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

112 Ch. 27 • Rebuilding Divided Europe

strategically crucial parts of Turkey. The Western Allies refused, because
such a move would have given the Soviet Union virtual control of the
straits of Constantinople—which Russian tsars had sought since the eigh­
teenth century. The Soviet Union had already occupied in 1940 the Baltic
states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, a large chunk of East Prussia, and
parts of Finland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania (Bessarabia and some of
Bukovina). Poland, which lost much of its eastern territory to the Soviet
Union, gained in the west at Germany’s expense (see Map 27.1).
Other territorial adjustments came at the expense of Germany’s wartime
allies, such as Italy, from which Yugoslavia acquired a small border region.
As the Allies dictated the new alignments, little attention was paid to the
fact that the new borders, as after World War I, left various nationalities dis­
satisfied. Hungarians living in Transylvania did not want to be left within the
redrawn borders of Romania; the many fewer Romanians who found them­
selves inside Hungary resented what they considered to be punishment for
having been forced by the Nazis and their wartime dictators to fight on the
side of Germany. Austria, which Hitler had annexed to his Reich in 1938,
had its independence restored. Military occupation of Austria by the victori­
ous World War II powers ended in 1955 with the withdrawal of Soviet troops
in exchange for Austria’s declaration of neutrality. In northern Europe,
Finland retained its independence and the Soviet Union accepted Finnish
neutrality.
As after the end of World War I, the Western Allies disagreed on the
question of war reparations. The Soviet Union, which had suffered far more
than Great Britain and the United States, demanded that Germany be forced
to pay for the costs of the war. Specifically, Stalin wanted the equivalent
of $20 billion in reparations, as well as German industrial equipment. The
Soviet Union eventually received half the amount of money demanded
(although in greatly inflated currency), as well as about 25 percent of indus­
trial equipment from the German zones occupied by Britain, France, and
the United States. In the meantime, Soviet trains and trucks began to haul
German machinery and other industrial materials from the eastern zone
back to Russia. By now fully suspicious of Soviet intentions in Eastern Eu­
rope, Truman eliminated the Soviet Union from the list of nations eligible
for U.S. loans to help with rebuilding their economies.
The Western Allies concurred that the victors should negotiate peace
treaties with Germany’s former allies (Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bul­
garia), which were to be represented by “recognized democratic govern­
ments.” But it was soon clear that the governments of the last three nations
were anything but democratically elected.

The United Nations and Cold War Alliances

In November 1944, the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, D.C.,

planned the United Nations, which would replace the League of Nations.