Potsdam Conference (1945): Truman, Stalin and the Fate of Germany

The Potsdam Conference was the last wartime meeting of the “Big Three” Allied powers, held at Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, near Berlin, from 17 July to 2 August 1945. Harry S. Truman, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, replaced midway by Clement Attlee, met to decide how to govern defeated Germany, settle the borders of Central Europe and end the war with Japan.

The agreements reached at Potsdam shaped post-war Germany and Poland for decades. Yet the conference also exposed the growing mistrust between the Soviet Union and the Western powers that would soon become the Cold War.

Background

Allied leaders had met twice before at the highest level, at Tehran in 1943 and at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. At Yalta they agreed to divide Germany into zones of occupation and to hold free elections in liberated Eastern Europe, and Stalin promised to enter the war against Japan.

Much had changed by July. Germany had surrendered on 8 May. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died on 12 April, and Truman, his successor, was far less experienced in foreign affairs. Soviet forces controlled Eastern Europe, and a Soviet-backed government held power in Poland, against Western wishes. Britain was in the middle of a general election, whose result would not be known until 26 July.

The conference

The leaders met in the panelled great hall of Cecilienhof, a mock-Tudor country house that had escaped war damage. Truman, as the only head of state present, chaired the sessions. The foreign ministers, James F. Byrnes for the United States, Vyacheslav Molotov for the Soviet Union and Anthony Eden, later Ernest Bevin, for Britain, met separately to work out details.

Churchill and Eden returned to London for the declaration of the election results. Labour won a landslide, and Attlee, who had attended earlier sessions as an observer, returned on 28 July as Prime Minister with Bevin as Foreign Secretary. The final document, usually called the Potsdam Agreement, was signed late on 1 August and published on 2 August.

The fate of Germany

The Allies agreed that Germany would be treated as a single economic unit but administered in four zones, by the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and France, under an Allied Control Council in Berlin. Policy would follow principles often summed up as the “four Ds”: denazification, demilitarisation, democratisation and decentralisation. Nazi organisations were to be dissolved, war criminals tried and the armaments industry dismantled.

Reparations were one of the hardest questions. Instead of a fixed total, each power would take reparations mainly from its own zone. The Soviet Union, whose zone was less industrial, would also receive a share of industrial equipment from the western zones, part of it in exchange for food and raw materials. Austria was likewise to be occupied in four zones.

Poland and the expulsions

The leaders agreed that German territory east of the Oder and western Neisse rivers, including most of Silesia, Pomerania and southern East Prussia, would come under Polish administration, with a final frontier to be fixed at a peace conference. Northern East Prussia, including Königsberg, was assigned to the Soviet Union. Poland in turn lost its eastern lands to the USSR.

The agreement also approved the transfer of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, stating that it should be carried out in an “orderly and humane” manner. In reality, flight and expulsion had already begun, and in the following years an estimated 12 to 14 million Germans left or were driven from Eastern and Central Europe, with hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Japan and the atomic bomb

On 16 July, the day before the conference opened, the United States successfully tested the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. On 24 July Truman told Stalin, in vague terms, about a powerful new weapon. Stalin, already informed by Soviet spies, said little.

On 26 July the United States, Britain and China issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding Japan’s unconditional surrender and warning of “prompt and utter destruction” otherwise. The Japanese government did not accept it. Within two weeks came the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviet declaration of war and the bombing of Nagasaki, leading to the surrender of Japan.

Tensions behind the scenes

Although the conference was outwardly cordial, with banquets and toasts, the leaders clashed repeatedly. Churchill and Truman objected to the new Polish government and to Soviet control of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, demanding free elections and access for Western journalists. Stalin countered by pointing to British policy in Greece and refused to discuss Soviet-backed governments in detail.

Reparations caused the longest arguments. The Soviet Union, devastated by the German invasion, had sought a fixed sum of 20 billion dollars, half for itself, a figure discussed at Yalta. The Americans, remembering the reparations problems after the First World War, refused to commit to a total that they feared they would end up financing. Byrnes’s compromise of zone-based reparations was linked to Western acceptance of the Oder–Neisse line in a single package deal.

Stalin also raised other ambitions, including a share in Italy’s former colonies, bases in the Turkish Straits and a role in the Mediterranean. These requests were deferred, but they increased Western suspicion of Soviet aims. Meanwhile, the Americans had already begun to calculate that the atomic bomb might make Soviet help against Japan less necessary.

The personalities of the leaders shaped these exchanges. Harry S. Truman, in office for barely three months, sought to keep Soviet cooperation while resisting Soviet demands. Joseph Stalin aimed to secure reparations and a friendly Poland. Winston Churchill distrusted Soviet intentions but lost office during the conference. Clement Attlee largely continued British policy in the final sessions.

Consequences

The conference resolved some issues but left others to a Council of Foreign Ministers, which failed to agree on a German peace treaty. Cooperation in the Allied Control Council soon broke down, and the zones developed separately. Disputes over currency and the economy led to the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949 and the creation of two German states in 1949.

The Oder–Neisse line remained Poland’s western border in practice. West Germany recognised it in treaties of the 1970s, and a reunited Germany confirmed it in a 1990 treaty with Poland.

Timeline

• 1945, 8 May: Germany surrenders unconditionally.
• 1945, 16 July: The first atomic bomb is tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
• 1945, 17 July: The Potsdam Conference opens at Cecilienhof Palace.
• 1945, 24 July: Truman tells Stalin about a new weapon.
• 1945, 26 July: The Potsdam Declaration is issued; Labour’s election victory is announced.
• 1945, 28 July: Clement Attlee takes Churchill’s place at the conference.
• 1945, 1 August: The Potsdam Agreement is signed.
• 1945, 2 August: The conference closes and the agreement is published.

Legacy

Cecilienhof is now a museum, with the conference room preserved much as it was in 1945. Visitors can see the large round conference table and the rooms used by each delegation, while the agreement itself is studied as a founding document of post-war Europe. Historians see Potsdam as the moment when wartime cooperation reached its limits: the Allies could still agree on paper, but their visions for Germany and Europe were already moving apart.

Why it matters

The Potsdam Conference shaped the map of Central Europe, the occupation of Germany and the end of the war in Asia. Its compromises and silences help explain both the long division of Germany and the start of the Cold War.