A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

In the Wake of Devastation 1111

the north; American and French armies held southern Germany; and the
four powers divided Berlin.
At the Potsdam Conference of July 1945, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman
considered the fate of defeated Germany. The defeat of Churchill’s Con­
servative Party in the election that took place at the same time as the con­
ference brought Clement Attlee (1883-1967) to Potsdam as British prime
minister, leading one diplomat to conclude that the meeting of the “Big
Three” had become a meeting of “the Big 2 and a half.” The Allies had
already decided to divide defeated Germany into a British, French, Rus­
sian, and American zone of occupation. They created a new border between
Germany and Poland, which would be the Oder and Niesse Rivers. The port
of Gdansk was restored to Poland. The Allied leaders agreed that Germany
should be reunified, despite the original opposition of de Gaulle, and that
German populations living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary should
be forcibly resettled in Germany, as the new governments of those states
demanded. The Four Power Allied Control Council (France had joined the
Potsdam powers) planned a new, disarmed, and de-Nazified Germany.
The growing mistrust between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union
affected the Potsdam Conference. Stalin’s territorial demands included

Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin at the

Potsdam Conference in 1945.