Potsdam Conference

Potsdam Conference. The World War II Allies met in Potsdam, near Berlin, Germany, from 17 July to 2 August, 1945, following their victory in Europe. Representatives at the conference included President Harry S. Truman, in office only since April; Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, and British prime ministers Winston Churchill and his successor Clement Attlee.

The conference's closing agreement confirmed an earlier plan to divide the administration of Germany and of Berlin into four zones of military occupation by the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union; established a four‐power Allied Control Council to resolve overall issues of occupation policy; and suggested a territorial settlement that would place German‐held lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers under Polish jurisdiction. Austria was also divided into zones. In addition, the Allies agreed to permit each occupying power to seize reparations from their zone and promised the Soviet Union greater compensation owing to the extraordinary war damage it had suffered. The conference established a process to draft peace treaties, to plan for demilitarizing and eliminating Nazi influence from Germany, and to try Axis officials as war criminals.

The United States, Britain, and China also issued on 26 July the Potsdam Declaration, calling for the unconditional surrender of Japan. Some historians believe that the nature of Japanese militarism and Allied public opinion demanded this ultimatum. Others argue that, by making it harder for Japanese moderates to press for a negotiated end to the war, the policy led inexorably to the use of the atomic bomb.

During the conference, receiving word of the Manhattan Project's successful test at Alamogordo, Truman with studied casualness told Stalin that the United States now had a weapon of vast destructive force. Stalin (who already knew of the atomic‐bomb project through espionage) calmly replied that he hoped it would be used against Japan. Recent research reveals that Stalin then urgently accelerated his program to develop a Soviet bomb, fearing that his ally's new weapon would threaten Soviet security. Historians still debate the extent to which America's unilateral possession of this fearsome bomb hastened the cooling of relations between Truman and Stalin. Certainly, the growing hostility between these two leaders and their countries, aggravated by America's atomic monopoly and Stalin's determination to force Soviet‐led communism on Eastern European countries, did not bode well for harmonious execution of the Potsdam agreements. The United States subsequently refused to support additional reparations for the Soviet Union. Acrimony developed within the Allied Control Council over zonal governance and the nature of future German reunification. Although considered successful at the time, the Potsdam Conference would come to be seen by many historians as marking the emergence of the Cold War.
See also Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Bombing of; Nuclear Weapons; Yalta Conference.

Bibliography

Charles L. Mee Jr. , Meeting at Potsdam, 1975.
James L. Gormly , From Potsdam to Cold War: Big Three Diplomacy, 1945–1947, 1990.

Emily S. Rosenberg