Potsdam Conference

On July 17, 1945, the Potsdam Conference began. An excerpt from the article:

"Determining Germany's Fate After WWII

Germany’s fate after the war was an important topic of the conference. According to the U.S. State Department’s history of the event, Stalin had pressured FDR at the previous Yalta Conference in February 1945 to force the defeated Germans to pay heavy postwar reparations, half of which would go to the Soviet Union. Roosevelt had agreed to that demand. But Truman, who was keenly aware that similar economic punishment inflicted upon the Germans after World War I had led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, was determined not to make the same mistake. Ultimately, the Allies worked out a deal in which the Soviets got to take German industrial machinery from their occupation zone.

The Big Three worked out many of the details of the postwar order in the Potsdam Agreement, signed on August 1. They confirmed plans to disarm and demilitarize Germany, which would be divided into four Allied occupation zones controlled by the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. They also went ahead with plans to drastically remake German society, by repealing laws passed by the Nazi regime and removing Nazis from the German education and court systems, and to arrest and try Germans who had committed war crimes. They also approved the formation of a Council of Foreign Ministers, which would act on behalf of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and China to write peace treaties with former German allies, such as Italy and Bulgaria.

The Potsdam Agreement also called for Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, which wanted to expel the ethnic German populations within their borders, to do so “in an orderly and humane manner.” The idea was to head off a massive influx of refugees into a Germany where existing residents already were having difficulty getting by. But the redrawing of Poland’s border with Germany was left unresolved."