Potsdam Conference
The last wartime conference met at Potsdam in July and August 1945, and the alliance came apart in the middle of it. Truman had been president for three months, Stalin was unchanged, and Churchill left partway through because the British election results arrived and Attlee replaced him at the table. The agenda was Germany. The agreement provided for demilitarisation, denazification, democratisation and decartelisation, the trial of war criminals, and administration in four zones by an Allied Control Council — with the German economy to be treated as a single unit, which lasted about two years. Reparations were the sticking point. The Soviets wanted twenty billion dollars and got instead the right to take from their own zone, plus a share from the west, which effectively divided the country's economy along the occupation line. The eastern border was fixed provisionally on the Oder and western Neisse, and the conference approved the orderly and humane transfer of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary — some twelve million people, in expulsions that killed several hundred thousand. The Potsdam Declaration to Japan demanded unconditional surrender. The bomb is the undercurrent. Truman was told during the conference that the Alamogordo test had worked and mentioned to Stalin that America had a new weapon of unusual destructive force; Stalin, who had known about the programme through his agents for years, said he hoped good use would be made of it. The alliance did not meet again. The four zones were meant to be temporary and became two states. The Control Council stopped functioning in 1948 when the Soviet representative walked out over currency reform, and the blockade of Berlin began three months later.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
