Allied Victory 1099during the war). Churchill and Roosevelt also went along with Stalin’s
insistence that the Soviet Union keep the parts of eastern Poland that had
been absorbed by the Soviet invasion in 1939. Poland’s western frontier
with Germany was to be left to a future conference, one that was never
held. The Big Three all agreed that free elections would be held in Eastern
Europe. Yet Stalin defied the Atlantic Charter of 1941, when the Allies had
agreed that free elections would lead to democratic governments in the
nations freed from German occupation, by setting up an unelected puppet
government in Romania, as well as Poland.
At Yalta, the Allies remembered that the League of Nations had been
doomed in its attempts to keep the peace by the nonparticipation of the
then-isolationist United States and by the exclusion of the Soviet Union
from the League. Roosevelt wanted to avoid committing the United States
to an active role in post-war Europe. He counted instead on the United
Nations to resolve future problems by facilitating collective security. In the
meantime, with the Red Army occupying Eastern Europe, Stalin held all
the cards. Eastern European peoples subsequently had reason to view Yalta
as a betrayal and a victory for Stalin.
The awful world conflict moved toward an end. The Red Army launched a
final attack on Berlin in April 1945. Italian partisans captured Mussolini
near the Swiss frontier. They executed him and his mistress, hanging their
bodies upside down at a gas station. Himmler, von Ribbentrop, and Goring
Soldiers from the Red Army hoist the Soviet flag over the German Reichstag in