The Potsdam Conference begins

At five in the afternoon on 17 July 1945, in Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, on the edge of ruined Berlin, the first plenary session of the conference of the heads of government of the three great powers began. Around a round table sat the President of the United States, Harry Truman, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. It was the third and last wartime meeting of the Big Three – after Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in February 1945 – and the first since Germany’s surrender. The conference, code-named “Terminal” in the correspondence, lasted until 2 August. It dealt above all with Germany and the post-war order in Europe, while in the background the war against Japan still went on.

War chronologies often sum up the day by saying that the conference was opened by “British Prime Minister Churchill, Soviet Premier Stalin and US President Truman”, and that “the Allied leaders agreed to demand Japan’s unconditional surrender”. Both statements need qualifying. Stalin did not hold the title of premier: he was Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, that is, head of the government, as well as General Secretary of the party and – from the end of June 1945 – Generalissimo; the Western press simply called him the premier. The second reservation matters more. The Soviet Union was not then at war with Japan and did not sign the call for its unconditional surrender. The Potsdam Declaration, issued on 26 July, was published by the United States, Britain and China, and the Soviet delegation was not consulted about it before publication.

The road to Potsdam

In the five months between Yalta and Potsdam almost everything had changed. On 12 April Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, and his successor Truman, who had been Vice-President for barely three months, had taken no part in earlier talks with the Allies and was facing the first summit of his life. Germany had surrendered in May, and with the Berlin Declaration of 5 June the four powers had assumed supreme authority in the Reich. At the same time disputes were mounting: over the composition of the Polish government, over communist rule in Romania and Bulgaria, over Trieste, and over the American halt to Lend-Lease deliveries after Germany’s surrender. At the end of May Truman sent Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s trusted adviser, to Moscow; Hopkins brokered a compromise on Poland and secured agreement on a further meeting. At Stalin’s request it was to be held near Berlin, in the Soviet occupation zone.

Churchill pressed for a summit as soon as possible, still in June, before American troops withdrew from Thuringia and Saxony into their own zone and the Western armies were demobilised. Truman preferred July. Some historians believe he wanted to wait for the result of the first atomic bomb test; others point to ordinary budgetary and political considerations in Washington. In the end the opening was fixed for 16 July. Truman sailed from Newport News aboard the cruiser USS Augusta, landed at Antwerp on 15 July, flew from Brussels to Gatow airfield and took up residence in a villa in Babelsberg, just outside Potsdam, which the Americans called the “Little White House”. Churchill flew in the same day. Stalin, travelling by train from Moscow, arrived late – only on 16 July – so the talks began a day later than planned. Truman and Churchill used the free day to tour the ruins of Berlin; Truman drove past the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery, while Churchill went into the wrecked Chancellery and viewed the area around Hitler’s bunker.

Cecilienhof and the delegations

The venue was chosen and prepared by the Russians. Cecilienhof, built in 1914–1917 in the style of an English manor house in the Neuer Garten park, was the last residence erected by the Hohenzollerns – for Crown Prince Wilhelm and his wife Cecilie. The building had come through the war undamaged. Soviet soldiers refurbished it within a few weeks, fitting out conference rooms and offices for the three delegations, and laid out a large star of red flowers in the courtyard. The area around Potsdam and Babelsberg, where the delegations were quartered, was cordoned off by NKVD troops.

The delegations were large. Truman was accompanied by the new Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, sworn in only on 3 July, who quickly became the chief American negotiator; the President’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy; the ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman; and the chiefs of staff. Secretary of War Henry Stimson also came, outside the official delegation. Churchill was accompanied by the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and by the Labour leader, Clement Attlee. Attlee’s presence had a particular reason: Britain had held a general election on 5 July, but the count was being delayed until the ballots of servicemen abroad came in, so no one knew who would be governing once the results were announced. Churchill invited Attlee so that the British delegation would retain continuity in the event of a change of government. Stalin was accompanied by the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, his deputy Andrey Vyshinsky and the ambassador in Washington, Andrei Gromyko.

The first day

At noon on 17 July Stalin called on Truman in Babelsberg. It was the first meeting between the two leaders. According to the American record, Stalin confirmed that the Soviet Union – in keeping with its commitment at Yalta – would enter the war against Japan, and gave a date: mid-August. That evening Truman wrote in his diary that Stalin would “be in the Jap War on August 15th” and that it would then be “Fini Japs”; of Stalin himself he noted, “I can deal with Stalin.” The President kept his guest for lunch.

At 5 p.m. the first plenary session opened. On Stalin’s proposal, seconded by Churchill, Truman took the chair. The President at once laid the American proposals on the table: the creation of a Council of Foreign Ministers of five powers – the United States, Britain, the USSR, France and China – to prepare peace treaties with Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland, and in future with Germany; political and economic principles for the control of Germany; the implementation of the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe, that is, the question of the governments in Romania and Bulgaria; and finally easier terms for Italy, which had fought on the Allied side and three days earlier, on 14 July, had declared war on Japan. Stalin added his own list: the division of the German navy and merchant fleet, reparations, the liquidation of the Polish government-in-exile, trusteeships over the former Italian colonies, the regime of General Francisco Franco in Spain, Tangier, Syria and Lebanon. Churchill demanded a discussion of Poland. It was agreed that the foreign ministers would meet every day before the plenary session to prepare the agenda. Nothing was decided on the first day.

The bomb in the background

The day before the conference opened, at dawn on 16 July, the Trinity test – the first nuclear explosion in history – was carried out in the New Mexico desert. That evening Stimson received in Babelsberg a coded cable from Washington reporting that the patient had been “operated on this morning” and that the results “seem satisfactory”, and passed it on to Truman and Byrnes. On 17 July Stimson informed Churchill. General Leslie Groves’s detailed report on the power of the explosion reached Potsdam on 21 July. According to Stimson and Churchill, reading it visibly boosted the President’s self-confidence in his dealings with the Russians. The bomb also changed the calculus of the war in the Far East: American leaders began to wonder whether Soviet participation in the war against Japan, for which Roosevelt had worked so hard at Yalta, was still necessary. Towards the end of the conference’s first week Truman decided to inform Stalin of the new weapon – in terms as vague as possible.

Germany: occupation principles and reparations

Germany was the main subject of the talks. The division into four occupation zones and the Allied Control Council had been settled earlier; at Potsdam the question was how the country was to be governed. The agreed political principles are usually summed up as the four Ds: denazification, demilitarisation, democratisation and decentralisation (a fifth is often added – decartelisation, the breaking up of the great industrial combines). The Nazi Party and its organisations were to be dissolved, its active members removed from office, war criminals brought to trial and the armaments industry dismantled. During the occupation Germany was to be treated as a single economic unit; no central German government was envisaged, however, only a few central administrative departments under the supervision of the Control Council.

Reparations proved the hardest issue. The Russians demanded, in line with what had been discussed at Yalta, 10 billion dollars for themselves out of a total of 20 billion. The Americans, remembering that after the First World War it had been their loans that financed German payments, refused to fix any sum. The compromise, negotiated by Byrnes at the end of the conference, provided that each power would take reparations from its own zone, while the USSR would receive in addition from the Western zones 15 per cent of surplus industrial equipment in exchange for food, coal and other raw materials from the Soviet zone, and a further 10 per cent without any payment. The Soviet Union undertook to meet Poland’s claims out of its own share. It was also decided to divide the German navy and merchant fleet among the three powers. The zonal solution, adopted to avoid disputes, meant in practice that in economic matters each zone began to lead a life of its own.

The USSR won support for the transfer to it – pending a peace conference – of the northern part of East Prussia with Königsberg. Truman and Churchill undertook to back this change at the future peace conference.

Poland: government, frontier and population transfers

The Polish question came up at the sessions almost daily. Part of it had formally been settled just before the conference: on 28 June the Provisional Government of National Unity had been formed in Warsaw with the participation of Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and on 5 July the United States and Britain recognised it and withdrew recognition from the Polish government in London. At Potsdam the dispute was over the consequences of that decision – the property and archives of the government-in-exile, the fate of the Polish Armed Forces in the West and the return of soldiers and refugees home, and finally the “free and unfettered elections” promised at Yalta. In the end the powers noted that the Provisional Government had agreed to hold such elections with the participation of all democratic parties and to allow foreign correspondents to work freely.

The dispute over the western frontier was far sharper. At Yalta it had merely been agreed that Poland would receive “substantial accessions of territory in the North and West”, with the final decision deferred. Meanwhile, since the spring of 1945, a Polish administration had already been operating, with Soviet consent, in the lands east of the Oder and the Lusatian Neisse. Truman protested that Poland had thereby in effect been given its own occupation zone without the agreement of the other powers. Churchill argued that a frontier pushed so far west would cut Germany off from food and from Silesian coal and would mean moving millions of people; Stalin replied that most of the Germans had already fled those lands. The Polish position was presented by a delegation of the Provisional Government that included, among others, Bolesław Bierut, Edward Osóbka-Morawski, Władysław Gomułka, Mikołajczyk and Stanisław Grabski. On 24 July the foreign ministers of the three powers heard it out, and its members also spoke with the leaders of the Western delegations. They argued from compensation for war damage, the loss of the eastern lands to the USSR, and economic and historical considerations.

The matter was settled only by a package proposed by Byrnes at the end of the conference: the West accepted the Oder–Neisse line, and the Russians accepted the American formula on reparations. In the final protocol, published on 2 August, the lands east of a line running from the Baltic just west of Świnoujście along the Oder and the Lusatian Neisse to the Czechoslovak border, together with the southern part of East Prussia and the former Free City of Danzig, were placed “under the administration of the Polish State”, with the proviso that the final delimitation of the Oder–Neisse frontier “should await the peace settlement”. That peace conference never took place, and the different readings of the clause – for Poland and the USSR a definitive transfer of territory, for the West a provisional arrangement – weighed on Polish–German relations until 1990.

Linked to this decision was Chapter XIII of the published communiqué (Chapter XII in the full protocol). In it the powers recognised that the German population remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary would have to be transferred to Germany, and stipulated that the transfer should take place “in an orderly and humane manner”. Further expulsions were to be suspended until the Control Council had assessed the situation. In practice the expulsions had been under way since the spring and continued; altogether the transfers of the German population from the lands assigned to Poland affected, according to various estimates, several million people in 1945–1950, and the number who died during the flight, the expulsions and in camps remains disputed among historians. At the same time Poles were being settled in these lands, among them people displaced from the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic.

Japan

The Pacific war was not formally on the agenda of the three leaders, because the Soviet Union was neutral towards Japan – it had denounced the Neutrality Pact in April, but the pact remained in force until April 1946. Japanese matters were therefore discussed mainly in bilateral talks and at meetings of the chiefs of staff. On 18 July Stalin told Truman that Tokyo was asking Moscow to receive a mission led by Prince Fumimaro Konoe, which was to seek mediation to end the war; the Americans already knew of these approaches from intercepted Japanese diplomatic traffic. Stalin proposed giving the Japanese an evasive answer, and Truman agreed. The chiefs of staff coordinated plans for the final phase of the war; among other things they decided to hand the southern part of Indochina to the British South East Asia Command, which later determined the division of Indochina at the 16th parallel.

The demand for unconditional surrender, announced by Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca in 1943, was the position of the Western Allies and China. At Potsdam it was set out in an ultimatum to Japan – the Potsdam Declaration, issued on 26 July by Truman, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek, who gave his assent by radio. The USSR joined it only on 8 August, the day it declared war on Japan. To say that on 17 July “the Allied leaders agreed” on Japan’s unconditional surrender therefore conflates two events and attributes to Stalin a declaration he did not sign.

The election break and the end of the conference

Nine plenary sessions were held up to 25 July. That day Churchill and Attlee flew to London for the announcement of the election results. Churchill never returned to Potsdam: the election ended in a decisive Labour victory, and on 28 July Attlee took the British Prime Minister’s seat at the table, with the new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, in place of Eden. After four more sessions, during the night of 1–2 August, the leaders signed the protocol and the final communiqué, known as the Potsdam Agreement. Of the three leaders who had opened the conference, only two were there at its close.

Significance

The Potsdam Conference was the last meeting of the Big Three and also the victors’ last attempt to settle Europe together. It produced decisions with lasting consequences: the principles of the occupation of Germany, new frontiers for Poland and the USSR in eastern Germany, the transfer of millions of Germans, and the creation of the Council of Foreign Ministers, which in 1946–1947 prepared the peace treaties with the Reich’s allies. Many key issues were merely postponed – a peace treaty with Germany was not concluded until 1990, and the Control Council, which worked on the principle of unanimity, soon ceased to function. Truman and Stalin never met again. The talks also revealed a new balance of power: the United States, with the atomic bomb within reach, had less need of Soviet help in the Far East, while the USSR, already in control of Central and Eastern Europe, had no intention of giving up those gains. For Poland, Potsdam meant new territory in the west, the shifting of the entire state several hundred kilometres westwards and – despite the promise of free elections – the entrenchment of a government dependent on Moscow. Divergent interpretations of the Potsdam decisions, especially on reparations and the economic unity of Germany, led within two years to the division of Germany and of Europe and to the Cold War.