 At the time, the Allies maintained that with this declaration the former German state was recognised as having ceased to exist, its historic institutions and organisation having been expunged under the criminal assault of Nazi power; such that any continuing sovereign identity for Germany as a whole was now being represented solely by the Allied Control Council.Under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement, the Allies stated their intention that the exercise of full German sovereignty by the Allied Control Council would be one of tutelage and of limited duration; the Council of Foreign Ministers being tasked with preparing the terms for an eventual Peace Treaty and final settlement of the War, and with establishing through the Control Council a wholly new German Government and state adequate for the purpose of accepting that settlement.The Allied contention that the German Reich no longer existed was however, challenged in legal and political debate, with a number of scholars maintaining that the legal extinction of a state could only be achieved through formal annexation of its peoples and territory into another state; and that, this option having been explicitly forsworn in the Berlin Agreement, in some form the German national state must be considered as having survived the collapse of Nazi Germany independently of the Allied Control Council.