The Potsdam Conference and the Cold War

The Final Meeting of Allied Leaders in WW II Began a New Era of Wars

Dec 13, 2009 Michael Streich

Although elements of the Cold War may have originated at Yalta, the Potsdam Conference validated Soviet European occupation and produced new global conflicts.

Photograph credit:

Michael Streich

Potsdam

July 17, 1945 would be the last time the “Big Three” – Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, and Harry Truman, would ever meet. Truman had replaced Franklin Roosevelt earlier that year when FDR died. Churchill himself would be replaced before the conference ended, having lost parliamentary elections in Britain. The new PM, Clement Attlee, would be inconsequential, symbolic perhaps of the British Empire itself. The Potsdam Conference would represent the first crucial step in the origins of the Cold War.

The Symbol of Soviet Military Might in Ruined Berlin

The Berlin or Potsdam Conference was held in the Cecilienhof Palace, built in 1917. The surrounding suburb had emerged unscathed from the bombing during the war and from the Soviet attack and occupation of the Reich’s capital city. It would be Berlin, surrounded by what would become East Germany that symbolized more than anything else the Soviet resolve in Eastern Europe during the Cold War

Although the city had been taken by the Russians, agreements called for three separate zones administered by the Soviets, the Americans, and the British. A fourth French zone was later added. In Berlin, Soviet troops where everywhere and large posters of Stalin and Marshal Zhukov hung from buildings. Stalin’s immense army was his trump card in the days of negotiations that resulted in the permanent occupation of Eastern Europe by Russia, referred to as an “Iron Curtain” by Churchill less than a year later.

First Signs of the Pending Cold War

History writer Douglas Botting writes that, “The conference was destined to be…not so much the finale to a past conflict as the overture to a new one – the worldwide tremor of the Cold War…” Although reparations issues were settled at the conference, more ominous results involved a Soviet-led Poland, recreated at the expense of Germany’s eastern frontier. After his election as chancellor in 1969 by the SPD, Willy Brandt formally acknowledged the contentious Oder-Neisse line.

The American atomic bomb test in New Mexico took place the day before the Potsdam Conference began. It would be the subtle bargaining chip Truman would hold over Stalin, not knowing that the Soviets were already working on their own bomb, a feat that ended with a successful test four years later. The bomb, though used to end the war with Japan, would ultimately be deemed a sterile weapon in the face of Soviet divisions parked across the European divide. Yet atomic bomb production would lead to the hydrogen bomb, ICBMs, and a deadly arms race characteristic of the Cold War and producing such policies as “mutually assured destruction.”

The departure of Churchill was more than symbolic. Britain, bankrupt and war weary, would witness the final end of empire, a process Attlee presided over. Although there were attempts to revive imperial notions, such as the French debacle in Vietnam and Algeria, there would be no return to colonialism. This was firmly reinforced during the 1956 Suez Crisis when the two superpowers threatened drastic action against Britain and France.

Potsdam and the Cold War

The final World War II conference between allied leaders transitioned the victors into a new more deadly era that was called the Cold War. Wartime alliances were replaced with suspicion and animosity as the nations of the world witnessed a competition for proxy states and satellites in the global conflict between democracy and Communism.

Sources:

• Stephen E. Ambrose and Douglas G. Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (Penguin, 1997)
• Douglas Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945-1949 (Crown Publishers, 1985)
• Lewis Broad, Winston Churchill: The Years of Achievement (Hawthorne Books, 1963)
• “Protocol of the Berlin (Potsdam) Conference, August 1, 1945,” Documents on Germany, 1944-1961, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (Greenwood Press, 1968.

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