Potsdam Conference

The Potsdam Conference was held from 17 July to 2 August 1945 at Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. It was the last of the three "Big Three" wartime conferences, following Tehran (1943) and Yalta (February 1945), and it took place after Germany's unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945 but before Japan's surrender.

The principal participants were Joseph Stalin for the Soviet Union, Harry S. Truman for the United States (newly in office after Franklin D. Roosevelt's death in April 1945), and Winston Churchill for the United Kingdom — replaced mid-conference by Clement Attlee after Labour's victory in the UK general election results announced on 26 July.

The conference produced the Potsdam Agreement, which set out arrangements for the four-power occupation of Germany (the USSR, US, UK, and France each administering a zone), the demilitarisation, denazification, decartelisation, and democratisation of Germany (the "four Ds"), and the prosecution of Nazi war criminals — paving the way for the Nuremberg trials. It approved the transfer of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and shifted Poland's western border to the Oder–Neisse line, with the Soviet Union annexing the northern part of East Prussia including Königsberg (Kaliningrad).

Separately, the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July 1945, issued by the US, UK, and China (not the USSR, then still neutral toward Japan), demanded Japan's unconditional surrender and warned of "prompt and utter destruction." Japan's rejection preceded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August.

Potsdam is widely regarded by historians as an early marker of the emerging Cold War: disagreements over reparations, Polish governance, and Soviet influence in Eastern Europe foreshadowed the bipolar division of the continent that would harden over the following years.