Potsdam Conference

The last of the wartime summits of the "Big Three" took place at the Cecilienhof palace in Potsdam, outside Berlin, from 17 July to 2 August 1945. Meeting a few weeks after Germany's unconditional surrender, the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain decided how the defeated country would be governed, where its eastern frontier would lie and how reparations would be paid. The conference also issued an ultimatum to Japan, and its compromises soon gave way to the divisions of the Cold War.

Much had changed since the Yalta Conference in February. Roosevelt had died on 12 April and Harry S. Truman, far more suspicious of Soviet intentions, now led the United States; Potsdam was the only time he met Joseph Stalin in person. Soviet armies occupied most of central and eastern Europe, and a Soviet-backed government ruled Poland. Britain had voted in a general election on 5 July, but the count was delayed so that the votes of servicemen abroad could be included. Winston Churchill attended the first sessions; when the result was announced on 26 July, his Conservatives had lost, and Clement Attlee returned to Potsdam as prime minister, with Ernest Bevin replacing Anthony Eden as foreign secretary. France's leader, Charles de Gaulle, was again left out.

The Allies confirmed that Germany, and its capital Berlin, would be divided into four zones of occupation, including a French zone, under an Allied Control Council. Austria and Vienna would be divided in the same way. The occupiers set out their aims as demilitarisation, denazification, democratisation and decentralisation, together with the dismantling of war industry and the breaking up of cartels. The SS, the Gestapo and the armed forces were to be abolished, Nazi laws repealed and war criminals brought to trial, and all German annexations in Europe, from Austria to the Sudetenland, reversed.

Reparations were to come mainly from each power's own zone. The Soviet Union, which had suffered most, would also receive a share of industrial equipment from the western zones, partly in exchange for food and raw materials from the east, and would satisfy Poland's claims from its own portion.

Germany's eastern frontier was moved west to the Oder and Neisse rivers. Most of Silesia and Pomerania, southern East Prussia and Danzig were placed under Polish administration, and the city of Königsberg and its surroundings went to the Soviet Union, reducing Germany by about a quarter compared with its 1937 borders. The final border was formally left to a peace settlement, which came only in 1990. The leaders also endorsed the transfer of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, asking that it be carried out in an "orderly and humane" manner. Modern estimates of Germans who died during the flight and expulsions range from about 600,000 to 2.2 million.

The Western powers recognised the Soviet-backed Provisional Government of National Unity in Warsaw, ending their recognition of the Polish government-in-exile in London, on its promise to hold free elections. A Council of Foreign Ministers was created to draft peace treaties with Germany's former allies.

On 16 July, the day before the conference opened, the United States had successfully tested the first atomic bomb. Truman told Stalin of a new weapon of unusual destructive power; Stalin, who already knew of the project through Soviet spies, replied that he hoped it would be used well against the Japanese. On 26 July Truman, Churchill and the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding Japan's unconditional surrender or "prompt and utter destruction". No surrender followed, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed on 6 and 9 August.

Potsdam ended in apparent goodwill, but within about eighteen months relations between the Soviet Union and the West had broken down. The zones of occupation hardened into two German states, and the border settlement reshaped central Europe for the rest of the century.

Our 1945 map shows Europe as the conference left it, with Germany shrunk in the east, and our 1960 map shows the two German states that grew out of the occupation zones.