207; for Journal of Interdisciplinary History, LII:2 (Autumn, 2021), 225–250. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/52/2/225/1959935/jinh_a_01698.pdf by guest on 02 September 2021