Potsdam Conference (jul 17, 1945 – aug 2, 1945)

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This meeting was the last of the big 3 conferences that occurred during WWII. After defeating the Axis powers and Nazi Germany, they met in Potsdam outside of Berlin to discuss the post WWII balance of power. During this conference, however, the US president was now Harry Tuman. According to the U.S. State Department’s history of the event, Stalin had pressured FDR at the previous Yalta Conference in February 1945 to force the defeated Germans to pay heavy postwar reparations, half of which would go to the Soviet Union. Roosevelt had agreed to that demand. But Truman, who was keenly aware that similar economic punishment inflicted upon the Germans after World War I had led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, was determined not to make the same mistake. Ultimately, the Allies worked out a deal in which the Soviets got to take German industrial machinery from their occupation zone. Signed on August 1st, 1945, they planned to disarm and demilitarize Germany, which would be divided into four Allied occupation zones controlled by the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. They also went ahead with plans to drastically remake German society, by repealing laws passed by the Nazi regime and removing Nazis from the German education and court systems, and to arrest and try Germans who had committed war crimes.

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