Potsdam Conference (1945)

From July 16 to August 2, 1945, the final meeting of the Big Three Allied powers (the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union), which presaged the opening of the Cold War. Called to determine the details of the occupation of Germany and Austria, the terms to be imposed upon Japan, and other aspects of the postwar world, the Potsdam Conference demonstrated the tensions always present in the Allied camp.

As agreed to by Big Three leaders Truman, Churchill, and Stalin at the conference, Germany, Austria, and their capital cities were divided into separate occupation zones, and reparations in kind were to be taken from each zone. Germany was to be occupied and reformed under the concept of the five Ds: demilitarization, de-Nazification, democratization, decentralization, and deindustrialization. No attempt to redraw the map of Europe was attempted at the meeting, except to clarify the German–Polish border as the Oder and Neisse rivers and to apportion part of former East Prussia to the Poles. The purpose of the Soviet occupation of the remaining countries in Eastern Europe was characterized as assisting in the democratic reorganization of those states. The conference called upon Japan on July 26 to surrender unconditionally, and in a secret codicil, the Russians promised to enter the war against Japan three months after the defeat of Germany.

[Page 586]By the end of the Potsdam meeting, the United States had tested successfully the first atomic bomb, and the Russian participation in the war against Japan became less significant. However, President Harry S. Truman indicated to Soviet marshal Joseph Stalin that his country had a new weapon of remarkable power and would use it shortly to end the war. This was the beginning of a nascent policy of atomic diplomacy, in which the United States hoped to intimidate the Soviet Union into a more favorable postwar posture.

Although the usual protocols of solidarity emerged from the Potsdam Conference, the wartime alliance was essentially over. Although the Cold War was not yet inevitable, the Soviet Union was not going to open its political, social, and economic system to the West and still feared capitalist encirclement as before the war. The presence of the Red Army in eastern and central Europe served Russian security interests well, and to Russia the language of democratization in the postwar administration signified the establishment of governments friendly to the USSR. Russia entered the war against Japan as promised in August 1945 and stripped reparations from Germany with considerable enthusiasm. Atomic diplomacy failed to shock the Russians at Potsdam, because their espionage system had already informed Stalin of U.S. progress with the A-bomb, and the Russian program to develop the bomb was well underway.

Postwar cooperation continued to remain unlikely between the East and West, largely because of divergent national interests, rather than because of specific problems encountered at Potsdam. If the conference failed to unite a world left devastated and divided, such may have been beyond the normal range of diplomacy. Potsdam, like the previous 1945 Yalta Conference, soon became a rallying point for national political debates in each country, where opposition groups asserted that their political leaders had been duped by the other signatories of the agreements. As a result, peace treaties ending World War II required decades to resolve, and to this day they remain unsigned between Russia and Japan.

...