Churchill, Stalin, and Truman convene at Cecilienhof; a new Europe is on the table
Germany surrendered in May 1945, and the men who beat it now had to decide what to do with it. On July 17, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Harry S. Truman, president for barely three months after Franklin Roosevelt's death, convened at Cecilienhof Palace outside Berlin. They argued over occupation zones, Poland's new government, and where Germany's eastern border would fall. Before the conference closed, Truman quietly told Stalin the United States had tested a weapon of unusual destructive force. Stalin, briefed by his own spies, barely blinked.
Truman arrived at Potsdam as an untested president carrying the news from Alamogordo, and his handling of both, agreeing to occupation terms while withholding the bomb's full weight, set the tone for four decades of American nuclear diplomacy. The conference also produced the Potsdam Declaration, issued by Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek, giving Japan an ultimatum to surrender unconditionally or face destruction.
QWhy did Britain's own prime minister vanish from the conference midway through?
Churchill left Potsdam on July 25 to fly home for the results of Britain's general election, an election held weeks earlier but whose count took time to tally across a country still mobilized for war. He expected to return as prime minister. Instead, voters had turned him out in a landslide for Clement Attlee, his own deputy in the wartime coalition government. Attlee, a comparatively obscure figure to Stalin and Truman, flew back to Potsdam in Churchill's place and finished the negotiations that Churchill had started, a strange handoff conducted in the middle of deciding Germany's fate.
QWhat exactly did Stalin already know before Truman said a word about the bomb?
Soviet intelligence had penetrated the Manhattan Project well before Truman ever mentioned a new weapon at Potsdam. When Truman told him that America possessed a weapon of unusual destructive force, Stalin's flat, unimpressed reaction wasn't diplomatic restraint. He simply already knew, having been briefed on the atomic program through espionage channels well ahead of the Trinity test nine days earlier. Truman left the exchange believing he'd surprised Stalin. He almost certainly hadn't.
QWhat specific piece of territory did Stalin personally insist on keeping?
Stalin pushed hard at Potsdam for outright Soviet annexation of Königsberg and the surrounding East Prussian territory, rather than folding it into the general redrawing of Germany's borders. The other Allies agreed, and the city was transferred to Soviet control, becoming Soviet territory as agreed at the conference.
