Potsdam Conference

• 1. Introduction

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  The Potsdam Conference opened on the 17th of July 1945, just sixteen days after the most destructive war in human history had ended in Europe. Three men gathered at Cecilienhof, a palace in Potsdam within the Soviet occupation zone near Berlin, carrying the weight of a shattered continent and the shape of the world to come. Joseph Stalin, Harry S. Truman, and Winston Churchill sat down to decide what would happen to Germany, Poland, Japan, and dozens of smaller questions that would define the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

  What happened inside those rooms was stranger and more fraught than the formal communiques suggested. One of the three leaders was replaced mid-conference by his own electorate. Another was concealing a secret that would detonate the atomic age within weeks. And a fourth power, France, was deliberately kept out of the room despite having a direct stake in the outcome. Within eighteen months of the conference ending, the Cold War had begun. So how did an agreement meant to secure a just and enduring peace unravel so quickly? And what exactly was decided in those sixteen days at Potsdam?

• 2. The Men in the Room

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  Roosevelt had died on the 12th of April 1945, and the man who replaced him, Harry S. Truman, came to Potsdam with less diplomatic experience but considerably more suspicion of Stalin than his predecessor had carried. Truman himself noted on the 17th of July, the first day of the conference, that Stalin seemed honest, if sharp. But that surface impression masked a deeper wariness.

  George Lenczowski, writing about Truman's character, observed that Truman had the courage to reverse policies that appeared to him naive and dangerous, a contrast with the ad hoc wartime improvisation that had marked Roosevelt's approach. Roosevelt had reportedly told William Bullitt in January 1943 that he believed Stalin, given enough generosity, would not try to annex anything and would work toward a world of democracy and peace. Truman did not share that hunch.

  Churchill, for his part, had long held a darker view of Stalin, whom his government had privately regarded as a devil-like tyrant leading a vile system. But Churchill did not stay long enough to shape the final outcome. A British general election had been held on the 5th of July 1945, and though the results were delayed to count the votes of armed forces personnel, they arrived during the conference. By the 28th of July, Clement Attlee had defeated Churchill and taken his place at the table. Anthony Eden departed with Churchill; Ernest Bevin stepped in as Britain's new Foreign Secretary. France's Charles de Gaulle was excluded entirely, partly due to longstanding personal friction with Roosevelt, and partly because the Americans feared he would reopen decisions already made at Yalta.

• 3. The Atomic Secret

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  On the 16th of July 1945, the day before Potsdam opened, the United States conducted the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb. The test was successful. Truman was quietly informed of this during the conference and at some point mentioned to Stalin that the United States was about to use a new kind of weapon against Japan.

  Stalin's reaction was notably mild. That mildness had a reason: Soviet intelligence had already penetrated the Manhattan Project, and Stalin had known about the bomb program long before Truman said a word. When Truman later informed Stalin more explicitly that the United States had a new weapon of unusual destructive force, Stalin replied that he hoped Truman would make good use of it against the Japanese.

  The Potsdam Declaration, issued on the 26th of July by Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek, the Chairman of the Nationalist Government of China, gave Japan an ultimatum to surrender unconditionally or face prompt and utter destruction. The declaration did not mention the atomic bomb by name. It also stated that it was not intended to enslave Japan. The Soviet Union was absent from the declaration because it remained neutral in the Pacific war at that point. When Japanese Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki sent negotiators but received no response from the United States, American officials later interpreted this as Japan ignoring the ultimatum. The atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima on the 6th of August and on Nagasaki on the 9th of August 1945.

• 4. Redrawing Germany

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  Germany's future was the conference's central problem. Nine weeks before Potsdam, Germany had surrendered unconditionally, and the three powers now had to decide what occupation and reconstruction would look like in practice.

  The agreed framework came to be known by six words, all beginning with the letter D: demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decentralization, dismantling, and decartelization. The Allies would abolish the SS, the SA, the SD, and the Gestapo, along with the military branches and any institution designed to keep alive the German military tradition. All Nazi laws were to be repealed, Nazi Party members holding public office were to be removed, and the educational system was to be purged of fascist doctrine.

  The territorial settlement was blunter. Germany's eastern border was to be shifted westward to the Oder-Neisse line, a change that reduced Germany in size by approximately 25% relative to its 1937 borders, or roughly 34% from its 1913 borders. The lands east of that line, including East Prussia, most of Silesia, West Prussia, and two-thirds of Pomerania, were placed under Polish administration. Upper Silesia, notably, had been the second-largest center of German heavy industry. German populations still living in those regions, as well as in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were to be transferred westward. The conference framed this as orderly and humane, but by modern estimates between 600,000 and 2.2 million Germans died during those expulsions and flights.

  On reparations, the Soviet Union was to receive compensation from its own eastern occupation zone plus a share from the western zones. Specifically, 15% of usable industrial capital equipment from the western zones was to go to the Soviets in exchange for food, coal, and raw materials from the east. An additional 10% was to be transferred without any obligation of payment in return. Germany's postwar economy was to be oriented toward agriculture and light industry, with exports imagined as coal, beer, toys, and textiles rather than the heavy industrial goods that had dominated before the war.

• 5. Poland and the Eastern Bloc

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  Poland's postwar status was perhaps the most consequential single decision made at Potsdam, and it was essentially forced on the Western powers before the conference began. Stalin had already installed a Soviet-backed group, known as the Lublin Poles, as the provisional government, and the Red Army occupied the country. Truman later reported that Stalin had presented the occupation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union and the Polish annexation of Silesia and eastern Pomerania as a fait accompli. The Western Allies, taken by surprise, had been forced to abandon the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

  At the conference, the Big Three formally recognized the Soviet-controlled Provisional Government of National Unity, which effectively ended international recognition of the London-based Polish government-in-exile. The agreement called for free elections with widespread suffrage and secret ballots, and promised that democratic and anti-Nazi parties would be able to participate. Allied press representatives were promised full freedom to report on the elections. Those guarantees were not honored.

  The pattern extended across Eastern Europe. Stalin maintained that Soviet control of the region was a defensive measure, a shield against future attacks. Within months of the conference's close, the Soviet Union had converted Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Albania into communist satellite states. Many of those countries had seen failed socialist revolutions before the Second World War, which made the postwar transformations feel, to Moscow, like historical completion. To Washington and London, it looked like exactly the expansionism they had feared.

• 6. What Came After

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  The conference ended on the 2nd of August 1945 with a formal communique expressing confidence that the three powers, together with the other United Nations, would ensure a just and enduring peace. The formal tone masked what had actually happened: a set of partial agreements, deferred questions, and unresolved tensions that would define the next four decades.

  The Council of Foreign Ministers was established at Potsdam to handle the unfinished business, with its first meeting set for London no later than the 1st of September 1945. That council was meant to draft peace treaties with Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Finland, and eventually to prepare a settlement for Germany itself. A peace settlement for Germany would not arrive for another 45 years, finalized only in 1990 with the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany.

  France, excluded from Potsdam, refused to implement the agreements within its own occupation zone. The French declined to resettle expelled Germans and reserved the right to block any moves toward a unified German government. De Gaulle's resentment at being excluded from both Yalta and Potsdam proved lasting and shaped French foreign policy for years. The Montreux Convention, governing passage through the Turkish Straits, was identified at Potsdam as something that required revision, with the United States proposing to open the straits to all commercial vessels and Black Sea warships at all times. That question, too, remained alive long after the delegates left Cecilienhof.