Not Yalta but Potsdam

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In the late afternoon of July 16, 1945, Harry Truman received an encrypted cable from Washington. He had awaited it with anxiety and trepidation. Having entered the White House a few months after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American president had arrived the day before in Potsdam, a few kilometers from Berlin, at the invitation of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The German capital was under the full control of the Red Army, which had conquered it at the end of an epic battle that ended on May 9, when the red flag flew over the Reichstag. Hitler had committed suicide. Nazism was defeated. But the Second World War continued in Asia, where Japan was putting up a last, desperate stand. Stalin was in a hurry. He felt strong. He was the true victor, having borne the brunt of the war effort, throwing millions of human lives into the furnace of conflict. After Yalta and Tehran, he had wanted a new and definitive conference of the victors to decide the fate of Germany and redraw the borders of Europe.

In the Iranian capital, at the end of 1943, while the war was still raging, Stalin and Roosevelt had prevailed over Churchill, agreeing on support for Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia, the timing and modalities of Operation Overlord, the Normandy landings (which took place in June 1944), and above all the need to dismember Germany's territory once the conflict was over to prevent its resurgence as a military power. Furthermore, agreements had been reached for the Allied invasion of France from the south and the future borders of Poland. In Crimea, from February 4 to 11, 1945, with victory now within reach, the Big Three had laid the foundations for the future: the division of Germany into four occupation zones, the creation of a Soviet zone of influence in the nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and the founding of the United Nations. Furthermore, Stalin had pledged to declare war on Japan as well, once Germany was defeated.

The Potsdam game, the little Versailles of the Prussian kings, was completely different . And not only because of Roosevelt's absence, who, especially at Yalta, was already very ill and had appeared rather compliant toward Stalin, almost captivated by his magnetism. Although he had little experience in foreign policy, former Kansas businessman Harry Truman was in fact made of a different cloth, much rougher, tougher, less inclined to delude himself about the true nature of communism, and surprised everyone with his professionalism. But as we will see, the Brandenburg conference was also different because of Churchill's condition, now devoid of the adrenaline that had sustained him in leading the United Kingdom's heroic resistance during the conflict. Above all, he was distracted, as we will rightly see, by the wait for the results of the elections held in Great Britain on July 5, which would be announced during the negotiations. More generally, a fundamental fact had changed: even though the United States and Great Britain were still fighting against Japan, there was no longer a common enemy in the European theater. The Zeitgeist of the great alliance against absolute evil, which had marked the meetings of Tehran and Yalta, had thus changed.

The choice of location was inevitable. Berlin was a pile of still-smoking rubble, a desert reeking of death, dominated by the "Trümmerfrauen," the women of the ruins, thousands of female figures who were instrumental in clearing the debris. Thus, the new Soviet masters chose to host the Conference in Potsdam in a palace that had survived the bombings almost unscathed. Built for Crown Prince Wilhelm of Hohenzollern, modeled after an English country residence, Cecilienhof, with its 126 rooms and its grand hall of honor, was the ideal place to accommodate several hundred participants.

Stalin was running late. He was traveling on the special train that had belonged to Tsar Nicholas II, through the territories wrested from the Wehrmacht. So Churchill and Truman had decided to use that day to visit Berlin and appreciate the dramatic situation. The British prime minister even wanted to go down to Hitler's bunker. "The entire street was lined with a double line of elderly men, women, and children, dragging packages on their shoulders or pushing carts loaded with all their belongings," wrote in her diary Joy Milward, the nineteen-year-old personal secretary Churchill had brought with him to Germany and who would faithfully record impressions and memories, also attaching maps, plans, photos, and invitation cards to the receptions that each delegation felt compelled to organize during the more than two weeks of talks.

But that day, Truman's mind was elsewhere. Thousands of miles away, in the New Mexico desert, the top-secret Manhattan Project had indeed reached its completion. In the early hours of dawn, the team of scientists and military personnel led by David Oppenheimer had conducted the first test of the American atomic bomb: "Operation carried out this morning. Diagnosis not yet complete. Initial results satisfactory, far beyond expectations," read the coded message . At that moment, Truman knew he had in his hands the most destructive weapon ever built by man. But during the conference, he would only mention it fleetingly, during a break and in rather general terms with both Churchill and Stalin. Stalin, among other things, hadn't batted an eyelid, probably because he already knew everything thanks to the spies infiltrated into Oppenheimer's team: "I hope you make good use of it against the Japanese," he had limited himself to saying.

The episode offers a measure of how, during the third meeting of the victorious powers, the seeds of what was to come were already being incubated: the rivalry between the two camps that would define the second half of the 20th century. Yet, as historian Michael Neiberg explains, the Potsdam days were dominated by a certain willingness to compromise: "No one was yet talking about the Cold War. Potsdam was still the closing ceremony of the victory over Germany, which was no longer Europe's great problem." From July 17 to August 2, eighty years ago, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill met almost daily around the great round table, which can still be visited today in the Potsdam villa. After preparatory discussions among diplomats and preliminary sessions of the foreign ministers—Vyacheslav Molotov accompanied by a very young Andrei Gromyko for the USSR, James Byrnes for the US, and Anthony Eden for Great Britain—the three leaders held thirteen sessions of nearly two hours each, beginning at 5 p.m. and ending shortly before 7 p.m. The evenings, after the leaders had retired to their respective quarters, were devoted to socializing: banquets, choirs, parties. "We dance almost every night," Joy Milward noted in her diary.

Despite many disagreements and a changed climate, Potsdam was the decisive conference for the postwar scenario. Stalin obtained for the USSR all of Poland's eastern territories, in exchange for a western shift of its borders, up to the Oder-Neisse line. Millions of ethnic Germans living in the occupied Polish provinces were expelled, but their transfer was far from "humane and orderly" as the protocol stated: 14 million human beings, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were forced to leave their homes, hundreds of thousands died from starvation and exhaustion or simply fell victim to the anti-German fury that gripped the nations liberated from the Nazi yoke. In exchange, Truman secured the final division of Berlin, still almost entirely occupied by the Red Army, into four sectors, each under the control of one of the victorious powers, including France. Germany would be disarmed and denazified, the military-industrial complex dismantled, and Nazi war criminals put on trial. German society was to be reshaped in a democratic, decentralized way, protected from any temptation to authoritarianism. But the country's reconstitution as a sovereign state was postponed indefinitely, and in the meantime, an Allied Control Commission would act as the supreme political authority. This was the prelude to the final division of Germany.

One of the key issues was war reparations: Stalin's demands were enormous, given the immense destruction the Nazi invasion had caused in his country. In both Tehran and Yalta, he had received assurances of this from Roosevelt. But in Potsdam, Truman and Byrnes urged the Kremlin leader to tone down his demands, raising the specter of Versailles, the 1919 peace conference that, following the end of the Great War, had imposed such harsh and impossible conditions on Germany that it had generated the sense of humiliation and revanchism that had been the breeding ground for Nazism. The argument was only partially accepted by the Soviet dictator, who nevertheless renounced the demand for reparations from the areas of the country controlled by the Western Allies. The dramatic turn of events occurred on July 26. The conference had been interrupted to allow Churchill to return to London so he could be present for the announcement of the election results. He had been thinking about it the entire time. He was depressed and listless. “I don't want to do anything. I have no energy left. I wonder if I'll ever get back to normal,” he had told his doctor in those days. He would never return to Potsdam. The victor of the war, the man who had saved England in its darkest hour, had been defeated in a landslide by the Labour Party's Clement Attlee, who until then had been present at Cecilienhof as head of the shadow government, and whom Churchill had no respect for. But with the war won, the British now wanted a peace leader. And so it was Attlee who returned to Brandenburg, accompanied by the new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, and sat at the talks table as Her Majesty's Prime Minister for the final five days.

At the end of the conference, Truman suggested that the Big Three meet again in Washington. Attlee, enthusiastic about the proposal, said that the summit would be "a milestone on the road to peace among our countries and in the world." That summit never took place. Four days after the Potsdam conference, the Enola Gay dropped the American atomic bomb on Hiroshima, wiping it out and killing tens of thousands of people. Seventy-two hours later, it was Nagasaki's turn. But it was not until August 15th that Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender.

At Potsdam, the question of what "a democratic Poland" meant was not resolved. Stalin made a vague promise to hold free elections in the areas under Soviet control. We know how it went. The Iron Curtain was beginning to descend on Europe, splitting it in two. It was the dawn of the Cold War. "In a certain sense," says historian Neiberg, "the foundations were laid at Potsdam that would prevent the US-Soviet conflict from escalating into a full-blown war. But the price was paid by Central and Eastern Europeans, who would live for decades under the Soviet yoke." As Stalin left the conference, someone asked him if he was satisfied with having come to Berlin. Stalin replied: "Tsar Alexander had arrived in Paris."

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