POTSDAM CONFERENCE.

The final summit conference of World War II (codenamed "Terminal") was held in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam between 17 July and 2 August 1945. The principal issues were the treatment of occupied Germany and that country's eastern border with Poland. Looming over all the discussions was the end of the war with Japan and the use of the atomic bomb.

PHASE ONE—DEADLOCK

The conference sessions took place in the Cecilienhof, a mansion built for the crown prince of Germany before the First World War, designed in English "mock Tudor" style. The American, British, and Soviet delegations were housed in the nearby film colony of Babelsberg, Germany's equivalent of Hollywood. Potsdam was the first opportunity for Winston Churchill (1874–1965), prime minister of Great Britain, and Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), the leader of the Soviet Union, to meet the new American president, Harry Truman (1884–1972). The conference followed the pattern of earlier summits such as Yalta, with plenary gatherings of the Big Three and their staffs alternating with meetings of the foreign ministers, who handled the details of policy and planning.

When the conference opened on 17 July, a contrast in styles was immediately apparent. Truman masked his lack of experience with a direct, businesslike manner, insisting that he wanted "something in the bag" each day. Churchill loved to make long speeches, his natural loquacity exacerbated by the fatigue of five grueling years as war leader. Stalin, as usual, listened closely and said little: his interventions were terse, often brusque. At times each leader got on the others' nerves, their frustration intensified by the delays as comments were translated into either English or Russian.

The central issue was the postwar fate of Germany. The country had been divided into four zones of military occupation, under the Americans, British, French, and Soviets. On 18 July, the conference quickly accepted Truman's outline proposals for further progress. In each zone, the Allies would eliminate all relics of Nazism, bring war criminals to justice, and establish democratic government at the local level. For the time being, no central German government would be created.

But the Allies could not agree on the question of reparations. At Yalta they had accepted as a basis for discussion a figure of twenty million dollars, half of which would go to the Soviets, who had suffered most from Nazi depredations. But the Red Army had already systematically looted its zone in the east, and the British and Americans feared that if their zones also had to be stripped bare, they would end up subsidizing western Germany to keep its people alive. In effect, they would be making reparations to Germany, so that the Germans could pay the Soviet Union.

A related issue was the Polish border. It had already been agreed at Yalta that the Soviet Union would recover former tsarist territories in Ukraine, which Poland had controlled between the world wars. In turn, the Poles would gain former German territory in Prussia and Silesia, effectively moving Poland westward, but no conclusion on the western border had been reached at Yalta. Where to draw it was a very sensitive issue. The decision would determine the size of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany and its capacity to extract reparations. As Churchill warned, it could also cause intense friction between Poland and the new Germany, as had happened after 1919.

Even more acrimonious were the debates about whether to recognize the new governments in some of the defeated Axis powers. The Americans and British wanted Italy admitted immediately into the United Nations. But they refused recognition to Eastern European countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, until their Soviet-imposed governments had been replaced. Stalin attacked this as unequal treatment. Churchill gave a long and effusive speech about Italy being a democracy, whereas the others were not. "Fiction," exclaimed Stalin. The exchanges became heated and no progress was made.

PHASE TWO—SOLUTIONS, OF A SORT

On 25 July the conference adjourned so Churchill could return to London for the result of the British general election. Still confident of victory; he expected to come back in a few days; his doctor even left half his luggage at Potsdam. Instead, Churchill's Conservatives suffered a humiliating defeat, and the Labour Party formed a new government. When the conference resumed on July 28, Clement Attlee (1883–1967) took Churchill's seat as Britain's prime minister. The former labor leader Ernest Bevin (1881–1951) was foreign secretary.

Churchill had been assertive; Attlee was much less so, and it was Bevin who championed British interests in a Churchillian manner. But the dramatic change of personnel weakened the British position, and in any case their power was now far less than that of the emerging "superpowers," the United States and the Soviet Union. One British diplomat wrote privately that it was not so much a meeting of "the Big Three" as of "the Big 2 ½." Truman was anxious to break the deadlock, and his secretary of state, James F. Byrnes (1882–1972), was a veteran political fixer. He offered Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), his Soviet counterpart, a deal whereby the Americans would give ground on the Polish border and the Russians would reduce their demands for reparations.

During 30–31 July this was fleshed out into a three-part package. The Americans conceded a Polish-German border along the Oder and Western Neisse Rivers—the extremity of Polish demands. To placate Bevin, this was billed as a temporary settlement, pending a final decision at a future peace conference. In return, the Soviets accepted that no cash totals for reparations would be established, but they were free to take what they wished from their own zone. After haggling over exact figures, it was also agreed that 10 percent of all industrial equipment in the three western zones that was "unnecessary for the German peacetime economy" would be given to the Soviets. A further 15 percent would be transferred in exchange for food, coal, and raw materials from the Soviet zone. The third element of the deal was agreement that the new council of foreign ministers, set up by the conference, would give priority to drafting a peace treaty with Italy, so that this country could be admitted to the United Nations. Treaties for Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Finland would then be drawn up.

Relieved at this breakthrough on 31 July, the leaders dealt rapidly with a series of issues so that the conference could close on 1 August. One of the most significant was a quick and uncontroversial decision that German nationals living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary should be transferred to Germany. Their expulsion was a fundamental demand of the new governments in these countries—tit for tat after years of Nazi repression—but it resulted in one of the biggest population movements of modern European history, involving twelve or thirteen million people. Although the Potsdam protocol stated that the transfer should take place "in an orderly and humane manner," the reality was very different, and estimates of German deaths run to one or two million.

Potsdam was intended only as a provisional settlement of German questions, pending a full-scale peace conference. But, as the Cold War deepened, the provisional became permanent. Although the Allies had reaffirmed that Germany should be treated as "a single economic unit," as the British predicted, the agreements on zonal reparations accelerated the division of Germany.

THE ATOMIC BOMB

On 16 July the Americans conducted an atomic test at Alamogordo, in the desert of New Mexico. By 21 July, it was clear that this had been a resounding success, and the news buoyed up Truman and the American delegation. It also had an effect on their strategy. The Soviets had promised to enter the war against Japan in the middle of August, and U.S. army commanders, fearful of heavy losses when they invaded the Japanese home islands, still regarded this commitment as militarily vital. But Byrnes, in particular, thought that the bomb could enable the Americans to end the Pacific war without Soviet help; he even hoped it might make Stalin more tractable in Europe. On 24 July Truman told Stalin, with studied casualness, that the Americans had a new weapon of unusual destructive power. Stalin, equally casually, said he hoped they would make good use of it against Japan. Possibly Stalin was dissimulating; more likely, although aware of the U.S. project from Soviet agents, he did not appreciate its full significance until after the bomb was dropped on Japan.

Truman gave fuller details to Churchill: the British were collaborators in the bomb project, albeit now very much as junior partners. The two leaders agreed to issue an oblique final warning to Japan and the so-called Potsdam Proclamation of 26 July threatened the Japanese with "prompt and utter destruction" if their government did not immediately order "the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces." When the Japanese prime minister announced four days later that there was "nothing important or interesting in the Allied declaration," Truman confirmed his order to use the atomic bomb, which was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August.

See alsoJapan and the Two World Wars; Nuclear Weapons; Warfare; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Butler, Rohan, and M. E. Pelly, eds. Documents on British Policy Overseas. Series 1, vol. 1: The Conference at Potsdam, July–August 1945. London, 1984.

United States Department of State Historical Office. Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conference of Berlin: The Potsdam Conference, 1945. 2 vols. Washington D.C., 1960.

Secondary Sources

Chronos-Film. Schloss Cecilienhof und die Potsdamer Konferenz, 1945. Berlin, 1995. Illustrated companion volume to the Chronos video about the conference.

Feis, Herbert. Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference. Princeton, N.J., 1960.

Mee, Charles L. Meeting at Potsdam. London, 1975.

David Reynolds