“There are not many moments in history that have as much drama as those six months between February and August 1945 [..]. America and Russia became the two most powerful countries in the world; Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan had been defeated; The British Empire teetered on the brink of economic collapse. The president was dead, the Führer had committed suicide, the prime minister, who had led his nation through the most difficult time in its history, had been defeated in the democratic elections. Coups and revolutions had become commonplace; millions lay in unknown graves, ancient cities were reduced to heaps of ruins. The Red Tsar redrew the map of Europe, raising the metaphorical “iron curtain” between East and West. Having met in the defeated capital of the Third Reich, the victors now sought the spoils of war.” This is how the American publicist Michael Dobbs begins his book “Six Months 1945”. The meeting he called in the capital of the Third Reich is a meeting of the three most important leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition, which began in the city of Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin 17 July 1945 and concluded on 2 August.
The dead president referred to in the quote is Franklin Delano Roosevelt – the only president of the United States who was elected for a third term, led his country during the Second World War, but passed away less than a month before its end. In his place at the Potsdam negotiating table, Harry Truman was now sitting – a politician who had not yet had any experience in foreign affairs. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill started his work in Potsdam, but in the middle of the conference – on July 26 – the results of the British elections became known: Labor had won them, and Churchill’s place at the negotiating table was taken by his deputy in the wartime coalition government, Clement Attlee.
And only the “red tsar” Joseph Stalin remained unshakable at the height of his power, now reaping the fruits of victory that he had longed for.
No one reminded him of the 1939 agreement with Hitler and questioned the rights of the Soviet Union to the territories it had seized at the beginning of the war – a large part of Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia. No one particularly objected when governments under the strict control of Moscow were formed without democratic procedure in the Eastern European countries occupied by the Red Army. In Potsdam, Stalin, in the literal sense of the word, single-handedly drew the borders of the countries, putting the negotiating partners in front of the facts. Territories that had been ethnically homogeneous German lands for hundreds of years now became part of Poland and the Soviet Union. The German population had to leave them, and although the accepted wording declared that this deportation should be humane, in reality it turned into a brutal ethnic cleansing, accompanied by murder, robbery and other crimes.
Could the Western countries have achieved a different outcome of the Potsdam Conference?
At that time, was it possible to curb the imperial appetite of the Stalinist regime by the threat of military force? Probably not. Of course, the military and economic potential of the United States and Great Britain was greater than that of the Soviet Union, but it was spread all over the world, while in Europe the Red Army was the most serious military force. The Americans had the first nuclear warheads, which the Soviet side did not yet have. However, a possible war against a former ally, which would surely require further massive casualties and destruction, was not something that any British or American government was prepared for. A period of long armed confrontation – the Cold War – began in Europe and around the world.
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2023-07-17 06:46:51
#day #history #fate #postwar #Europe #decided #Potsdam
