Hubert Zimmermann

Money and Security: Troops, Monetary Policy, and West Germanys Relations with the United States and Britain, 1950-1971

Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge University Press, 2002.


This study links two fundamental political structures of the Cold War era, the transatlantic security system and the international monetary system. Central to this issue is a problem that soured relations among the Federal Republic and its major allies from the 1950s to the 1970s: Who was to bear the enormous cost of British and American troops in Germany? Both Washington and London identified this cost as a major reason for the decline of the pound and the dollar, whereas Germany reluctantly paid and traded "Money for Security", a fundamental pattern of its postwar foreign policy.