## A City Cut Off
To understand why candy fell from the sky over Tempelhof, it helps to understand what West Berlin was in the summer of 1948, and how it had arrived at that condition.
At the end of World War II, Germany lay in ruins. The victorious Allied powers divided both Germany and its capital, Berlin, into occupation zones. The United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union each administered a sector. Berlin sat deep inside the territory the Soviets occupied, roughly one hundred miles from the nearest Western-held territory in what would become West Germany. Under agreements reached in 1945, the Western powers retained rights to use three air corridors connecting their sectors of Germany to their sectors of Berlin. These corridors were the city’s most reliable link to the outside.
The arrangement was tense from the beginning. The Soviets had their own ideas about what postwar Europe should look like, and American and British plans for rebuilding western Germany ran against Soviet interests. By early 1948 the relationship was deteriorating rapidly. In March 1948 the Soviets walked out of the Allied Control Council, the four-power body governing occupied Germany. The break left the powers managing their zones independently, with no coordinating framework.
The immediate trigger for the Berlin crisis was currency. The Western Allies, planning a new Deutschmark for the western occupation zones, announced the reform on June 18, 1948. The Soviets responded by announcing they would not allow the new currency to circulate in Berlin. When the Western powers introduced the currency there anyway, the Soviets acted. Between June 19 and June 29, 1948, the Soviets blocked all land, rail, and water routes into West Berlin. Food convoys stopped. Coal shipments stopped. The canal barges stopped. The electricity supply, which came largely from Soviet-controlled generating stations, was cut back sharply. West Berlin, a city of roughly two million people, was sealed.