Opening of the Potsdam Conference: 17 July 1945 Posted on: 17 July 2020
Cecilienhof Palace, Potsdam (Photo by Gill Bennett)
We must base our foreign policy on the principle of co-operation between the three World Powers. Sir Orme Sargent, 11 July 19451
Seventy-five years ago, President Harry Truman, Marshal Josef Stalin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, leaders of the victorious wartime Alliance, met in the Cecilienhof Palace in a small town outside Berlin, for the Potsdam Conference. Between 17 July and 2 August, American, British and Russian delegations discussed all the major issues confronting the post-war world. It was the last of the great tripartite conferences of the Second World War. The last great conference In fact, the war was not yet over. Though victory was achieved in Europe, fighting continued against Japan. The day before Potsdam opened, the atomic bomb was tested successfully in New Mexico. Its use, on 6 and 9 August, would lead to Japanese surrender and the final end to the global conflict. At Potsdam, Truman would tell Stalin about the ‘atomic secret’ supposedly known only to the US, UK and Canada. But Stalin already knew about it, from Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project and elsewhere. Many decisions about the post-war world had been taken earlier, including at Yalta in February 1945.2 At the San Francisco Conference, which ended on 26 June 1945, the United Nations Organisation had been established. But much remained for discussion at Potsdam, including European economic reconstruction, international waterways, Iran, Italian colonies, constitutional crisis in Belgium, elections in Greece, civil war in China and the future of the Middle East. A contentious issue was the future of defeated Germany: its administration, industrial disarmament, allocation of reparations, and how its people should be treated, fed, housed and re-educated. The fate of many thousands of refugees and displaced persons, as well as Prisoners of War, had to be considered.
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