f reedom of a ction 183Rather than the outcome of a clear political decision, Germany’s
postwar future refl ected military expedients and the erosion of cooper-
ation between the Soviet Union and the West. At Yalta in March 1945,
Roosevelt again put off a decision on splitting Germany, though Stalin
still seemed to prefer dismemberment. (He also wanted to impose
severe reparations on the Germans to block any quick recovery, but
neither Roosevelt nor Churchill was prepared to reenact what many
viewed as the error of Versailles.) Th e immediate solution took the form
of zones of occupation for each of the Allies, including France. Stalin
chose to bide his time because Roosevelt hinted that he expected Amer-
ican occupation forces to remain for only two years. To the Soviet lead-
er’s surprise, however, as tensions between the Soviet Union and the
West quickly worsened after the war and the exhaustion of British
resources became more evident, the Americans stayed and thus assured
a great power balance in Europe. Th e boundary between the Soviet
occupation zone in Germany and the others hardened into a perma-
nent one that would endure for almost fi fty years.
On Eastern Europe, though, Stalin would have his way. As the Red
Army rolled back the Germans in 1944, it claimed control over coun-
tries that Hitler’s troops had conquered early in the war (Poland) and
those that had chosen to ally themselves with the führer (Bulgaria,
Hungary, and Rumania). Only Yugoslavia, which was largely lib-
erated by Tito’s communist-led partisans, managed to escape the
smothering embrace of Soviet liberation. Stalin made clear, too, that
he intended to impose a Soviet-style system wherever his troops
marched. In a cold demonstration of his intentions, he had ordered
his forces to give no assistance to Polish underground forces that
staged an uprising in Warsaw in August 1944, going so far as to refuse
the British and Americans permission to drop supplies to the belea-
guered resistance as it was systematically crushed by the Germans.
Th e uprising had been orchestrated by leaders tied to the London
Polish government-in-exile, while Stalin had formed his own acting
government in a liberated town, Lublin. Stalin also insisted on
redrawing Poland’s borders, eff ectively moving the entire nation to
the west to give the Soviet Union more territory and requiring the
forced relocation of ethnic Poles unfortunate enough to live within
the transferred land.