Charles River Editors - The Potsdam Conference: The History of the Negotiations Between the Allies Near the End of World War II

By Charles River Editors

Attlee, Truman, and Stalin at the Potsdam Conference

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A conference meeting at the conference

The Potsdam Conference

If we can put this tremendous machine of ours, which has made this victory possible, to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind. That's what we propose to do. - President Harry S. Truman at a July 1945 flag-raising ceremony in Berlin

Standing in history like a milestone marking the boundary between one era and the next, the Potsdam Conference brought together the leaders of the three major Allied powers the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom for the last time at the end of World War II and at the threshold of the Cold War. A follow up to the Yalta Conference just five months earlier, Potsdam attempted to work out the contours of the postwar world.

Though it came so shortly after Yalta, the Potsdam Conference also highlighted a turnover of leadership on the world stage. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who gave his nation hope in the darkest days of World War II, had suffered a stunning defeat at the hands of the Labor candidate Clement Attlee, who replaced him towards the end of the Conference. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died prior to the meeting, leading to his replacement by the new president Harry S. Truman, a keen-minded pragmatist whose intense focus on America's advantage contrasted with Roosevelt's internationalism. Only General Secretary Josef Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union, remained unchanged from the earlier summit. Destined to continue in power for another 8 years until his death (possibly at the hands of Lavrenty Beria), the Russian strongman found himself confronting a world in which the United States possessed the atomic bomb.

At the same time, despite the power of the central personalities, their lieutenants also played a role at Potsdam. James Byrnes, Truman's right-hand man at the conference, concealed a deeply astute, intelligent, and cunning mind under the exterior of a scrawny country bumpkin. Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy provided continuity with the Yalta conference for the American delegation, while Vyacheslav Molotov and Foreign Minister Anthony Eden also reprised their roles from the earlier summit.

World War II was so horrific that in its aftermath, the victorious Allies sought to address every aspect of it to both punish war criminals and attempt to ensure that there was never a conflict like it again. World War II was unprecedented in terms of the global scale of the fighting, the number of both civilian and military casualties, the practice of total war, and war crimes. World War II also left two undisputed, ideologically opposed superpowers standing, shaping global politics over the last 65 years.

Though the countries had often discussed Russia joining America and Britains fight against the Japanese, it became clear at Potsdam that this was not going to happen. Instead, Stalin pleaded for help for his own country, which had been decimated by the fighting with Germany. Russia had lost more than 30,000 factories and so much farm land that the vast majority of the population was suffering from malnutrition. Stalin was also particularly concerned that the Allies might stage an invasion of Russia and overthrow his regime. While it may have seemed at the time that he was just being paranoid, it is now known that George Patton was already pushing Truman and the other world leaders to go ahead and finish the weakened Soviets off, meaning Stalin might actually have been wise to build up communist governments in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria and elsewhere.

The British and Americans didnt see it that way, though. Instead, they assumed that Stalin was expanding the Soviet Union in preparation for invading Europe. The Europeans appealed to the Americans for help and with them would go on to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. This mutual mistrust among all parties involved marked the beginning of the Cold War.

The Potsdam Conference: The History of the Negotiations Between the Allies Near the End of World War II looks at the final major conference of the war and its results. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Potsdam Conference like never before, in no time at all.

Adolf Hitler's Third Reich had scant time remaining when the Big Three Allied leaders met at Yalta to discuss the future of Germany, Europe, and the postwar world as a whole. No doubt existed regarding the war's outcome; the Americans had shattered the Wehrmacht's desperate last throw in the West, the Ardennes Offensive, during the Battle of the Bulge in the weeks immediately preceding Yalta, and the Soviet front lay just 50 miles east of Berlin, with the Red Army preparing for its final push into the Reich's capital after a successful surprise winter campaign.

Among the agreements, the Yalta Conference called for Germanys unconditional surrender, the split of Berlin, and German demilitarization and reparations. Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt also discussed the status of Poland, and Russian involvement in the United Nations. By this time Stalin had thoroughly established Soviet authority in most of Eastern Europe and made it clear that he had no intention of giving up lands his soldiers had fought and died for. The best he would offer Churchill and Roosevelt was the promise that he would allow free elections to be held. He made it clear, though, that the only acceptable outcome to any Polish election would be one that supported communism. One Allied negotiator would later describe Stalins very formidable negotiating skills. "Marshal Stalin as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all. Indeed, after something like thirty years' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and of course he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated."

The final question lay in what to do with a conquered Germany. Both the Western Allies and Stalin wanted Berlin, and knew that whoever held the most of it when the truce was signed would end up controlling the city. Thus they spent the next several months pushing their generals further and further toward this goal, but the Russians got there first. Thus, when the victorious allies met in Potsdam in 1945, it remained Britain and Americas task to convince Stalin to divide the country, and even the city, between them. They accomplished this, but at a terrible cost: Russia got liberated Austria.