 As a nod to the legal fiction that East Berlin was still occupied territory, it was counted neither as part of Brandenburg, nor as a state in its own right.East Germany claimed East Berlin as its capital, a status recognised by virtually all Eastern Bloc countries.However, the Western Bloc countries of the US, UK, and France never formally acknowledged the authority of the East German government to govern East Berlin; the official Allied protocol recognised only the authority of the Soviet Union in East Berlin in accordance with the occupation status of Berlin as a whole.