With Goebbels and Bormann at his side, he issued
streams of orders from his underground headquar-
ters in Berlin. But his orders were no longer
unquestioningly obeyed. Armaments Minister
Albert Speer attempted to prevent Germany’s
industry from being totally destroyed. He was
looking beyond Hitler and defeat to Germany’s
recovery. Himmler tried to save his neck by seek-
ing to negotiate an end to the war. Göring, who
was in southern Germany, fancied himself as
Hitler’s successor, but an angry Hitler ordered the
field marshal’s arrest. The Reich ended in intrigue,
ruins, bloodshed and shabby farce. Hitler con-
cluded his life marrying his mistress, and on 30
April they both committed suicide. Goebbels and
his wife then killed themselves with all their chil-
dren. On 2 May Berlin surrendered to Soviet
troops. Despite Germany’s rapid disintegration,
Admiral Karl Dönitz, nominated by Hitler as new
leader of the Reich, took over as head of state,
observing legal niceties. He even formed a new
‘government’. It lasted but a few days. On 7 May
Germany unconditionally surrendered on all
fronts. Britain and the US now confronted the
Soviet Union amid the ruins of continental
Europe. Thus began a new era of international
realities and conflict.
The sudden death of Roosevelt was a great blow
for Churchill. While the prime minister’s influ-
ence over the peace settlements had diminished,
his special relationship with Roosevelt, an old
friendship and appeals to past loyalties still
counted for something. But would the new inex-
perienced president listen to the advice of the
elder statesman, as Churchill now directed his
warnings about Russia to Truman? He sent a
cable to Truman expressing his foreboding that
an ‘iron curtain is being drawn down on their
front’, his first use of this phrase, which was to
become famous later when he uttered it in public
at Fulton in March 1946. He wanted Truman to
come to London to coordinate a showdown with
Stalin at a new conference. Truman rejected the
idea as signalling to Stalin that the Anglo-
Americans were ganging up against him.
Churchill further urged Truman to delay
implementing the agreements reached on the
respective occupation zones of Germany and not
to withdraw the Allied forces which held territory
deep in the zone assigned to the Soviet Union. It
would be a bargaining counter and at least force
the Russians to relinquish control over the whole
of Berlin. But Truman was his own man. He was
not enamoured of the Russians, to put it mildly,
yet he was determined to honour previous agree-
ments, so that he could hold Stalin, so he
thought, to what the Russians had undertaken. If
Churchill had prevailed, the Cold War would
have begun earlier, more of Germany would have
been kept out of the Soviet sphere, and the West
would not have become entangled in Berlin;
alternatively, Stalin would have had to give way
in central Europe. But a major difficulty of stand-
ing up to the Russians at this early date was public
opinion in the West, where an unbounded admi-
ration was felt for the Red Army, which had
played the major role on land in the defeat of the
Wehrmacht.
Far from coordinating policy with Churchill,
Truman sought a direct Soviet–American under-
standing on all the issues not settled at Yalta, to
which end he sent Harry Hopkins to Moscow in
May 1945. Churchill was upset by this move,
which left Britain out in the cold. He was anxious
to secure settlements with the Soviet Union con-
cerning frontiers and spheres of influence before
the British and American armies on the continent
had been demobilised, for he feared that if such
settlements were delayed the Russians would be
able to do what they wanted. Truman and his
advisers were more anxious to establish the
United Nations as an institution that would
ensure peace and solve all future world problems.
It was a case of realism versus idealism.
The conference to negotiate the United
Nations Charter convened in San Francisco on 25
April 1945. The Americans feared that the UN
would be stillborn unless Russian cooperation
could be won. The problem of how the veto
would operate on the Security Council had not
finally been settled at Yalta, and Molotov’s widen-
ing of its application was creating difficulties. It
was common ground that the five permanent
members – the US, the Soviet Union, Britain,