The Gau Mark Brandenburg was formed in 1933 initially under the name Gau Kurmark in Nazi Germany as a district within the Free State of Prussia. In 1935, Germany's constituent states were dissolved and the Gaus replaced the states and their responsibilities. In 1940, Kurmark was renamed Mark Brandenburg. The Gau was 38, 278 km² in area and with over 3 million inhabitants the largest in Nazi Germany. The seat of the Gauleitung was in Berlin on Kurmärkische Straße. The Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen concentration camps were located in the Gau March of Brandenburg. Ravensbrück was a women's camp and of the 132,000 prisoners that were sent to the camp, 92,000 perished whilst of the estimated 200,000 prisoners at Sachsenhausen 30,000 perished. However this figure does not include prisoners that died on the way to the camp or were never registered and killed on arrival, the latter mostly Soviet prisoners of war. The Gau was dissolved in 1945, following Allied Soviet occupation of the area and Germany's formal surrender in 1945. After the war, the territory of the former Gau became part of the state of Brandenburg in East Germany except one of beyond Oder-Neisse line, which was given to Poland. Most territories of it are divided between Germany's State of Brandenburg and Poland's Lubusz Voivodeship now.
Potsdam
On March 21 1933, the first day of spring, the new Hitler government
staged an elaborate ceremony in Potsdam, the traditional residence of
the Prussian kings. The ceremony was intended to symbolise the
continuity between Prusso-German monarchism and the new Nazi-led regime.
In the venerable Garrison Church, in front of the vault of Frederick
the Great and the throne traditionally occupied by the kaiser, President
Hindenburg called on the new government to overcome the selfishness and
partisan divisions of the Weimar era and to lead the national renewal
for a unified, free, and proud Germany. Hitler, in turn, extolled
Hindenburg as the patron of the German “awakening” and as the symbol of
the indestructible vitality of the German nation.
Potsdam
Reich
Chancellor Hitler and Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen on their
way to the garrison church on the 'Day of Potsdam,' left.
Significantly, one of Goebbels’ first staged events as Propaganda Minister was the opening of the new Reichstag with an elaborate ceremony known as the ‘Day of Potsdam’ on 21 March 1933. The ceremony was held in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, the shrine of the old Prussian monarchy. President Hindenburg resplendent in the full military regalia of Prussian field-marshal raised his baton to the empty throne of the exiled Kaiser. Hitler, in top hat and morning coat, bowed deferentially before him. The propaganda message was clear. The Nazis were restoring the old imperial glories lost in 1918 by forging a link between the past and the present – between the conservatism of the Prussian tradition and the razzmatazz of National Socialist ritual propaganda. In a symbolic piece of theatrical staging, Hindenburg took the salute for the final parade (which lasted for several hours) while Hitler stood modestly with his ministers some rows behind the old man
Welch (21) The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda
During the war given the fear of bombing the coffins of Friedrich II and his father, Friedrich Wilhelm I were removed from the Garrison Church in 1943 and placed in a bunker in today’s German Army Command Centre in Potsdam. After the British bombings on April 14 and 15, 1945 it looked as though the church had remained unscathed, but on the 15th the “Lange Stall next door took a direct hit, and the ensuing fire storm entered the church through windows broken by the bombing the night before. The fire destroyed the wooden galleries and the roof before it entered the tower, where wooden ventilation shutters needed for the carillon mechanic allowed the fire to spread quickly. Damage to water pipes and low water pressure resulting from the bombings made it impossible for fire hoses to reach the source of the blaze. Firemen could only watch helplessly as first the tower burned from top to bottom followed by the wooden beams in the church nave. Only the crucifix, chandeliers and the altar table could be saved before the enormous heat caused an unexploded ordnance to detonate. One by one the carillon bells loosened and fell nearly 80 metres to the ground until finally the oaken roof of the tower also collapsed ending the long existence of Potsdam’s most famous musical instrument. Only the ruined outside walls of the church and a stump of its tower remained.
The wartime conferences had calmly discussed the Germans’ fate, but at the Potsdam Conference the Allies finally realised that ‘Uncle Joe’ had stolen a march on them. He would call the shots. The Allies met from 17 July to 2 August 1945 at the palace of Crown Prince ‘Little Willi’, the Cecilienhof in Potsdam. The Western Allies were able to see their handiwork for the first time. In a fifteen-minute raid on 14 April they had flattened the centre of Frederick the Great’s Residenz. The town centre had lost ‘everything that was historic, a memorial or artistically important’, according to Hanna Grisebach. There were consolations: ‘The voices that we have had to listen to for over twelve years have been silenced.’
Giles MacDonogh (471) After the Reich
In a massive air raid that night, Allied bombers attacked Potsdam. A Hitler Youth sheltering in a basement that night found the walls around him `rocking like a ship'. The bombs destroyed much of the old town, including the Garnisonkirche, the spiritual home of the Prussian military caste and aristocracy. Ursula von Kardorff burst into tears in the street after hearing the news. `A whole world was destroyed with it,' she wrote in her diary.
Beevor (204-5) Berlin 1945
The city centre of Potsdam was badly damaged by an Allied bombing raid on April 14, 1945 in the last phase of the war. The area between the Havel, the Alter Markt and the Bassinplatz was particularly affected. The main station, city palace, long stable and garrison church burned out completely. Large parts of the northeastern suburb near the Glienicke Bridge were also damaged in a similar manner. However, the area around the New Market , the Dutch Quarter, has largely been preservedand the northern parts of the old town. In the battles of the last days of the war, other buildings were damaged, such as the Holy Spirit Church and the Old Town Hall. On April 27, 1945, Potsdam was taken by the Red Army. Potsdam was the target of a particularly large number of bombs in Germany. Up to the present day, newly discovered duds are defused and the people living in the area are evacuated on such occasions.
The Lustgarten then and now, showing the Marstall, St. Nicholas Church and Stadtschloss
The Altes Rathaus and looking towards the Alten Markt from Schlossstraße
The
Stadtschloss is being reconstructed with as much of the original
material as possible. When completed, it is intended to become the
Parliament House for the Federal State of Brandenburg.
One
part of the schloss currently under reconstruction is the fountain "The
Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite Stilling the Waves", shown here in
the 1930s and today.
The
unveiling in October 1929 of the memorial for the 15,000 paramedics
killed in the Great War with the honorary company of the Reichswehr in
the foreground.
The Lustgarten then and now, showing the Marstall, St. Nicholas Church and Stadtschloss
Apart from the headquarters of the (KGB) in Berlin's Karlshorst district, the German headquarters of Soviet military counterintelligence- the secret service base known as "Military Town No. 7"- was the Soviets' most important intelligence outpost with Western Europe. After the Potsdam Conference the base was expanded to cover sixteen hectares, including a hundred or so buildings used to accommodate all of the departments and service facilities as well as the staff and their families.
Outside the former residence of the heads of Soviet military counterintelligence.
At
the
main entrance of Schloss Cecilienhof , where the Potsdam "Big Three"
meetings were held. It was built
from 1914 to 1917 in the layout of an English Tudor manor house inspired by Bidston Court in Birkenhead. Cecilienhof was the last palace built by the House of Hohenzollern that
ruled the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire until the end of the Great War. A UNESCO World Heritage Site
since 1990, it is of course famous for having been the location of the Potsdam
Conference in 1945 when the most influential leaders in the world gathered in the conference hall, the former residence of the crown prince. Together with their foreign ministers- future Prime Minister Anthony Eden (Britain), Vyacheslav Molotov (USSR) and James F. Byrnes (USA), their respective ambassadors and a political and military advisory board, Truman, Churchill and Stalin tried to solve the most pressing issues. The war against Japan continued and the Soviets were already moving troops from Europe to Asia to join the alliance against the Japanese Empire. The Allies had to define a common occupation policy for the defeated and occupied Germany, but territorial issues were also on the agenda after the Soviets annexed large areas in eastern Poland. In addition, a decision had to be made on the extent to which Germany, suffering the war, had to pay economic and financial compensation to the Allies. Conflicts could also be expected from the changed geopolitical situation in Eastern Europe. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states and almost the entire Balkans now belonged to Moscow's sphere of influence. At the negotiating table, Churchill and Truman had to try to find out to what extent independent politics and democratic development would even be possible in these countries. As Churchill would presciently tell the American special envoy Joseph E. Davies during his mission to London in the course of preparations for the Potsdam Conference, "[p]erhaps it would fall to a very few men to decide in the next few weeks the kind of life that would confront several generations to come."
The Potsdam Conference took place from July 17 to August 2, 1945 and was the third and longest summit between the heads of government of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States, the three victors in the anti-Hitler-coalition that had just won the war after VE day, May 8 1945. The conference was mainly organised by the Soviets as seen in the red star floral arrangement still to be seen in the photos I took for this page. Although Churchill had refused to hold a summit "anywhere within the current Soviet military zone", Truman and Stalin had agreed in late May 1945 to meet "near Berlin". As Berlin itself had been too heavily damaged by Allied bombing and street-to-street fighting, Cecilienhof in Potsdam was selected as the location for the conference. The delegations were to be housed in the leafy suburb of Potsdam-Babelsberg, which had suffered only slight damage in the bombing raids and also offered the advantage that the streets to the conference venue were easy to guard. To that end Soviet soldiers repaired the streets connecting Babelsberg to Cecilienhof, built a pontoon bridge to replace the Glienicker Brücke, which had been destroyed during the last days of the war, planted trees, bushes and flower beds—including the aforementioned Soviet red star in the Ehrenhof of the palace. 
At Cecilienhof, 36 rooms and the great hall were renovated and furnished with furniture from other Potsdam palaces. The furniture of Wilhelm and Cecilie had been removed by the Soviets and stored at the Dairy. The main rooms used for the conference were as follows: Cecilie's music salon, the White Salon, used by the Soviet delegation as a reception room. On the first day of the conference, this was also the site of a buffet Stalin provided to the other delegations; Cecilie's writing room—the Red Salon, used by the Soviet delegation as a study; the Great hall—this was the conference hall, fitted by the Soviets with a round table ten feet in diametre (probably custom-made by a Moscow-based furniture company); Wilhelm's smoking room was used as study of the American delegation; Wilhelm's library served as the study of the British delegation; Wilhelm's breakfast room was possibly used as a secretary's office. However, according to the official guide to the palace, evidence has recently emerged that indicates that the current designation of the British and American studies may have been switched by the Soviets after the conference.
After the conference ended, Soviet troops used the palace as a clubhouse. It was handed over to the state of Brandenburg and in 1952 a memorial for the Conference was set up in the former private chambers of Wilhelm and Cecilie. The East German government also used the palace as a reception venue for state visits whilst the rest of the complex became a hotel in 1960, a function that remains today. Some of the rooms were used by the ruling party (SED) for meetings. After 1961 a part of the Neuer Garten was destroyed to build the southwest section of the Berlin Wall (as part of the Grenzsicherungsanlagen) which ran along the shore of Jungfernsee.
On the left, the flags of the USSR, United States
and the United Kingdom are flying over the main entranceway as Soviet
officers
serve as guards and as it appeared during my 2020 Bavarian International School trip; I was personally impressed they didn't just use a regular American flag but chose one that had the original 48 stars. This main portal of Cecilienhof Palace was the one the British delegation used to get into the conference hall. Photographed during the conference, the last of the
major Allied conferences of the Second World War showing the great red
star of geraniums, pink roses and hortensias in the flower bed at the
entrance the Soviets had planted. Held from July 17 to August 2, 1945,
in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam Truman, Stalin, and (at the beginning of
the conference) Churchill, whose place was later taken by Clement Attlee, when he
replaced Churchill as prime
minister. Beginning with the Tehran Conference in 1943, the main allies
of the anti-Hitler coalition of the Second World War had already met
several times at various levels in order to reach an agreement on the
course for the time after the victory over Germany. Previously, in
the 1943 Conference of Casablanca the demand for an unconditional
surrender was raised. 
At the Yalta conference in February 1945, a
division into occupation zones as well as a coordinated administration
and control by a Central Control Commission was adopted.
At the Yalta conference in February 1945, a
division into occupation zones as well as a coordinated administration
and control by a Central Control Commission was adopted. After the
military collapse of the Germany on the occasion of the entry into force
of the unconditional surrender of the German forces on May 8, 1945 and
the arrest of the managing Reichsregierung under Karl Doenitz and Lutz
von Krosigk on May 23, Berlin Declaration and the establishment of the
occupation zones as well as the establishment of an Allied Control
Council officially assumed the power of government in Germany. A conference in June, proposed by Churchill was delayed by Stalin. This was done within the framework of Soviet endeavours
to make the West Powers complete fait accompli with regard to the
German eastern frontier. Original plans had foreseen Berlin as a meeting
place, but because of the serious war damage, the meetings were
transferred to the intact Potsdam palace Cecilienhof.
The centrally located city palace was severely damaged by the heavy British air raid on April 14, 1945 and was therefore not a suitable conference venue. Of course, certain minimum requirements were also made of a conference venue: existing infrastructure, accessibility, reachability and, above all, security for the delegations. 
All this required a certain building size, so that the smaller Hohenzollern palaces such as Charlottenhof, the New Chambers and even the world-famous Sanssouci Palace were out of the question. Since the delegations were not supposed to live in the building, but their security had to be guaranteed, the palace was not allowed to have the confusing size of the New Palace. Basically, from a purely functional point of view, all that was required a conference room large enough to accommodate all the negotiators and their entourage, plus a couple of adjoining offices at the rear of the building. Cecilienhof Palace offered all of this although symbolically it stood far less for "Prussian militarism" than other Hohenzollern palaces. Nevertheless, it didn't stop Joan Bright Astley, the woman who organised the Special Information Centre (SIC) for Churchill during the war and who, as a young woman, dated Ian Fleming and is believed to be one of the three or four women whose attributes were used by him for the character of Miss Moneypenny, from writing in The Inner Circle: A View Of War At The Top how "[t]he Big Three would meet at Potsdam - cradle of German militarism and suburb of the Berlin graveyard - on 15 July." Potsdam thus was not seen as a random location near Berlin; its importance as a garrison location and residence of the Prussian kings and German emperors was understood as the cradle of German militarism and deliberately chosen by the delegation members.
All this required a certain building size, so that the smaller Hohenzollern palaces such as Charlottenhof, the New Chambers and even the world-famous Sanssouci Palace were out of the question. Since the delegations were not supposed to live in the building, but their security had to be guaranteed, the palace was not allowed to have the confusing size of the New Palace. Basically, from a purely functional point of view, all that was required a conference room large enough to accommodate all the negotiators and their entourage, plus a couple of adjoining offices at the rear of the building. Cecilienhof Palace offered all of this although symbolically it stood far less for "Prussian militarism" than other Hohenzollern palaces. Nevertheless, it didn't stop Joan Bright Astley, the woman who organised the Special Information Centre (SIC) for Churchill during the war and who, as a young woman, dated Ian Fleming and is believed to be one of the three or four women whose attributes were used by him for the character of Miss Moneypenny, from writing in The Inner Circle: A View Of War At The Top how "[t]he Big Three would meet at Potsdam - cradle of German militarism and suburb of the Berlin graveyard - on 15 July." Potsdam thus was not seen as a random location near Berlin; its importance as a garrison location and residence of the Prussian kings and German emperors was understood as the cradle of German militarism and deliberately chosen by the delegation members. 
During my 2022 Bavarian International School class trip to the site of the conference and as it appeared when Truman left.
On July 17, 1945, the first of thirteen sessions took place at Cecilienhof Palace. Internally, the Potsdam Conference was always codenamed TERMINAL, the Allies seeing this as the end of a long war against Germany. The site would produce three locations loaded with iconic symbolism: the courtyard with the Soviet star, the conference hall with its round table and the palace terrace with three wicker chairs for press photos. The major subjects of the conference were the
European peace settlements; the urgently pressing
issue of administering a defeated and substantially
destroyed Germany; the determination of Polish
boundaries; the terms of the occupation of Austria;
the Soviet role in Eastern Europe; reparations; and,
not least, the continued prosecution of the war
against Japan. The
conference would eventually produce the Potsdam Declaration calling for unconditional surrender, or else Japan's “prompt and utter destruction.” 
With regard to Germany,
the declaration
asserted the Allies’ intention to give the “German
people . . . the opportunity to prepare for the eventual reconstruction
of their life on a democratic
and peaceful basis.” Four zones of occupation were
demarcated in Germany, each to be administered
by military governments under the commanders in
chief of the British, American, Soviet, and French armies
of occupation. Austria was also divided into four
zones of occupation, as were the capital cities of
Berlin and Vienna. Coordination amongst the occupation zones was to be
handled by an Allied Control Council. The conference agreed that
occupation
policy would embody the principles stated in the
Yalta Agreement, including demilitarisation,
denazification, democratisation, decentralisation,
and deindustrialisation. 
Regarding the issue of reparations, each Allied
power was to recover reparations from its own
zone of occupation, with the proviso that the
Soviet Union was entitled to recover ten to fifteen percent of the industrial equipment in the western
zones of Germany in exchange for agricultural produce and other natural products from its zone.
With regard to the settlement of the Polish border, this was fixed at the Oder and Neisse Rivers in the west, and the country absorbed a portion of what had been East Prussia. This settlement required relocating millions of Germans from these areas.
The settlement of the Soviet role in Eastern
Europe was highly contentious, as Stalin refused to
permit Western intervention in those Eastern governments already controlled by communists.
Here Truman revealed to Stalin the existence of the atomic bomb and that he intended to use it against Japan. Stalin hardly reacted to this revelation because- as it turned out- his espionage network had already informed him of the existence of the bomb. Stalin knew already what the Americans had achieved; knew, too, that it was an achievement that the Soviet Union must match. Stalin disingenuously told the American ambassador in Moscow that the Bomb "would mean the end of war and aggressors". Harriman concurred that "it could have great importance for peaceful purposes"; to which, with a stony face, Stalin replied: "Unquestionably." However, because of the weapon, the conferees were emboldened to issue an ultimatum to Japan on July 26 demanding unconditional surrender. The Japanese government, hopelessly deadlocked in political arguing, made it clear they would ignore the message. After Japan rejected the ultimatum the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This has led to the myth of how an ill-chosen translation of the Japanese word mokusatsu led to the United States decision to drop the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The conference room then and now. It was around this table that the Anglo-Americans informed Stalin of the existence of the atomic bomb. On July 17, the American Secretary of War Stimson visited Churchill in his villa in Babelsberg and put a note on the table with the words "Babies satisfactorily born". 
"The big experiment in the desert was successful, the atomic bomb is here," he announced euphorically according to Churchill's memoirs. Churchill's response: "What was gunpowder? Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. The atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath." Indeed, a detailed report, in which the tremendous, unprecedented destructive power was described, followed shortly afterwards. The light and thunder of the explosion could be heard more than 300 kilometres away. As a veteran realpolitiker and former military officer, Churchill immediately grasped the opportunity this news might offer during the negotiations, and wondered if it would now be possible to stop Stalin's demands. However, this could only succeed if the Americans and the British officially informed the Soviets about the atomic bomb. The allies had already argued about the question of a possible publication in 1944. The dispute finally culminated on September 19, 1944 in an Anglo-American commitment to the "extreme secrecy" of nuclear research. Up until the Potsdam Conference, everyone had kept to this agreement, but now, after the successful atomic bomb test, Stalin was to be informed. But as Churchill pondered, "How should this news be imparted to him? Should it be in writing or by word of mouth? Should it be at a formal and special meeting, or in the course of our daily conferences, or after one of them?” In the end, it was agreed that Stalin would be informed casually about the bomb. On July 24, 1945 at around 19.30, the time had finally come. 
After the deliberations in the conference hall of Cecilienhof Palace, Truman went alone to Stalin: “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make 'good use of it against the Japanese.'" he recollected in his memoirs. "The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese.” The Soviet dictator's reaction came as a surprise to all those present who were privy to the incident. Churchill observed the scene from just fifteen feet away and was convinced that Stalin had no idea what Truman was talking about, for his "features remained serene and light-hearted." The American interpreter Bohlen also followed everything closely: "Across the room, I watched Stalin's face carefully as the President broke the news. So offhand was Stalinʼs response that there was some question in my mind whether the Presidentʼs message had got through.” But everyone in the end was mistaken. Stalin was well informed and prepared by his intelligence chief, Beria. It was agreed that he should play ignorant, and he was an excellent actor. On his return to his villa in Babelsberg, however, he showed how much effort it had cost him. He called his followers together and complained clearly about the Americans. Like Churchill, he recognised the value of the bomb on the diplomatic stage: “There is no doubt that Washington and London hope that it will take us some time to develop the atomic bomb. Meanwhile they want to use the American - more precisely the American-British - monopoly to force us to accept their plans for Europe and the world. But they will not succeed!”
"The big experiment in the desert was successful, the atomic bomb is here," he announced euphorically according to Churchill's memoirs. Churchill's response: "What was gunpowder? Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. The atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath." Indeed, a detailed report, in which the tremendous, unprecedented destructive power was described, followed shortly afterwards. The light and thunder of the explosion could be heard more than 300 kilometres away. As a veteran realpolitiker and former military officer, Churchill immediately grasped the opportunity this news might offer during the negotiations, and wondered if it would now be possible to stop Stalin's demands. However, this could only succeed if the Americans and the British officially informed the Soviets about the atomic bomb. The allies had already argued about the question of a possible publication in 1944. The dispute finally culminated on September 19, 1944 in an Anglo-American commitment to the "extreme secrecy" of nuclear research. Up until the Potsdam Conference, everyone had kept to this agreement, but now, after the successful atomic bomb test, Stalin was to be informed. But as Churchill pondered, "How should this news be imparted to him? Should it be in writing or by word of mouth? Should it be at a formal and special meeting, or in the course of our daily conferences, or after one of them?” In the end, it was agreed that Stalin would be informed casually about the bomb. On July 24, 1945 at around 19.30, the time had finally come. 
After the deliberations in the conference hall of Cecilienhof Palace, Truman went alone to Stalin: “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make 'good use of it against the Japanese.'" he recollected in his memoirs. "The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese.” The Soviet dictator's reaction came as a surprise to all those present who were privy to the incident. Churchill observed the scene from just fifteen feet away and was convinced that Stalin had no idea what Truman was talking about, for his "features remained serene and light-hearted." The American interpreter Bohlen also followed everything closely: "Across the room, I watched Stalin's face carefully as the President broke the news. So offhand was Stalinʼs response that there was some question in my mind whether the Presidentʼs message had got through.” But everyone in the end was mistaken. Stalin was well informed and prepared by his intelligence chief, Beria. It was agreed that he should play ignorant, and he was an excellent actor. On his return to his villa in Babelsberg, however, he showed how much effort it had cost him. He called his followers together and complained clearly about the Americans. Like Churchill, he recognised the value of the bomb on the diplomatic stage: “There is no doubt that Washington and London hope that it will take us some time to develop the atomic bomb. Meanwhile they want to use the American - more precisely the American-British - monopoly to force us to accept their plans for Europe and the world. But they will not succeed!” 
Inside the famous garden terrace where press photos were taken of the “Big Three” sitting in wicker chairs which were added as part of the special exhibition Potsdam Conference 1945 – Shaping the World, commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Potsdam Conference. The exhibition ran from June 23 to December 31, 2020, and presented historical documents, films, photographs and mementos of the era to bring the event to life and to examine how it sculpted world history. The conference’s official conclusions, set out in the Potsdam Agreement, had immediate repercussions for Germany and for the rest of Europe, but the exhibition also shows how the behind-the-scenes discussions had far-reaching implications for Asia and the Middle East. Unfortunately when I arrived for it neither Churchill’s walking cane, Panama hat nor cigar tube had arrived in time from the wartime prime minister’s former home given the coronavirus lockdown back in Britain which led to an export license for the items taking longer than expected to procure. 
What it did have on display for the first time was the diary of Joy Milward, then a 19-year-old secretary with the British delegation, recording her impressions of the conference and the wreckage of Germany, describing the journey from the airport to Potsdam as having been “lined with old men and women, children and young women all carrying packs on their back or pushing carts loaded with family belongings.”Four days after the conference ended, the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing tens of thousands of people followed three days later with Nagasaki. One particularly moving exhibit that was on loan from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was the blackened metal lunchbox of a twelve-year-old schoolboy, Koji Kano, whose body was never found.
The last section of the exhibition dealt with the Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria that occurred a week after the meeting ended, and how the ultimatum to Japan eventually led to independence for Korea. Also touched on were issues such as the withdrawal of British and Soviet troops from Iran, the failure of the three powers to settle compensation for Holocaust survivors or to decide what should happen next in Palestine.
Stalin, ever more sartorially aware, changed into his white, gilded Generalissimo’s magnificence with the single Hero of the Soviet Union gold star, and arrived last for the first session at the Cecilienhof Palace, built in 1917 for the last Crown Prince, mocking its Kaiserine grandeur: “Hmm. Nothing much,” he told Gromyko. “Modest. The Russian Tsars built themselves something much more solid.” At the conference, Stalin sat between Molotov and his interpreter Pavlov, flanked by Vyshinsky and Gromyko. Champagne glasses were brought to toast the conference. Churchill, puffing at a cigar, approached Stalin who was himself smoking a Churchillian cigar. If anyone were to photograph the Generalissimo with a cigar, it would “create an immense sensation,” Churchill beamed, “everyone will say it is my influence.” Actually British influence was greatly diminished in the new world order of the superpowers in which they could agree on the de‑Nazification of Germany but not on reparations or Poland. Now Hitler was gone, the differences were mountainous.
Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
https://recs.hypotheses.org/6014. As can be seen in the GIFs, the room differs in essential points from the way it appeared at the time of the Potsdam Conference for a number of reasons. One was to prevent accidents by rearranging the chairs within the movement areas intended for the public along the window front. With regard to possibly reconstructing the original upholstery fabrics of the furniture, one plan is to use the red silk upholstery of the chairs now on permanent display in the Marble Palace. This would however require the chairs to be removed from their current, stylistically coherent surroundings, for which they were only recently specially adapted at the expense of public funds.
The paintings however appear to have remained with the watercolour hanging on the east wall by an unknown artist depicting a “park landscape” visible at the back left of the images as well as the two pictures on the south wall above the fireplace and to the left of it. The latter is a view of a "southern landscape" that shows a steep rocky peak at the edge of a wide bay, and a view of the Acropolis. Two of the three watercolours are by Angelos Gialliná, an artist based on Corfu, which originally belonged to the crown prince. It is possible that the depictions were a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm II who used to stay in Corfu after having bought the Achilleion in 1907 and had it rebuilt according to his ideas.
There remained a great deal of unfinished business. The future of Germany, discussed at Yalta, was not decided by the documents of surrender. The settlement in Eastern Europe was not resolved. The war with Japan was not yet over. The three wartime allies agreed to meet for a conference in which they could explore the many political issues left over from the defeat of the Axis powers. The date agreed upon was July 15. Stalin persuaded his allies to add to the symbolism of surrender by meeting in Berlin. The site chosen was Potsdam, home of Prussian militarism. Zhukov was once again asked to find a suitable venue. He chose the Cecilienhof, a former palace of the Prussian royal family. Other villas were requisitioned for the thousands of officials who followed in train behind their heads of state. Zhukov organized the refurbishment of thirty‐six rooms and an assembly hall in the palace. By request Truman’s headquarters were painted blue; Churchill asked for pink; the Soviet delegation chose a stark white. No circular conference table large enough and in one piece could be found in Berlin, so the Lux furniture factory in Moscow was asked to build one in time for the conference.
Overy, Russia's War
Inside
Stalin's study and as it appeared in 1945. The decor of such rooms assigned to the Soviets were guided by pragmatism and demonstrative renunciation. Accordingly, Zhukov would later recall that when Stalin was preparing the Soviet rooms in Cecilienhof Palace and his residence in Babelsberg, it was particularly important to eliminate all appearances of luxury, noting in 
his Reminiscences and Reflections how “Stalin had never liked luxury, so after a walk through the rooms he had superfluous furniture removed." At the same time, the space had to radiate power, which Antipenko in particular obviously initially viewed as a challenge. At least it was important to him to report later – quite agitatedly – that the representatives of the USA and Great Britain had explicitly valued the luxurious furnishings of their rooms in Cecilienhof, writing how “[i]t seemed to me that Stalin's rooms should not be made less luxurious. Some things had already been done. But the representative of Moscow, General Vlasik, said that the more modest the equipment, the better. In place of the costly furniture brought from other castles, simple furniture has come.” This principle seems to have been implemented most consistently in Stalin's study, since two sets of seating furniture were placed there for the conference, which cannot subsequently be assigned to any inventory of the surrounding castles and which, judging by their style, seem to have been brought from bourgeois households. The painting of Villa Falconieri by Albert Hertel remains the same, albeit in a different
frame. The
painting originally hung in the Dutch Palace in Berlin which was largely destroyed in November 1943. 
The painting itself however was saved and stored in the former Imperial Riding Hall in the New Garden. In January 1962, the administration of the State Palaces and Gardens in Potsdam-Sanssouci gave the picture to the memorial as a "permanent loan". In the 1950s after his death the painting was replaced with the photo of Stalin sitting outside on the terrace during the conference in his white uniform. The club chairs are upholstered in dark leather, which in combination with the dark wood of the desk and the waist-high wall paneling created a very 'masculine' impression of the room. Also included is a leather couch, which - behind the photographer's location - was placed on the north wall under the window there. The GIF on the right shows me standing in front of the 1948 painting "The Morning of our Fatherland" by the painter Fjodor S. Schurpin that was temporarily displayed in his study. It shows a country no longer war ravaged and struggling with infrastructure, food supplies or housing. Schurpin received the Stalin Prize Second Class for this painting. The furniture visible in the bay window was there when the house was handed over in 1952 but was subsequently lost. It is possible that it was not removed until the early 1960s, when the leather suite was reupholstered in beige grosgrain and moved from the main room to the bay window.
his Reminiscences and Reflections how “Stalin had never liked luxury, so after a walk through the rooms he had superfluous furniture removed." At the same time, the space had to radiate power, which Antipenko in particular obviously initially viewed as a challenge. At least it was important to him to report later – quite agitatedly – that the representatives of the USA and Great Britain had explicitly valued the luxurious furnishings of their rooms in Cecilienhof, writing how “[i]t seemed to me that Stalin's rooms should not be made less luxurious. Some things had already been done. But the representative of Moscow, General Vlasik, said that the more modest the equipment, the better. In place of the costly furniture brought from other castles, simple furniture has come.” This principle seems to have been implemented most consistently in Stalin's study, since two sets of seating furniture were placed there for the conference, which cannot subsequently be assigned to any inventory of the surrounding castles and which, judging by their style, seem to have been brought from bourgeois households. The painting of Villa Falconieri by Albert Hertel remains the same, albeit in a different
frame. The
painting originally hung in the Dutch Palace in Berlin which was largely destroyed in November 1943. 
The painting itself however was saved and stored in the former Imperial Riding Hall in the New Garden. In January 1962, the administration of the State Palaces and Gardens in Potsdam-Sanssouci gave the picture to the memorial as a "permanent loan". In the 1950s after his death the painting was replaced with the photo of Stalin sitting outside on the terrace during the conference in his white uniform. The club chairs are upholstered in dark leather, which in combination with the dark wood of the desk and the waist-high wall paneling created a very 'masculine' impression of the room. Also included is a leather couch, which - behind the photographer's location - was placed on the north wall under the window there. The GIF on the right shows me standing in front of the 1948 painting "The Morning of our Fatherland" by the painter Fjodor S. Schurpin that was temporarily displayed in his study. It shows a country no longer war ravaged and struggling with infrastructure, food supplies or housing. Schurpin received the Stalin Prize Second Class for this painting. The furniture visible in the bay window was there when the house was handed over in 1952 but was subsequently lost. It is possible that it was not removed until the early 1960s, when the leather suite was reupholstered in beige grosgrain and moved from the main room to the bay window. 
Inside
the room assigned to Truman and his staff still partly furnished with
items from the nearby Marmorpalais such as the finely carved writing
desk. Inside are two armchairs, one of which served as a desk chair, and six matching chairs in neo-Gothic style, which had been brought for the conference from Wilhelm I's study in Babelsberg Palace and whose upholstery was upholstered in blue velvet. On the right is his private dining room set inside the room. In his first volume of memoirs published a decade after, Truman recorded how “Cecilienhof had been used as a hospital during the war by both the Germans and the Soviets. It had been stripped of all its furnishings, but the Russians had done an impressive job in refurnishing and refitting it for the conference." (379)
Gellately writes in Stalin's Curse howTruman’s attitude was sunny and accommodating, as can be gathered from the fact that he brought along none other than Joseph Davies, the former ambassador who favoured appeasing the Soviet Union. In a letter to his wife after the first day’s meetings at Potsdam, the president was pleased to have been made chairman of the conference, though he found the role tricky. “Anyway a start has been made and I’ve gotten what I came for–Stalin goes to war on August 15 with no strings on it.” That would mean, he wrote, that “we’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed! That is the important thing.” In his diary he added: “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest–but smart as hell.”
Standing in the garden of Cecilienhof and as it appeared from the photo
dated July 13, 1945, just days before the start of the conference. Hermann Christlieb's deer statues shown here were acquired in 1938 by Crown Prince Wilhelm and later would be seen from the dining room used by Truman. They were removed in 1983 for fear of vandalism to the park nursery in the New Garden but finally returned on May 27, 2020. In 1983, the sculpture was removed Whilst
Admiral Leahy recorded five years later in his memoir I Was There
(465) that he "thought Truman had handled himself very well at this
first session. He was positive in his manner, clear and direct in his
statements. He seemed to know exactly what he wanted to say and do. As
for Stalin, nothing had occurred to ruffle the Soviet chieftain, and he
was his usual courteous self. It seemed, as a result of the lunch and
this meeting, that Truman and Stalin would get along well. The Chief
Executive’s first impression was that 'Uncle Joe' personally was most
affable and a pleasant companion.” The Soviets however felt that the new
American President had not given the impression of great strength and
determination; as Andrei Gromyko, the future Soviet Foreign Minister who
would be directly involved in deliberations with the Americans during
the Cuban Missile Crisis, recalled, "he's nervous, but he's doing his
best not to let it show. Sometimes he seems about to smile, but that is
deceptive. I have the feeling that the President is kind of hiding in
himself. Certainly the fact that he has no experience of such high-level
meetings and has never met Stalin before also plays a role." 
As Robin Edmonds wrote, at the time Truman was not only new to the presidency and new to international relations, but- like almost everyone else- new to the great issues of the atomic bomb, about which he was assailed with conflicting advice (some of it, from Potsdam onwards, British). In all the circumstances-and whatever the Soviet archive may one day reveal-Truman's initial decision is understandable: in effect, to expose the bare minimum of atomic surface to Stalin at Potsdam and then to pause for reflection in Washington. It is, however, clear that had he been aware of the true state of atomic affairs in the Soviet Union at that time, he should either have said more to Stalin than he did on 24 July, or have said nothing at all at Potsdam; and if he had said nothing, it would have been wise to follow up his silence with a personal message from Washington after his return. Instead, he fell between two stools. A half truth is risk all diplomacy. At a minimum, this particular half truth, followed in less than a fortnight by the attack on Hiroshima, must have made Truman look silly in Stalin's eyes at the time.
The
schloß library, assigned to none other than Churchill himself (later to
be occupied by Attlee) as his personal office. This was the only room
for the British on the ground floor. Theoretically, the most natural way
for Churchill to have made his way down to the actual conference room
from the British delegation's offices upstairs was via the grand wooden
stairs that lead down from the first floor to the conference hall.
However, the Soviets childishly insisted that he had to make his way in a
very roundabout way in order to use a side entrance since they and the
American delegations occupied rooms on the ground floor and thus had to
enter through side doors, leaving Churchill to have appeared privileged
had he been the only one to make his entry to the Conference via the
grand stairs. The different quarters were to be colour-coded: blue for
the Americans, white for the Russians and pink for the British. Churchill never recorded hi thoughts about Cecilienhof itself, possibly considering a description of the conference location to be too banal in view of the urgent problems to be solved, or not appropriate to the matter. In any case, of the Big Three, he had the greatest connection to the Crown Prince's Palace. Not only the architectural elements of the Tudor style and English country house must have been very familiar to him, but he was also the only one who had personally met a member of the former imperial family. In 1906 he was in Silesia for the Kaiser maneuvers, where he met Wilhelm II.
Churchill arriving with me at the spot, 2017...
Notes Abbreviations CLEM. Clemson University Special Collections, Clemson, South Carolina CRL. Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom FDR. Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York FRUS. Foreign Relations of the United States Series HSTL. Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri IWM. Imperial War Museum, London LHCMA. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London LOC. Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, DC NARA. National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park, Maryland NYPL. New York Public Library, New York City SMOF. Staff Member Office Files USAHEC. United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania Introduction 1. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 143–144; Aida D. Donald, Citizen-Soldier: A Life of Harry Truman (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 67. 2. James W. Muller, “The Aftermath of the Great War,” in James W. Muller, ed., Churchill as Peacemaker (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178; Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 4, The Stricken World, 1916–1922 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 427; Alan Wood, The Origins of the Russian Revolution (London: Routledge, 2003), 49. 3. Charles Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975), 7; Robert Betzell, Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam: The Secret Protocols (Hattiesburg, MS: Academic International, 1970), 141. 4. The Big Three at Versailles were American President Woodrow Wilson, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando thought of himself as part of a Big Four, but clearly he played a secondary role in the conference, in part because he did not speak French or English very well but disliked relying on interpreters out of a fear of appearing weak. In April 1919 he stormed out of the conference, but he returned in June; his terrible showing at the conference contributed significantly to his resignation at the end of the month. 5. Charles à Court Repington, The First World War, 1914–1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920); Private Alexander Clay, 33rd (US) Infantry Division, 131st Regiment, Veterans Survey, USAHEC. 6. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, Camus at Combat: Writing, 1944–1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 111; William Leahy, diary entry for August 14, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 144, LOC. In Repington’s more global conception, the era also included the 1911 revolution in China and the humiliating Russian defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1904–1905, both of which radically altered the strategic picture in Asia as well as in Europe. Repington, First World War. 7. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 97. 8. Bela Grünewald Ivanyi and Alan Bell, Route to Potsdam: The Story of the Peace Aims, 1939–1945 (London: Allan Wingate, 1946), 45. 9. “Suggestions for a Peace Settlement,” Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, Pal/45/2, folio 103, CRL. 10. “Some Considerations on the Guidance to Be Obtained from the Procedure of the Peace-Making of 1918–20,” Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, Pea/43/1, folio 2, CRL. 11. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 234. 12. Harry Hopkins to President Truman, May 30, 1945, Map Room Messages of President Truman, *2H-726, Reel 2, NYPL. Stalin made the observation about the Senate possibly rejecting agreements made at Potsdam to American diplomat and senior United Nations official Alger Hiss. Within a few weeks of the end of the war, rumors began to spread that Hiss was working as a Soviet spy. Robert Messner, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Engines of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 45. 13. McCullough, Truman, 415–416. 14. William Leahy, diary entry for April 12, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 55, LOC. 15. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 48. 16. I would like to acknowledge the intellectual debt this book owes to two studies: Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), and Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 17. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 5, 30. 18. Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 497. Chapter One: “Jesus Christ and General Jackson” 1. Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin, 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2003). 2. Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 2013), 608. 3. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), 622–626. For more on Roosevelt’s health problems, see Smith, 600ff. 4. Ibid., 629. 5. Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 242; S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Penguin, 2010), 3, 76. 6. Charles Bohlen, Eyewitness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 205–206. 7. George McKee Elsey, An Unplanned Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 77; James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 48. 8. William Leahy, diary entry for April 12, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 55, LOC. 9. Robert Messner, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 19, 32. 10. J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 25; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 245. 11. Allen Drury, A Senate Journal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 219. 12. Ibid., 220. 13. Smith, FDR, 618; McCullough, Truman, 314. 14. Exhibit from Harry S. Truman Museum, Independence, Missouri. Emphasis in original. 15. McCullough, Truman, 291. 16. Drury, Senate Journal, 410. 17. Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 10. 18. McCullough, Truman, 339. 19. Smith, FDR, 582–583. 20. Bohlen, Eyewitness to History, 210–211. 21. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (London: Penguin, 2003), 761. Keynes had been Britain’s chief economist at the Paris Peace Conference. He published a stinging critique of the failures of the economic aspects of that conference in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920), available at Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15776. 22. See George Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956); David S. Fogelsong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and William T. Allison, American Diplomats in Russia (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997). 23. For more on East Asia, see Chapter 11. 24. Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 5, 190. 25. See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. Chapter 2. 26. Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 27. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 117. 28. McCullough, Truman, 340–342. 29. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 486; Eden to Lord Halifax, April 13, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/86, folio 731, CRL; Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 567. 30. Elsey, Unplanned Life, 80; Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 48–49; William Leahy, diary entry for April 12, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 55, LOC. 31. Drury, Senate Journal, 412, 419, 422. 32. Elsey, Unplanned Life, 78. Chapter Two: “The Most Terrible Responsibility Any Man Ever Faced” 1. Allen Drury, A Senate Journal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 413. 2. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 375; Henry Lewis Stimson, Stimson Diaries in the Yale University Library, microform, Reel #9, entry for April 12, 1945, USAHEC; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 212. 3. For more information on this topic, see Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). 4. Harry Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower: The Personal Diary of Captain Harry C. Butcher, Naval Aide to General Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 816. The text of Murrow’s full, emotional broadcast and Gellhorn’s article can be found in Reporting World War II, Part Two, American Journalism, 1944–1946 (New York: Library of America, 1995), 681–685, 730. 5. James Byrnes to James K. Vardaman, August 25, 1945, and “Dismemberment of Germany,” July 11, 1945, Papers of George M. Elsey, Map Room Records, Elsey Papers Folder; Berlin Conference, July-August 1945, Folder 2, HSTL; McCullough, Truman, 349–350; George McKee Elsey, An Unplanned Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 81; James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 48; Nigel Hamilton, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 54; J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 159. 6. William Hillman, ed., Mr. President: The First Publication from the Personal Diaries, Private Letters, Papers, and Revealing Interviews of Harry S. Truman (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Young, 1952), 10, 110–111; Robert Messner, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 53, 67. 7. There appears to be some disagreement among Truman and Churchill biographers. Some suggest that the two men had never met before Potsdam. It hardly matters. The key point is that the two men did not know one another. 8. Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower, 816. Following Pearl Harbor, Senator Truman had approached Marshall about reenlisting. Marshall responded by telling him that “we don’t need old stiffs like you. This will be a young man’s war.” Hamilton, American Caesars, 53. 9. Truman to Churchill, April 14, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/89, folio 734, CRL. 10. Halifax to Eden, April 16, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/93, folio 738, CRL. 11. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 10, CLEM. 12. Walter J. Brown, James F. Byrnes of South Carolina: A Remembrance (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1992), 254. 13. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 5918; Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. Harriman may have believed that Byrnes (or someone close to him) had been spreading rumors of his affair with Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela. The two ended the affair in 1943, but later rekindled the romance and married in 1971. Pamela Harriman eventually served as US ambassador to France. 14. Halifax to Eden, April 16, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/93, folio 738, CRL; William Leahy, diary entry for June 30, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 102, LOC; Messner, End of an Alliance, 78. Truman and Byrnes would begin to fall out before the end of the year. In December, the two had a sharp meeting in the White House. Truman recalled having to say that he would “not tolerate a repetition” of Byrnes’s perceived insubordination and grandstanding. The rift was soon out in the open, and Byrnes resigned in 1947, delaying his departure a few months so that George Marshall could replace him. McCullough, Truman, 479. 15. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 10, CLEM. 16. Hillman, ed., Mr. President, 116; Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 164. Hull was seventy-three years old in 1945, Davies was sixty-eight, and Hopkins was fifty-four, but Hopkins was dying of stomach cancer. 17. Messner, End of an Alliance, 77; Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 10, CLEM. Later in the year, at Truman’s urging, Congress put the Speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate as numbers one and two in the succession order so that a president could not effectively select his own successor. 18. Russia still celebrates Victory Day on May 9, whereas France, Britain, and the United States mark the day on May 8. That George Elsey mentioned the issue of the German surrender in his diary might also suggest that he was the one who found out about the State Department’s intransigence and told Truman, but here I am speculating. Elsey, Unplanned Life, 83. 19. “Outline and Notes,” entry for August 19, 1945, Wallace Deuel Papers, Box 61, Potsdam Conference Folder, Box 61, LOC. 20. Messner, End of an Alliance, 78. For more on the drift in their relationship, see McCullough, Truman, 478–480. 21. Truman did name Henry Wallace secretary of commerce, perhaps small compensation for missing out on the presidency by just three months. He named Stettinius the first American ambassador to the United Nations. 22. Messner, End of an Alliance, 6; for a reporter’s view of the transition, see Drury, Senate Journal, 410–419. 23. Deuel Papers, August 19, 1945, LOC; Bohlen, Witness to History, 226. 24. Halifax to Eden, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/95 and US/45/100, folios 741 and 747, CRL. 25. Hillman, Mr. President, 117, 382. 26. Drury, Senate Journal, 424 and 439. 27. Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 246. 28. Frederick J. Dobney, ed., Selected Papers of Will Clayton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 136. 29. I am grateful to Professor Michael Snape of the University of Birmingham for a wonderful explanation of how Wilson’s Presbyterian worldview made him reluctant to use economic instruments for political gains. 30. See Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 31. Keith M. Heim, Hope Without Power: Truman and the Russians, 1945, PhD Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1973, D748.H45, 4. 32. Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948 (New York: Norton, 1977), 40; Heim, Hope Without Power, 75n2 and 103. 33. Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 120; “Memorandum of Conversation, 23 April,” in FRUS, vol. 5, Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), 256–257. 34. Heim, Hope Without Power, 103; Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 84; Bohlen, Witness to History, 213; McCullough, Truman, 373. 35. FRUS, vol. 5, Europe, 257. 36. McCullough, Truman, 262; Oral History of Valentin Berezhekov, 12/8, vol. 2, 6–10, LHCMA. 37. Heim, Hope Without Power, 89–93. 38. Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 565; Churchill to Eden, May 13, 1945, and Churchill to Roosevelt, quoted in Correlli Barnett, Lords of War: From Lincoln to Churchill, Supreme Command 1861–1945 (London: Pen and Sword, 2012), 239; SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, May 1945 Folder, HSTL. 39. Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 53; Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), 401. 40. Roberts, Masters and Commanders, 565. 41. Churchill to Truman, June 4, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 20, Pol/45/213, folio 787, CRL. 42. Eden to Halifax, May 11, 1945 (US/45/107, folio 756), and Eden to Halifax, May 13, 1945 (US/45/110, folio 759), Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, CRL. 43. Elsey, Unplanned Life, 84. Chapter Three: May Days 1. Churchill to Truman, May 11, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, Churchill to Truman, May 1945 Folder, HSTL. 2. Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), 474. 3. Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 143; William Leahy, diary entry for June 13, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, LOC. 4. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 3395; Eden to Halifax, May 13, 1945, US/45/110, folio 759, CRL. 5. Feis, Between War and Peace, 143; Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York: Viking, 1960), 398. 6. Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940–1945 (New York: Knopf, 2010), 473. The imagination reels at that statement, but one guesses that Churchill meant that the United States and Great Britain would always be close, but never completely united. 7. William Leahy, diary entry for June 4, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, LOC. 8. Churchill to Truman, June 17, 1945, US/45/131, folio 785, CRL; Churchill to Truman, May 13, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, Churchill to Truman, May 1945 Folder, HSTL; Charles Ross to Judge Samuel Rosenman, July 20, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference File, Communications to the Map Room, July 15–25, 1945, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. 9. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 59. 10. Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, in S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Victory (New York: Penguin, 2010), 230; Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 306. 11. Hastings, Winston’s War, 469–471. 12. Joseph Davies, untitled memorandum, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 1–5 Folder, LOC. 13. Churchill to Truman, May 31, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, Churchill to Truman, May 1945 Folder, HSTL. 14. Keith M. Heim, Hope Without Power: Truman and the Russians, 1945, PhD Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1973, D748.H45, 134–135, 146, 151. 15. Joseph Davies, diary entry for July 13, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, LOC. 16. Eden to Churchill, July 10, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 2, Conf/45/152, folio 319–321, CRL. 17. James, Anthony Eden, 306. 18. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 73. 19. Heim, Hope Without Power, 2; Carlo D’Este, Patton: Genius for War (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 735–736. On Stalin’s admiration for Roosevelt, see Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 209. Bohlen was Roosevelt and Truman’s Russian interpreter and a key adviser on Russian affairs. 20. J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 65. 21. Joseph Davies, Memorandum of June 29, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, 6, LOC. 22. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 57–58; Bohlen, Witness to History, 209; “Second Meeting Kremlin—8 pm, May 27, 1945,” in Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, FDR. 23. Bohlen, Witness to History, 215. 24. Dobbs, Six Months, Kindle locations 954, 1944; Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 255. 25. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 500; Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, 73. 26. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), 588; Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 203, 222; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 418. 27. Papers of General Lucius D. Clay: Germany, 1945–1949 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), entry for July 9, 1945. 28. Dobbs, Six Months, Kindle location 5778; Mark Stoler, George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century (Boston: Twain, 1989), 134–136. 29. Dobbs, Six Months, Kindle location 2522; Harriman, LHCMA, 27/80, 28. Ironically in light of that observation, Stalin gave Kathleen Harriman Mortimer two prize Russian horses for her estate as a gift upon her departure from Russia. Because Harriman’s wife did not accompany him to Russia, Kathleen served as the effective First Lady of the embassy. 30. George Kennan, Memoirs, vol. 1, 1925–1950 (Boston: Atlantic–Little Brown, 1967), 257; Bohlen, Witness to History, 222. 31. Plokhy, Yalta, 382. 32. Heim, Hope Without Power, 115. 33. Ibid., 136n70. 34. Albert L. Weeks, Assured Victory: How ‘Stalin the Great’ Won the War, but Lost the Peace (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2011), 134; Montefiore, Stalin, 498; Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 121. 35. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Correspondence Between the Chairman of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the USSR and the President of the USA and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), 344, 360–361. 36. Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 217; “First Meeting, Kremlin 8 pm, May 26, 1945,” in Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, 2–3, FDR. 37. A fuller version of Ebert’s speech is in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 203. 38. Plokhy, Yalta, 38, 53, 323. 39. Robert Gellately, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 76. 40. Papers of William L. Clayton, Chronological File 1945, June 1945–December 31, 1945, Box 1, Berlin Conference, July-August 1945, Folder 1, HSTL. Chapter Four: “Our Troubles Might Not Yet Be Over” 1. Ben Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 2. The British emerged from the war with their debt at 240 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP); in 1939 it had been at 29 percent. 2. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Not for nothing did Anthony Eden, then prime minister, embroil Great Britain in the 1956 Suez crisis. He compared Gamal Adbel Nasser, who had been among those Egyptian officers with pro-German sympathies in World War II, to Benito Mussolini, and ordered British forces to join French and Israeli forces as part of a military operation to take the canal back after Nasser nationalized it. When President Eisenhower refused to extend American support, the British withdrew, leaving Eden and members of his government embarrassed and angry. See David A. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis—Suez and the Brink of War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). 3. S. N. Sen, History of the Freedom Movement in India, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: New Age International Press, 1997), 323; Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 247. I’d like to thank my friend Partha Mazumdar for his help over the years in explaining many of the nuances of South Asian history in addition to his extensive knowledge of macroeconomics. 4. Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, esp. Chapter 4. 5. Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York: Viking, 1960), 396–397; Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 773; Eden to Churchill, July 12, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, Conf/45/157, folio 328, CRL. 6. Joseph Davies to Truman, June 12, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, Box 4, vol. XI, Miscellaneous Papers, Reports by Joseph E. Davies, HSTL. 7. Steil, Battle of Bretton Woods, 110. 8. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (New York: Penguin, 2003), 756, 758, 765, 769; Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 121. 9. Krishan Kumar, “Empire, Nation, and National Identities,” in Andrew Thompson, ed., Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 318. 10. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 758, 775–783. 11. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), 562. 12. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962), 81; Olivier Wieviorka, Normandy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 288–289. 13. Beschloss, Conquerors, 229. Truman’s remarks appeared in the June 24, 1941, issue of the New York Times and many other newspapers as well. 14. The essay appears in Vasily Grossman, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (New York: New York Review Books, 2010). 15. Richard Bessel, Germany, 1945 (New York: Harper, 2009), 150–151; Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 9–13; Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 27. Grossman, The Road, contains a new translation of “The Hell of Treblinka” as well as other wartime writings. 16. Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 46; Bessel, Germany, 1945, 71. 17. Oral History of Yevgeni Khaldei, Cold War Collection, 28/1, pp. 1–4, LHCMA; Oral History of Konstantin Koval, 28/5, p. 12, LHCMA; Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (London: Constable, 1966), 268; Applebaum, Iron Curtain, 26; Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (New York: Random House, 2012), 5. 18. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 479. The figure of 2 million women raped is a rough estimate at best. The true figure will never be known. Oral history of Yevgeni Khaldei, 4, LHCMA; A Wartime Journey: The 296th Engineer Combat Battalion (1939–1945), ARCH COLL Bay 5, Row 190, Face B, Shelf 6, Box 69, Folder 6, p. 84, USAHEC; J. E. Rhys, Memoirs of a Soldier, 12/35/1, 59, IWM. 19. Rhys, Memoirs of a Soldier, 58. Three different American soldiers recorded the soap anecdote in Wartime Journey, 86. The 296th was one of the first American units into Berlin. 20. Eden to Churchill, July 17, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 26, SU/45/135, folio 708, CRL 21. See Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), esp. Chapter 5. 22. David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 235; Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 6303. 23. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, 82, 114–115. 24. Aida D. Donald, Citizen Soldier: A Life of Harry Truman (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 156; William Hillman, ed., Mr. President: The First Publication from the Personal Diaries, Private Letters, Papers, and Revealing Interviews of Harry S. Truman (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1952), 115. 25. Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 341–342. 26. Ibid., 350; Hillman, Mr. President, 83; Nigel Hamilton, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 59. 27. Eden to Churchill, July 17, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 26, SU/45/135, folio 708, CRL; Lord Alanbrooke, diary entry for June 11, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA. Churchill’s allusion to Russia’s only further penetration of Western Europe refers to the Russian occupation of Paris following the first capitulation of Napoleon. The figure of twenty divisions is the high end of the estimate that Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, relayed to Truman. See Joseph Davies, Memorandum of June 29, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, June 26–30 Folder, 7, LOC. 28. William Leahy, diary entry for April 23, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 62, LOC. 29. George Kennan, “Russia’s International Position at the Close of the War with Germany,” in Harry Hopkins Papers, Sherwood Collection, Book 11, Box 338, Hopkins in Moscow (1945) Folder, Harry Hopkins Papers Box 338, n.d., FDR. 30. John Lewis Gaddis, George Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 200–202. For the text of the Long Telegram, see National Security Archive, George Washington University, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar /documents/episode-1/kennan.htm. 31. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Triumph and Tragedy, Book 2 (London: Bantam, 1962), 489. 32. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, xxviii. Chapter Five: “A Vast Undertaking”: Coming to Potsdam 1. Eden to Churchill, July 17, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 26, SU/45/135, folio 708, CRL. 2. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 589. 3. Helen Rappaport, Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO, 1999), 118; Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege (New York: Penguin, 1998), 407. 4. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 504. 5. Robert van Hallberg, “Translation,” in Sacman Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 181; Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 18. 6. Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, Attlee: A Life in Politics (London: I. B. Taurus, 2010), 124. 7. Joseph Davies, “Potsdam: Prelude,” Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 6–10 Folder, LOC. 8. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: The Power of Words (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2012), 360. 9. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 792–793. 10. Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 306; Jenkins, Churchill, 774. 11. James Byrnes noted at Yalta that Roosevelt and Churchill had each “worried about how the other looked.” Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 10, CLEM; Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 310. 12. Joseph Davies to Truman, June 12, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, Box 4, vol. XI, Miscellaneous Papers, Reports by Joseph E. Davies, HSTL. 13. William Leahy, diary entry for July 31, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, LOC. 14. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 13, CLEM; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 138. 15. Charles Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975), 83; Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940–1945 (New York: Knopf, 2010), 473. 16. “Terminal Administrative Arrangements, June 27, 1945,” in Mrs. O. M. Margerison Papers, IWM 99/40/1. 17. Prime Minister to President Truman, June 4, 1945, Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, Message number 72, FDR. 18. Anthony Eden, The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon (Cambridge, UK: Riverside Press, 1965), 631. 19. Eden, Reckoning, 629. 20. Papers of Lord Ismay, 2/3/284/2a, LHCMA; Clement Attlee, As It Happened (New York: Viking, 1954), 204. 21. Scrapbook of Colonel J. W. E. Gainher, Spec Misc C10, IWM. 22. “Potsdam Symphony” and Brigadier O. M. Wales, “Report on Operation Terminal,” in Papers of Lieutenant Colonel Evelyn Lindsay-Young, Potsdam Conference, Germany, July 1945 Folder, LHCMA. 23. Eden, Reckoning, 634. 24. Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 331–332. 25. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 234; Truman to Alben Barkley, July 5, 1945, WHCF: OF 190, Potsdam Conference, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. Barkley soon became Truman’s vice president. On Senate reservations to both treaties, see Allen Drury, A Senate Journal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 464–466. Drury was the United Press’s Capitol Hill bureau chief. 26. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 16, Folder 12, CLEM. 27. Robert Messner, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Engines of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 80–83. 28. William Hillman, ed., Mr. President: The First Publication from the Personal Diaries, Private Letters, Papers, and Revealing Interviews of Harry S. Truman (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Young, 1952), 123. 29. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 66. 30. Ibid., 68. 31. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Collaboration with Russia (New York: Viking, 1947), 273. 32. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 403. 33. Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 68; Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 16, Folder 12, CLEM. 34. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 16, Folder 12, CLEM. 35. Charles Ross to Eben Ayers, July 19, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the Presidential Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference File, Communications to the Map Room Folder, HSTL. 36. Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), 442; McCullough, Truman, 430. 37. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 15. 38. Volkogonov, Stalin, 497–499; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 480, 498. 39. Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (London: Constable, 1966), 267; Oral History of George McKee Elsey, 27/11, 5–6, LHCMA; Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 37. Chapter Six: “What a Scene of Destruction” 1. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia (New York: Viking, 1947), 269. 2. Nigel Hamilton, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 57. See also Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), and Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, 1914–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 3. Martha Gellhorn, “Dachau,” in Reporting World War II, Part Two, American Journalism, 1944–1946 (New York: Library of America, 1995), 724. See also Peter Schrijvers, The Crash of Ruin: American Combat Soldiers in Europe During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 4. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 68. 5. Flight Lieutenant A. H. Coleman, 09/69/1, and L. M. I. Marston, 93/18/1, IWM. 6. J. E. Rhys, 12/35/1, IWM, and Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 7. Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York: Viking, 1960), 401–402; Lord Alanbrooke, diary entries for July 16 and July 19, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA. 8. Floyd Parks, Diary entry for July 16, 1945, Floyd Parks Papers, Box 1, “Diary, July-August 1945” Folder, USAHEC; President’s Trip to the Berlin Conference, MSS 90, James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 12, CLEM; Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 341. 9. “Potsdam Prelude,” Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 6–10 Folder, LOC. 10. Ibid.; Ismay, Memoirs, 402; Oral History Interview with Richard R. Beckman, July 5, 1991, HSTL, downloaded from Truman Library, Independence, Missouri, http://trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/beckmanr.htm, 62; David Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 392; Floyd Parks, diary entry for July 26, 1945, Floyd Parks Papers, Box 1, “Diary, July-August 1945 Folder,” USAHEC. 11. Lord Moran, Churchill, Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 289; Ismay, Memoirs, 402. 12. “Narrative, Lille, September, 1944 to Berlin, 1945,” in Lieutenant Colonel Evelyn Lindsay-Young Papers, LHCMA; Evelyn Lindsay-Young, entries for June 25 and July 28, 1945, ibid., LHCMA; Alan Brooke, diary entry for July 16, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA. 13. William Leahy, diary entry for July 16, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Box 6, Reel 4, LOC. 14. A. H. Colman, 09/69/1, IWM. 15. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 23; Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans from the East (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 60. 16. Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, 1, 8. 17. See Richard Bessel, Germany, 1945 (New York: Harper, 2009), 67–68; Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 1. 18. Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 31, 58–59. 19. Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 40–52. 20. Ibid., 65–73. 21. Bessel, Germany, 1945, 9, 235. 22. Beckman oral history, 60–61, HSTL. 23. Deane, Strange Alliance, 270; Walter J. Brown Papers, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 24. Richard Beckman to his wife, August 2, 1945, Papers of Richard Beckman, “An Accounting of Time to Scrapbook, 1942–1945 [1 of 2],” Box 1, Correspondence, 1945, Folder 2 of 2, HSTL. 25. Bessel, Germany, 1945, 134. 26. Carlo D’Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 686. Eisenhower ordered all American units able to make the trip to see the camp for themselves. “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for,” Eisenhower said. “Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.” 27. Lucius Clay, Papers of Lucius Clay, vol. 1, Germany 1945–1949 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 47. 28. O. M. Margerison to her husband, August 2, 1945, 99/40/1, IWM; Richard Beckman to his father, August 4, 1945, Papers of Richard Beckman, “An Accounting of Time to Scrapbook, 1942–1945 [1 of 2],” Box 1, Correspondence, 1945, Folder 2 of 2, HSTL. 29. Deane, Strange Alliance, 268. 30. Papers of A. H. Colman, 09/69/1, and O. M. Margerison, 99/40/1, IWM. 31. Papers of O. M. Margerison, 99/40/1, IWM; Papers of Harry S. Truman, President’s Secretary’s Files, Box 283, August 5, 1945, Folder, HSTL. 32. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 216. 33. William Leahy, diary entries for July 15 and 16, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Box 6, Reel 4, LOC; Truman to Churchill, April 19, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: White House Map Room Files, April 1945–January 1946, Outgoing Messages, Box 2, Top Secret File, April 1945, HSTL. 34. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (New York: Random House, 2012), 235. Chapter Seven: “In Seventeen Days You Can Decide Anything” 1. J. E. Rhys, Memoirs of a Soldier, 12/35/1, IWM. 2. Die Villa Ingenheim (Berlin: be.bra wissenschaft, 2005). 3. L. M. I. Marston to her mother, July 4, 1945, 93/18/1, IWM; “Information Bulletin, Tripartite Conference,” Papers of Harry S. Truman, SMOF: President’s Secretary Files, Box 141, Potsdam, Germany, Trip [July-August, 1 of 2] Folder, HSTL. 4. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 105. 5. John Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia (New York: Viking, 1947), 269; Joseph Davies, diary entry for July 15, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 14 Folder, LOC. 6. Truman to Hopkins, May 28, 1945, White House Cable No. 281558, Harry Hopkins Papers, Hopkins 338, FDR; David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 390. 7. O. M. Margerison to her husband, August 2, 1945, 99/40/1, IWM; C. R. Attlee, As It Happened (New York: Viking, 1954), 205. Today Cecilienhof is a hotel and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 8. “The Potsdam Conference,” July 22, 1945, Papers of Richard Beckman, “An Accounting of Time to Scrapbook, 1942–1945 [1 of 2],” Box 1, Potsdam Folder, HSTL. 9. Ibid. 10. Floyd L. Parks, diary entry for July 9, 1945, Floyd L. Parks Papers, Box 1, “Papers, 1944–1945,” “Diary, July-August 1945” Folder, USAHEC; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 151; “The Potsdam Conference.” 11. Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 38. 12. Lieutenant Colonel Evelyn Lindsay-Young, “Narrative, Lille, Sept. 1944, to Berlin, 1945,” entries for July 8, 9, and 15, 1945, LHCMA; George McKee Elsey, An Unplanned Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 88; Richard Beckman to his father, August 5, 1945, Papers of Richard Beckman, “An Accounting of Time to Scrapbook, 1942–1945 [1 of 2],” Box 1, Correspondence, 1945 [2 of 2] Folder, HSTL. 13. L. M. I. Marston to her mother, July 6, 1945, 93/18/1, IWM. 14. Brigadier O. M. Wales, “Report on Operation Terminal,” LHCMA; Richard Beckman to his father, July 15, 1945, Papers of Richard Beckman, “An Accounting of Time to Scrapbook, 1942–1945 [1 of 2],” Box 1, Correspondence, 1945 [2 of 2] Folder, HSTL; MSS 90, “Report on the Tripartite Conference of Berlin,” James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 10, CLEM. 15. V. Biriskov, Nuclear Age 12/9, LHCMA; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History (New York: Norton, 1973), 227. 16. Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 350, 364. 17. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 3286. 18. Halifax to Eden, April 23, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/101, folio 748, CRL; Joseph Davies, diary entry for July 13, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 11–13 Folder, LOC. 19. Map Room Messages of President Truman, *2H-726, Reel 2, NYPL, June 8, 1945. 20. Truman, Memoirs, 386. 21. Floyd L. Parks, diary entries for July 31 and August 1, 1945, Floyd L. Parks Papers, Box 1, “Papers, 1944–1945” “Diary, July-August 1945” Folder, USAHEC; Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 22. Papers of L. M. I. Marston, 93/18/1, IWM; Scrapbook of Colonel J. W. E. Gainher, Spec Misc C10, IWM; O. M. Margerison to her husband, August 2, 1945, 99/40/1, IWM. 23. Floyd L. Parks, diary entry for July 14, 1945, Floyd L. Parks Papers, Box 1, “Papers, 1944–1945,” “Diary, July-August 1945” Folder, USAHEC. 24. Truman, Memoirs, 370. 25. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 406. Canfil gave Harry Truman his famous plaque reading “The Buck Stops Here.” 26. Clay, Decision in Germany, 45; Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 234; Truman to Alben Barkley, July 5, 1945, WHCF: OF 190, Potsdam Conference, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. Barkley soon became Truman’s vice president; on Senate reservations to both treaties, see Allen Drury, A Senate Journal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 464–466. 27. Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 389, folio 63, and vol. 30, US/45/157, folio 813, CRL; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Correspondence Between the Chairmen of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the USSR and the Presidents of the USA and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), 370; Charles Ross to Eben Ayers, July 13, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference File, Communications to the Map Room, July 7–14, 1945, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. 28. Acting Secretary of State to Secretary of State, July 21, 1945, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder, Entries 307 and 308, Box 8b, Record Group 43, NARA. 29. “The Berlin Conference,” Life, August 6, 1945, 15–28; Robert Ferrell, ed., Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 55. Ayers served as Truman’s assistant press secretary. 30. Acting Secretary of State to Secretary of State, July 20, 1945, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder, Entries 307 and 308, Box 8b, Record Group 43, NARA; Lindsay-Young, “Narrative,” entry for July 19, 1945; Charles Ross to Eben Ayers, July 19 and July 24, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference File, Communications to the Map Room, July 15–25, 1945, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL; and Ross to Ayers, July 24, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference File, Communications to the Map Room, July 7–14, 1945, Folder 2 of 2, HSTL. 31. Ferrell, ed., Truman in the White House, 204. 32. Truman, Memoirs, 349. 33. Ibid., 394; Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948 (New York: Norton, 1977), 84, 88. 34. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 58. 35. Italy sent a corps to support the German invasion of Russia in 1941. The 130,000-man strong Italian Eighth Army fought with the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad. See MacGregor Knox, Hitler’s Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940–43 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 36. See Michael S. Neiberg, The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944 (New York: Basic Books, 2012), Chapter 9. 37. Truman to Churchill, June 5, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: White House Map Room Files, April 1945–January 1946, Outgoing Messages, Box 2, Top Secret File, June 1945 Folder, HSTL. 38. Joseph Davies, diary entry for July 14, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 11–13 Folder, LOC; Irwin Gellman, Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Wells (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 401. 39. Roll, The Hopkins Touch, 379; Walter J. Brown Papers, Box 8, Folder 13, CLEM. 40. Churchill headed the British government, but King George VI was its head of state. Stalin held the official title of general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was not the equivalent of a head of state. Chapter Eight: “I Dreamed That My Life Was Over” 1. Albert L. Weeks, Assured Victory: How ‘Stalin the Great’ Won the War but Lost the Peace (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 139. For more on Hopkins and his impressions, see Matthew B. Wills, Wartime Missions of Harry L. Hopkins (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2004), and David I. Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. “Conversation, 30 July, 1945, 4:30 pm,” in Potsdam Conference Minutes, Record Group 43, Entry 307, Box 8a, p. 11, NARA; Averill Harriman to Truman, June 8, 1945, Map Room Messages of President Truman, *2H-726, Reel 2, NYPL; Joseph Davies, untitled document, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 1–5 Folder, LOC; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 347–348. 3. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 491. In 1970, the KGB ordered Hitler’s remains removed from the grave at Magdeburg, the body cremated, and the ashes scattered. 4. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Row, 1947), 68; “First Meeting, Kremlin 8 pm, May 26, 1945,” in Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, 7, FDR. This might well be the origin of the popular myth that Hitler had somehow escaped to South America after the war. 5. Montefiore, Stalin, 497–498; Oral History of Valentin Berezhekov, prepared for the documentary The Nuclear Age, 12/8, vol. 2, 8, LHCMA. 6. Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (New York: Crown, 2014). 7. Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 307–308; Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. These were not new patterns for Churchill, as previously unpublished World War I diaries from Lewis Harcourt and Margot Asquith will demonstrate. Harcourt, a cabinet member, wrote of Churchill, “I think he has gone mad.” Asquith, the wife of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, called Churchill, “insolent” and said that his “vanity is septic.” See Hannah Furness, “Revealed: War Diary Meant to Stay Secret,” The Telegraph, June 8, 2014, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10883656 /Revealed-war-diary-meant-to-stay-secret.html; Dalya Alberge, “‘Insolent’ Churchill, ‘Ignorant’ Kitchener: Waspish Wartime Diaries of Margot Asquith,” The Guardian, June 7, 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/08/margot -asquith-diaries-insolent-churchill-ignorant-kitchener; and Michael Brock, ed., Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8. Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940–1945 (New York: Knopf, 2010), 475. 9. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 6186. 10. Nigel Hamilton, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 85. 11. Charles Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975), 96, 100; Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 363; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 189. 12. Feis, Between War and Peace, 188; William Leahy, diary entry for July 20, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, 1945, LOC. 13. Lord Alanbrooke, diary entry for July 23, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA. 14. Eden to Cadogan, June 17, 1945, in Anthony Eden (Lord Avon) Papers, Conf/45/126, folio 287, CRL. 15. Anthony Eden, The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon (Cambridge, UK: Riverside Press, 1965), 630, 632. 16. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 17. Field Marshal Brooke was one British leader who told Churchill to resist Labour’s demands for an early election. After Churchill’s defeat, Brooke complained to his diary “What was my advice to him, a mere soldier!!!” Lord Alanbrooke, diary entry for July 26, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA. 18. Mrs. O. M. Margerison to her husband, August 2, 1945, 99/40/1, IWM (emphases in original). 19. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 3 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 101; Churchill, after all, is the man who said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” On Churchill and his memoirs, see David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005). 20. Eden, Reckoning, 635. 21. Ibid., 636. 22. Clement Attlee, Twilight of Empire: The Memoirs of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), 69; Eden, Reckoning, 638. 23. Clement Attlee, As It Happened (New York: Viking, 1954), 207; William Leahy, diary entry for July 26, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, LOC. 24. McCullough, Truman, 446; Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), 501. 25. Attlee, Twilight of Empire, 71. 26. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 233; Hastings, Winston’s War, 476; Lord Alanbrooke, diary entry for July 26, 1945, LHCMA. 27. James, Anthony Eden, 311; Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 232. 28. Attlee, Twilight of Empire, 9. 29. Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 7, Folder 5, CLEM; Hastings, Winston’s War, 478. 30. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 232; James, Anthony Eden, 311. 31. Lieutenant General Burrows to General Lionel Ismay, August 17, 1945, in Burrows Papers, 4/4/1–9, LCHMA. 32. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 45, 254. 33. McCullough, Truman, 447–448. 34. Lieutenant General Burrows to General Ismay, August 17, 1945, in Burrows Papers, 4/4/1–9, LHCMA; Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 251. 35. Truman, Memoirs, 395; Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 39. 36. “Clement Richard Attlee,” Life, August 6, 1945, 27; Truman, Memoirs, 389. 37. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 38. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 79. 39. Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 567. 40. Eden, Reckoning, 635. Chapter Nine: “Dismemberment as a Permanent Fate”? Solving the Problem of Germany 1. See David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), Chapter 3. 2. Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 38; Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 367. 3. S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Penguin, 2010), 111; Truman, Memoirs, 370; FRUS, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1945), 795–797. 4. George Kennan, “Russia’s International Position at the Close of the War with Germany,” n.d. [but almost certainly May 1945], Harry Hopkins Papers, Sherwood Collection, Book 11, Box 338, Hopkins in Moscow Folder, 10, FDR. 5. “Wilson’s War Message to Congress,” April 2, 1917, World War I Document Archive, http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Wilson’s_War_Message _to_Congress. 6. Henry Stimson, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 583; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 57; Joseph Grew to James Byrnes, July 21, 1945, NARA II, Record Group 43, entries 307 and 308, Box 8b, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder; Proposal by the Soviet Delegation, July 23, 1945, FRUS, 755–756. 7. Proposal by the Soviet Delegation, July 23, 1945, FRUS, 810. 8. Ibid., 802–804. 9. Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 132, 134. 10. Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 231. 11. Floyd L. Parks Papers, Box 1, “Papers, 1944–1945,” “Diary July-August, 1945,” Folder 1, USAHEC. 12. Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 31, WARC/45/5, folios 67–73, CRL. 13. Interview with Dick Hottelet, Parks Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, USAHEC. 14. Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life (New York: Henry, Holt, 1990); Jennifer Fay, Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 15. Plokhy, Yalta, 92, 109; “Dismemberment of Germany,” July 11, 1945, Papers of William L. Clayton, Chronological File 1945, June 1945–December 31, 1945, Box 1, Berlin Conference, July-August 1945, Folder 2, HSTL. 16. Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 283. 17. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), 624; Steil, Battle of Bretton Woods, 287. 18. “Third Meeting, Kremlin, 8 pm, May 28, 1945,” in Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, FDR; Steil, Battle of Bretton Woods, 283, 286. 19. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Viking, 1947), 82; Truman to Joseph Davies, July 20, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part II, Box 42, Correspondence, June-July 1945 Folder, LOC. 20. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (New York: Penguin, 2003), 771. 21. Averill Harriman to the Secretary of State, July 6, 1945, NARA II, Record Group 43, entries 307 and 308, Box 8b, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder. 22. Recommendations from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, June 26, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 2, vol. V, HSTL. 23. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 34; Clement Attlee, Twilight of Empire: Memoirs of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), 77. 24. Thomas Lamont, quoted in Margaret Macmillan, Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 180; Foreign Ministers Meeting, July 27, 1945, Record Group 43, Entry 307, Box 8a, NARA. 25. Pauley to Molotov, July 27, 1945, FRUS, 896. 26. Potsdam Conference Minutes, entries for July 23 and July 27, 1945, NARA II; FRUS, 876, 889; “Russian Machinery Removals from Berlin,” July 25, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, Box 4, vol. XI, Miscellaneous Papers, Reparations, HSTL. 27. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 83–84; Bohlen, Witness to History, 233; Shephard, Long Road Home, 149; Truman, Memoirs, 357; FRUS, 918, 927. 28. Truman, Memoirs, 360; FRUS, 809, 837, 961. 29. Potsdam Conference Minutes, Foreign Ministers Meeting, July 23, 1945, 4 pm, Record Group 43, Entry 307, Box 8a, NARA; Memorandum, July 18, 1945, Record Group 43, entries 307 and 308, Box 8b, NARA. 30. “Proposal for the Establishment of a Council of Foreign Ministers,” Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 171, “Big Three Conference Agenda (Potsdam),” July 1945, tabs 1, 2, 9, 14, 15, FDR; FRUS, 896. 31. FRUS, 993–997. Chapter Ten: “The Bastard of Versailles” 1. Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 96. 2. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 128. 3. For more on Soviet crimes against Poles, see Snyder, Bloodlands. Zaolzie had a plurality of ethnic Poles, but not a majority. It also had a key rail juncture and valuable coal mines. The Germans were happy to give Poland a piece of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference in order to make the point that Germany was not solely responsible for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. 4. John Owens, editorial from the Baltimore Sun “sent to the President for Potsdam,” Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, June 26–30 Folder, LOC. 5. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 226. The main difference in the two lines existed around the town of Bialystok, which lay west of the Curzon Line but east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line. 6. Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 439, 445; Arthur Bliss Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to the American People (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1948), 60; Churchill to Truman, April 29, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, Churchill to Truman, April 1945 Folder, HSTL. 7. Bela Grünwald Ivanyi and Alan Bell, Route to Potsdam: The Story of the Peace Aims, 1939–1945 (London: Allan Wingate, 1946), 72, 96; Lane, Poland Betrayed, 84. Lane estimated that in fact 12 million Poles then lived between the Curzon and Riga lines, although this number may be too high. 8. Snyder, Bloodlands, 307; “The Polish Problem, 1943–1945,” April 25, 1945, Papers of William L. Clayton, Chronological File 1945, June 1945–December 31, 1945, Box 1, Historical Reports and Research Notes—Poland Folder, HSTL. 9. Henry Lewis Stimson Diaries in the Yale University Library, microfilm reel 9, entry for April 2, 1945, USAHEC; Recommendations from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, June 26, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 2, vol. V, HSTL. 10. Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 331. 11. S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Penguin, 2010), 177–178; David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 371; July 18 Meeting of the Heads of State, MSS 90, James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 6, CLEM. 12. Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 452, 455; Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans from the East (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 47–49; “Summary of the Views Expressed by the Polish Delegation,” July 24, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, Box 4, vol. XI, Miscellaneous Papers, Poland, HSTL. 13. Roll, Hopkins Touch, 371. 14. “Summary of the Views Expressed by the Polish Delegation,” HSTL. 15. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 1919; “The Polish Problem, 1943–1945.” 16. Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 152, 167; FRUS, vol. V, 362. 17. Lane, Poland Betrayed, i; George Kennan, Memoirs, vol. 1, 1925–1950 (Boston: Atlantic–Little Brown, 1967), 263; Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 515. 18. Truman to Stalin, May 4, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: White House Map Room Files: April 1945–January 1946, Outgoing Messages, Box 2, Top Secret File, May 1945 Folder, HSTL; Draft Submitted by the Soviet Delegation, July 18, 1945, MSS 90, James Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 6, CLEM. 19. Richard Bessel, Germany, 1945 (New York: Harper, 2009), 69–70, 214; Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 545; FRUS, vol. V, 277; Joseph Grew to James Byrnes, July 25, 1945, Record Group 43, Entry 307, Box 8b, NARA. 20. For more on this issue, see Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 514–515. 21. Messages of June 3 and June 6, 1945, Map Room Messages of President Truman, *2H-726, Reel 2, NYPL; J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 85. In the end three of the men were acquitted; one was sentenced to ten years in prison, another to eight years, and three men to five years; the rest received sentences of between four months and one year. Three of the men died in prison. See Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 534–536. 22. Halifax to Eden, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, May 14, 1945, US/45/114, folio 765, CRL; Clement Attlee, Twilight of Empire: Memoirs of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), 76; Joseph Davies, Memorandum of June 29, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, June 26–30 Folder, LOC; Robert Messner, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 50; FRUS, vol. V, 252; Harry Hopkins to Truman, June 3, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: White House Map Room Files, Incoming Messages, Top Secret File, June 1945 Folder, HSTL. 23. Halifax to Eden, May 14, 1945; “Second Meeting, Kremlin—8 pm, May 27, 1945,” and “Fifth Meeting, Kremlin—6 pm, May 31, 1945,” Harry Hopkins Papers, Sherwood Collection, Box 338, Hopkins in Moscow Folder, FDR. 24. “Territorial Studies,” July 6, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Berlin Conference File, Box 1, vol. III, Tabs 12, 17–24, HSTL. 25. Charles Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975), 171; “President’s Trip to the Berlin Conference,” James F. Byrnes Papers, MSS 90, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 12, CLEM; Anthony Eden, The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon (Cambridge, UK: Riverside Press, 1965), 630–631; Dobbs, Six Months in 1945, Kindle location 1214. 26. Eden, Reckoning, 630–631; Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 819; Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 369. 27. Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 232; Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 177, 179. 28. Bessel, Germany, 1945, 232; Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 538. 29. Oral History of Kathleen Harriman Mortimer, Cold War 27/80, 22, 29–30, LHCMA; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 211. 30. John Lewis Gaddis, George Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 202. 31. Zayas, Nemesis, 53; William Leahy, diary entry for July 31, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, LOC; Bessel, Germany, 1945, 228, 234–237, 240. 32. Joseph Grew to James Byrnes, July 25, 1945, Record Group 43, Entry 307, Box 8b, NARA. 33. FRUS, vol. V, 257. 34. Ibid., 263. 35. Feis, Between War and Peace, 229; Dobbs, Six Months in 1945, Kindle locations 6160, 6168. 36. FRUS, vol. V, 254, 265; Churchill to Truman, April 29, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, Churchill to Truman, April 1945 Folder, HSTL. 37. “Second Draft of Speech by President Truman on Berlin Conference,” n.d., Papers of William L. Clayton, Chronological File 1945, June 1945–December 31, 1945, Box 1, Berlin Conference, July-August 1945, Folder 1, HSTL. 38. Anne Applebaum, Behind the Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 17. Chapter Eleven: Dr. Groves’s Son and the Fate of East Asia 1. See Guoqi Xu, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 2. Margaret Macmillan, Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 338. 3. A Chinese version of these events is in Hu Sheng, From the Opium War to the May Fourth Movement, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991), 646ff. 4. Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 6–10 Folder, LOC. 5. “Third Meeting, Kremlin—8 pm, May 28, 1945,” Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, 6, FDR. See also Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 263–265, and Zhang Baijia, “China’s Quest for Foreign Military Aid,” in Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 283–307. 6. “Third Meeting, Kremlin—8 pm, May 28, 1945”; Hopkins to Truman, May 29, 1945, Map Room Messages of President Truman, *2H-726, Reel 2, NYPL; Baijia, “China’s Quest for Foreign Military Aid,” 292. 7. ALUSNA [American Legation United States Naval Attaché, the office responsible for coding and sending secret messages] Moscow to Truman, July 9, 1945; Harriman to Truman, July 11, 1945; and COMNAVGROUP China to Byrnes, July 19 and 20, 1945, “Potsdam to Babelsberg (From Other Sources)” Folder, Record Group 43, Box 8b, NARA; FRUS 1945, vol. II (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1945), 1223. 8. James I. Matray, “Fighting the Problem: George C. Marshall and Korea,” in Charles F. Brower, ed., George C. Marshall: Servant of the American Nation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 81; Henry Lewis Stimson Diaries in the Yale University Library, microfilm reel 9, entry for April 5, 1945, USAHEC; Papers and Minutes of Meetings of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 2, vol. VI, 33, HSTL. 9. George Kennan to Truman, April 23, 1945, and Harry Hopkins to Truman, May 30, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: White House Map Room Files, Incoming Messages, Top Secret File, April 1945–May 1945, HSTL. 10. Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 382; Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York: Viking, 1960), 401. 11. [Joseph] Grew to [James] Byrnes, July 21, 1945, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder, Record Group 43, Box 8b, NARA; USS Augusta Morning Press, August 5, 1945, Presidential Secretary’s Files, Box 141, Potsdam Germany Trip, July-August 1945, Folder 1 of 2, and Frank Boykin to Truman, July 25, 1945, WHCF: OF 190, Miscellaneous (1945), Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. 12. Stimson Diary, entry for July 23, 1945, USAHEC. 13. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), 493. 14. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia (New York: Viking, 1947), 272–276; Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), 74. 15. Truman, Year of Decisions, 382, David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 424; Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1995), 268; Meeting of Heads of Government, July 19, 1945, 5 pm, MSS 90, James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 6, CLEM. 16. J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 224; Stimson Diary, entry for July 24, 1945, USAHEC; Millis, Forrestal Diaries, 80. 17. Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 1594. 18. State [Department] to Babelsberg, July 21, 1945, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder, Record Group 43, Box 8b, NARA; Millis, Forrestal Diaries, 53; Background Information, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Berlin Conference Files, Box 1, vol. II, 63, HSTL. 19. Harry Hopkins to Truman, May 30, 1945, Map Room Messages, HSTL; Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 20. Millis, Forrestal Diaries, 52, 69–71. 21. J. David Kidwell to Truman, May 10, 1945, Fred Burdick to Truman, July 14, 1945, and New York Times, May 11, 1945, in WHCF: OF 190, Miscellaneous (1945), Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. 22. Ferenc Szasz, The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 145. The full text of Groves’s two notes and the much longer reports that followed are in FRUS, vol. II, 1360ff. 23. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 149; Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 4429; Stimson Diary, entry for July 21, 1945, USAHEC. 24. Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. See also Barrett Tillman, Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 25. Robert H. Ferrell, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 55–56. 26. Lord Alanbrooke, diary entry for July 23, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA (emphasis in original). 27. McCullough, Truman, 393; Clement Attlee, Twilight of Empire: Memoirs of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), 73. 28. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 206, 289; Ismay, Memoirs, 401. 29. Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 112; McCullough, Truman, 444. 30. Anthony Eden, The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon (Cambridge, UK: Riverside Press, 1965), 634; Dobbs, Six Months in 1945, Kindle location 4454; Charles Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975), 110. 31. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 498. 32. Montefiore, Stalin, 499. Curiously, Anthony Eden, who was standing nearby, said that Stalin only replied “Thank you.” A Russian aide later said that Stalin only shook his head. See David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 117. 33. Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 237; Messner, End of an Alliance, 112; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 177. 34. Oral histories of Valentin Berezhkov and V. Biriskov, Nuclear Age, 12/8 and 12/9, LHCMA; Montefiore, Stalin, 500; Messner, End of an Alliance, 104. 35. Charles Ross to Eben Ayers, July 24, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference, Communications to the Map Room, July 15–25, 1945, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. 36. The full declaration is available at National Diet Library, Birth of the Constitution of Japan, Text of the Constitution and Other Important Documents, Potsdam Declaration, www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html. 37. FRUS, vol. II, 1293. 38. McCullough, Truman, 785–786; Feis, Between War and Peace, 115. Rusk, of course, went on to become secretary of state from 1961 to 1969. Conclusion 1. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 62, 285. 2. MSS 90, James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 6, CLEM; MSS 243, Walter J. Brown Papers, Box 8, Folder 10, CLEM. 3. Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), Jennifer Fay, Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) all show the far more aggressive role of US government agencies in using soft and hard power to influence events in Europe in the 1940s compared to the 1920s. 4. Nigel Hamilton, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 59; Truman to Eben Ayers, Papers of Harry S. Truman, SMOF: President’s Secretary’s Files, Box 197, Potsdam Conference, 1945 Folder, HSTL; Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 331. 5. Walter J. Brown Papers, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM; Hamilton, American Caesars, 59. Debates over sharing the atomic bomb show the continued tensions between the United States and Great Britain. In the fall of 1946, after a meeting with Byrnes on the subject, Ernest Bevin told Clement Attlee: “I don’t want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked at, or to, by the Secretary of State in the United States as I just have in my discussions with Mr. Byrnes. We’ve got to have this thing [the atomic bomb] over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.” Gerard de Groot, The Bomb: A Life (London: Pimlico, 2005), 219. 6. MSS 90, James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 6, CLEM. 7. George McKee Elsey, An Unplanned Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 91; Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 410–412. 8. Lukas E. Hoska, A Critical Analysis of the Summit Conferences of Tehran, the Crimea, and Berlin (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Affairs, 1960), 173–179, USAHEC; Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 39–43; James Forrestal, The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), 78. 9. Richard M. Brickner, Is Germany Incurable? (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1943). Brickner saw some hope, noting that the very different attitudes of ethnic Germans in the United States proved that the problem was societal, not racial. See Fay, Theaters of Occupation, 17–26. 10. Papers of Wallace R. Deuel, Box 61, Potsdam Conference Folder, LOC. 11. Vol. II, Background Information, and vol. IV, Papers Prepared by the Department of State for Discussion, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 1, HSTL. 12. Eden to Churchill, February 2, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 19, Pal/45/2, folio 72–73, Palestine 1936–1945 and Peace Settlement, CRL. 13. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Mariner Books, 2000), Chapter 4. For more on the extremely complex reactions of the Soviet Union to the Holocaust, see Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 545–547. 14. Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 103, 110–114; Alex Grobman, Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1945–1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 81. 15. Shephard, Long Road Home, 113–118; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 595. Harrison was then dean of the law school at the University of Pennsylvania and a former senior official with the US Immigration Department. 16. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 86–87. 17. Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, 28, LOC; Montefiore, Stalin, 502; Student Research File, Potsdam Conference, Folder 1, HSTL. 18. Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 13, CLEM; McCullough, Truman, 454.
Churchill, puffing at a cigar, approached Stalin who was himself smoking a Churchillian cigar. If anyone were to photograph the Generalissimo with a cigar, it would “create an immense sensation,” Churchill beamed, “everyone will say it is my influence.” Actually British influence was greatly diminished in the new world order of the superpowers in which they could agree on the de‑Nazification of Germany but not on reparations or Poland. Now Hitler was gone, the differences were mountainous. When Stalin decided he wanted a stroll in the gardens after a session, a British delegate was amazed to see “a platoon of Russian tommy‑gunners in skirmishing order, then a number of guards and units of the NKVD army. Finally appeared Uncle Joe on foot with his usual thugs surrounding him, followed by another screen of skirmishers. The enormous officer who always sits behind Uncle at meetings was apparently in charge of operations and was running around directing tommy‑gunners to cover all the alleys.” After a few hundred yards, Stalin was picked up by his car.
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| ...and in 2020 |
Finally, on 24 July, two monumental moments symbolized the imminent end of the Grand Alliance. First Churchill attacked Stalin for closing off Eastern Europe, citing the problems of the British mission in Bucharest: “An iron fence has come down around them,” he said, trying out the phrase that would become “the iron curtain.” “Fairy tales!” snapped Stalin. The meeting ended at 7:30 p.m. Stalin headed out of the room but Truman seemed to hurry after him. Interpreter Pavlov deftly appeared beside Stalin. Churchill, who had discussed this moment with the President, watched in fascination as Truman approached the Generalissimo “as if by chance,” in Stalin’s words. “The U.S.A.,” said Truman, “tested a new bomb of extraordinary destructive power.” Pavlov watched Stalin closely: “no muscle moved in his face.” He simply said he was glad to hear it: “A new bomb! Of extraordinary power! Probably decisive on the Japanese! What a bit of luck!” Stalin followed the plan he had agreed with Beria to give the Americans no satisfaction but he still thought the Americans were playing games: “An A‑bomb is a completely new weapon and Truman didn’t exactly say that.” He noticed Churchill’s glee too: Truman spoke “not without Churchill’s knowledge.”
Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Notes Abbreviations CLEM. Clemson University Special Collections, Clemson, South Carolina CRL. Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom FDR. Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York FRUS. Foreign Relations of the United States Series HSTL. Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri IWM. Imperial War Museum, London LHCMA. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London LOC. Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, DC NARA. National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park, Maryland NYPL. New York Public Library, New York City SMOF. Staff Member Office Files USAHEC. United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania Introduction 1. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 143–144; Aida D. Donald, Citizen-Soldier: A Life of Harry Truman (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 67. 2. James W. Muller, “The Aftermath of the Great War,” in James W. Muller, ed., Churchill as Peacemaker (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178; Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 4, The Stricken World, 1916–1922 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 427; Alan Wood, The Origins of the Russian Revolution (London: Routledge, 2003), 49. 3. Charles Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975), 7; Robert Betzell, Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam: The Secret Protocols (Hattiesburg, MS: Academic International, 1970), 141. 4. The Big Three at Versailles were American President Woodrow Wilson, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando thought of himself as part of a Big Four, but clearly he played a secondary role in the conference, in part because he did not speak French or English very well but disliked relying on interpreters out of a fear of appearing weak. In April 1919 he stormed out of the conference, but he returned in June; his terrible showing at the conference contributed significantly to his resignation at the end of the month. 5. Charles à Court Repington, The First World War, 1914–1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920); Private Alexander Clay, 33rd (US) Infantry Division, 131st Regiment, Veterans Survey, USAHEC. 6. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, Camus at Combat: Writing, 1944–1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 111; William Leahy, diary entry for August 14, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 144, LOC. In Repington’s more global conception, the era also included the 1911 revolution in China and the humiliating Russian defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1904–1905, both of which radically altered the strategic picture in Asia as well as in Europe. Repington, First World War. 7. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 97. 8. Bela Grünewald Ivanyi and Alan Bell, Route to Potsdam: The Story of the Peace Aims, 1939–1945 (London: Allan Wingate, 1946), 45. 9. “Suggestions for a Peace Settlement,” Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, Pal/45/2, folio 103, CRL. 10. “Some Considerations on the Guidance to Be Obtained from the Procedure of the Peace-Making of 1918–20,” Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, Pea/43/1, folio 2, CRL. 11. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 234. 12. Harry Hopkins to President Truman, May 30, 1945, Map Room Messages of President Truman, *2H-726, Reel 2, NYPL. Stalin made the observation about the Senate possibly rejecting agreements made at Potsdam to American diplomat and senior United Nations official Alger Hiss. Within a few weeks of the end of the war, rumors began to spread that Hiss was working as a Soviet spy. Robert Messner, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Engines of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 45. 13. McCullough, Truman, 415–416. 14. William Leahy, diary entry for April 12, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 55, LOC. 15. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 48. 16. I would like to acknowledge the intellectual debt this book owes to two studies: Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), and Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 17. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 5, 30. 18. Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 497. Chapter One: “Jesus Christ and General Jackson” 1. Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin, 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2003). 2. Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 2013), 608. 3. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), 622–626. For more on Roosevelt’s health problems, see Smith, 600ff. 4. Ibid., 629. 5. Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 242; S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Penguin, 2010), 3, 76. 6. Charles Bohlen, Eyewitness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 205–206. 7. George McKee Elsey, An Unplanned Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 77; James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 48. 8. William Leahy, diary entry for April 12, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 55, LOC. 9. Robert Messner, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 19, 32. 10. J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 25; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 245. 11. Allen Drury, A Senate Journal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 219. 12. Ibid., 220. 13. Smith, FDR, 618; McCullough, Truman, 314. 14. Exhibit from Harry S. Truman Museum, Independence, Missouri. Emphasis in original. 15. McCullough, Truman, 291. 16. Drury, Senate Journal, 410. 17. Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 10. 18. McCullough, Truman, 339. 19. Smith, FDR, 582–583. 20. Bohlen, Eyewitness to History, 210–211. 21. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (London: Penguin, 2003), 761. Keynes had been Britain’s chief economist at the Paris Peace Conference. He published a stinging critique of the failures of the economic aspects of that conference in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920), available at Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15776. 22. See George Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956); David S. Fogelsong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and William T. Allison, American Diplomats in Russia (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997). 23. For more on East Asia, see Chapter 11. 24. Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 5, 190. 25. See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. Chapter 2. 26. Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 27. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 117. 28. McCullough, Truman, 340–342. 29. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 486; Eden to Lord Halifax, April 13, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/86, folio 731, CRL; Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 567. 30. Elsey, Unplanned Life, 80; Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 48–49; William Leahy, diary entry for April 12, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 55, LOC. 31. Drury, Senate Journal, 412, 419, 422. 32. Elsey, Unplanned Life, 78. Chapter Two: “The Most Terrible Responsibility Any Man Ever Faced” 1. Allen Drury, A Senate Journal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 413. 2. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 375; Henry Lewis Stimson, Stimson Diaries in the Yale University Library, microform, Reel #9, entry for April 12, 1945, USAHEC; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 212. 3. For more information on this topic, see Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). 4. Harry Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower: The Personal Diary of Captain Harry C. Butcher, Naval Aide to General Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 816. The text of Murrow’s full, emotional broadcast and Gellhorn’s article can be found in Reporting World War II, Part Two, American Journalism, 1944–1946 (New York: Library of America, 1995), 681–685, 730. 5. James Byrnes to James K. Vardaman, August 25, 1945, and “Dismemberment of Germany,” July 11, 1945, Papers of George M. Elsey, Map Room Records, Elsey Papers Folder; Berlin Conference, July-August 1945, Folder 2, HSTL; McCullough, Truman, 349–350; George McKee Elsey, An Unplanned Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 81; James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 48; Nigel Hamilton, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 54; J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 159. 6. William Hillman, ed., Mr. President: The First Publication from the Personal Diaries, Private Letters, Papers, and Revealing Interviews of Harry S. Truman (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Young, 1952), 10, 110–111; Robert Messner, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 53, 67. 7. There appears to be some disagreement among Truman and Churchill biographers. Some suggest that the two men had never met before Potsdam. It hardly matters. The key point is that the two men did not know one another. 8. Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower, 816. Following Pearl Harbor, Senator Truman had approached Marshall about reenlisting. Marshall responded by telling him that “we don’t need old stiffs like you. This will be a young man’s war.” Hamilton, American Caesars, 53. 9. Truman to Churchill, April 14, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/89, folio 734, CRL. 10. Halifax to Eden, April 16, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/93, folio 738, CRL. 11. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 10, CLEM. 12. Walter J. Brown, James F. Byrnes of South Carolina: A Remembrance (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1992), 254. 13. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 5918; Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. Harriman may have believed that Byrnes (or someone close to him) had been spreading rumors of his affair with Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela. The two ended the affair in 1943, but later rekindled the romance and married in 1971. Pamela Harriman eventually served as US ambassador to France. 14. Halifax to Eden, April 16, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/93, folio 738, CRL; William Leahy, diary entry for June 30, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 102, LOC; Messner, End of an Alliance, 78. Truman and Byrnes would begin to fall out before the end of the year. In December, the two had a sharp meeting in the White House. Truman recalled having to say that he would “not tolerate a repetition” of Byrnes’s perceived insubordination and grandstanding. The rift was soon out in the open, and Byrnes resigned in 1947, delaying his departure a few months so that George Marshall could replace him. McCullough, Truman, 479. 15. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 10, CLEM. 16. Hillman, ed., Mr. President, 116; Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 164. Hull was seventy-three years old in 1945, Davies was sixty-eight, and Hopkins was fifty-four, but Hopkins was dying of stomach cancer. 17. Messner, End of an Alliance, 77; Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 10, CLEM. Later in the year, at Truman’s urging, Congress put the Speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate as numbers one and two in the succession order so that a president could not effectively select his own successor. 18. Russia still celebrates Victory Day on May 9, whereas France, Britain, and the United States mark the day on May 8. That George Elsey mentioned the issue of the German surrender in his diary might also suggest that he was the one who found out about the State Department’s intransigence and told Truman, but here I am speculating. Elsey, Unplanned Life, 83. 19. “Outline and Notes,” entry for August 19, 1945, Wallace Deuel Papers, Box 61, Potsdam Conference Folder, Box 61, LOC. 20. Messner, End of an Alliance, 78. For more on the drift in their relationship, see McCullough, Truman, 478–480. 21. Truman did name Henry Wallace secretary of commerce, perhaps small compensation for missing out on the presidency by just three months. He named Stettinius the first American ambassador to the United Nations. 22. Messner, End of an Alliance, 6; for a reporter’s view of the transition, see Drury, Senate Journal, 410–419. 23. Deuel Papers, August 19, 1945, LOC; Bohlen, Witness to History, 226. 24. Halifax to Eden, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/95 and US/45/100, folios 741 and 747, CRL. 25. Hillman, Mr. President, 117, 382. 26. Drury, Senate Journal, 424 and 439. 27. Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 246. 28. Frederick J. Dobney, ed., Selected Papers of Will Clayton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 136. 29. I am grateful to Professor Michael Snape of the University of Birmingham for a wonderful explanation of how Wilson’s Presbyterian worldview made him reluctant to use economic instruments for political gains. 30. See Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 31. Keith M. Heim, Hope Without Power: Truman and the Russians, 1945, PhD Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1973, D748.H45, 4. 32. Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948 (New York: Norton, 1977), 40; Heim, Hope Without Power, 75n2 and 103. 33. Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 120; “Memorandum of Conversation, 23 April,” in FRUS, vol. 5, Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), 256–257. 34. Heim, Hope Without Power, 103; Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 84; Bohlen, Witness to History, 213; McCullough, Truman, 373. 35. FRUS, vol. 5, Europe, 257. 36. McCullough, Truman, 262; Oral History of Valentin Berezhekov, 12/8, vol. 2, 6–10, LHCMA. 37. Heim, Hope Without Power, 89–93. 38. Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 565; Churchill to Eden, May 13, 1945, and Churchill to Roosevelt, quoted in Correlli Barnett, Lords of War: From Lincoln to Churchill, Supreme Command 1861–1945 (London: Pen and Sword, 2012), 239; SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, May 1945 Folder, HSTL. 39. Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 53; Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), 401. 40. Roberts, Masters and Commanders, 565. 41. Churchill to Truman, June 4, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 20, Pol/45/213, folio 787, CRL. 42. Eden to Halifax, May 11, 1945 (US/45/107, folio 756), and Eden to Halifax, May 13, 1945 (US/45/110, folio 759), Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, CRL. 43. Elsey, Unplanned Life, 84. Chapter Three: May Days 1. Churchill to Truman, May 11, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, Churchill to Truman, May 1945 Folder, HSTL. 2. Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), 474. 3. Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 143; William Leahy, diary entry for June 13, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, LOC. 4. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 3395; Eden to Halifax, May 13, 1945, US/45/110, folio 759, CRL. 5. Feis, Between War and Peace, 143; Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York: Viking, 1960), 398. 6. Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940–1945 (New York: Knopf, 2010), 473. The imagination reels at that statement, but one guesses that Churchill meant that the United States and Great Britain would always be close, but never completely united. 7. William Leahy, diary entry for June 4, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, LOC. 8. Churchill to Truman, June 17, 1945, US/45/131, folio 785, CRL; Churchill to Truman, May 13, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, Churchill to Truman, May 1945 Folder, HSTL; Charles Ross to Judge Samuel Rosenman, July 20, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference File, Communications to the Map Room, July 15–25, 1945, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. 9. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 59. 10. Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, in S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Victory (New York: Penguin, 2010), 230; Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 306. 11. Hastings, Winston’s War, 469–471. 12. Joseph Davies, untitled memorandum, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 1–5 Folder, LOC. 13. Churchill to Truman, May 31, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, Churchill to Truman, May 1945 Folder, HSTL. 14. Keith M. Heim, Hope Without Power: Truman and the Russians, 1945, PhD Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1973, D748.H45, 134–135, 146, 151. 15. Joseph Davies, diary entry for July 13, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, LOC. 16. Eden to Churchill, July 10, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 2, Conf/45/152, folio 319–321, CRL. 17. James, Anthony Eden, 306. 18. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 73. 19. Heim, Hope Without Power, 2; Carlo D’Este, Patton: Genius for War (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 735–736. On Stalin’s admiration for Roosevelt, see Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 209. Bohlen was Roosevelt and Truman’s Russian interpreter and a key adviser on Russian affairs. 20. J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 65. 21. Joseph Davies, Memorandum of June 29, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, 6, LOC. 22. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 57–58; Bohlen, Witness to History, 209; “Second Meeting Kremlin—8 pm, May 27, 1945,” in Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, FDR. 23. Bohlen, Witness to History, 215. 24. Dobbs, Six Months, Kindle locations 954, 1944; Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 255. 25. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 500; Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, 73. 26. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), 588; Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 203, 222; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 418. 27. Papers of General Lucius D. Clay: Germany, 1945–1949 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), entry for July 9, 1945. 28. Dobbs, Six Months, Kindle location 5778; Mark Stoler, George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century (Boston: Twain, 1989), 134–136. 29. Dobbs, Six Months, Kindle location 2522; Harriman, LHCMA, 27/80, 28. Ironically in light of that observation, Stalin gave Kathleen Harriman Mortimer two prize Russian horses for her estate as a gift upon her departure from Russia. Because Harriman’s wife did not accompany him to Russia, Kathleen served as the effective First Lady of the embassy. 30. George Kennan, Memoirs, vol. 1, 1925–1950 (Boston: Atlantic–Little Brown, 1967), 257; Bohlen, Witness to History, 222. 31. Plokhy, Yalta, 382. 32. Heim, Hope Without Power, 115. 33. Ibid., 136n70. 34. Albert L. Weeks, Assured Victory: How ‘Stalin the Great’ Won the War, but Lost the Peace (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2011), 134; Montefiore, Stalin, 498; Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 121. 35. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Correspondence Between the Chairman of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the USSR and the President of the USA and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), 344, 360–361. 36. Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 217; “First Meeting, Kremlin 8 pm, May 26, 1945,” in Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, 2–3, FDR. 37. A fuller version of Ebert’s speech is in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 203. 38. Plokhy, Yalta, 38, 53, 323. 39. Robert Gellately, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 76. 40. Papers of William L. Clayton, Chronological File 1945, June 1945–December 31, 1945, Box 1, Berlin Conference, July-August 1945, Folder 1, HSTL. Chapter Four: “Our Troubles Might Not Yet Be Over” 1. Ben Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 2. The British emerged from the war with their debt at 240 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP); in 1939 it had been at 29 percent. 2. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Not for nothing did Anthony Eden, then prime minister, embroil Great Britain in the 1956 Suez crisis. He compared Gamal Adbel Nasser, who had been among those Egyptian officers with pro-German sympathies in World War II, to Benito Mussolini, and ordered British forces to join French and Israeli forces as part of a military operation to take the canal back after Nasser nationalized it. When President Eisenhower refused to extend American support, the British withdrew, leaving Eden and members of his government embarrassed and angry. See David A. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis—Suez and the Brink of War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). 3. S. N. Sen, History of the Freedom Movement in India, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: New Age International Press, 1997), 323; Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 247. I’d like to thank my friend Partha Mazumdar for his help over the years in explaining many of the nuances of South Asian history in addition to his extensive knowledge of macroeconomics. 4. Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, esp. Chapter 4. 5. Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York: Viking, 1960), 396–397; Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 773; Eden to Churchill, July 12, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, Conf/45/157, folio 328, CRL. 6. Joseph Davies to Truman, June 12, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, Box 4, vol. XI, Miscellaneous Papers, Reports by Joseph E. Davies, HSTL. 7. Steil, Battle of Bretton Woods, 110. 8. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (New York: Penguin, 2003), 756, 758, 765, 769; Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 121. 9. Krishan Kumar, “Empire, Nation, and National Identities,” in Andrew Thompson, ed., Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 318. 10. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 758, 775–783. 11. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), 562. 12. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962), 81; Olivier Wieviorka, Normandy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 288–289. 13. Beschloss, Conquerors, 229. Truman’s remarks appeared in the June 24, 1941, issue of the New York Times and many other newspapers as well. 14. The essay appears in Vasily Grossman, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (New York: New York Review Books, 2010). 15. Richard Bessel, Germany, 1945 (New York: Harper, 2009), 150–151; Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 9–13; Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 27. Grossman, The Road, contains a new translation of “The Hell of Treblinka” as well as other wartime writings. 16. Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 46; Bessel, Germany, 1945, 71. 17. Oral History of Yevgeni Khaldei, Cold War Collection, 28/1, pp. 1–4, LHCMA; Oral History of Konstantin Koval, 28/5, p. 12, LHCMA; Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (London: Constable, 1966), 268; Applebaum, Iron Curtain, 26; Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (New York: Random House, 2012), 5. 18. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 479. The figure of 2 million women raped is a rough estimate at best. The true figure will never be known. Oral history of Yevgeni Khaldei, 4, LHCMA; A Wartime Journey: The 296th Engineer Combat Battalion (1939–1945), ARCH COLL Bay 5, Row 190, Face B, Shelf 6, Box 69, Folder 6, p. 84, USAHEC; J. E. Rhys, Memoirs of a Soldier, 12/35/1, 59, IWM. 19. Rhys, Memoirs of a Soldier, 58. Three different American soldiers recorded the soap anecdote in Wartime Journey, 86. The 296th was one of the first American units into Berlin. 20. Eden to Churchill, July 17, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 26, SU/45/135, folio 708, CRL 21. See Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), esp. Chapter 5. 22. David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 235; Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 6303. 23. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, 82, 114–115. 24. Aida D. Donald, Citizen Soldier: A Life of Harry Truman (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 156; William Hillman, ed., Mr. President: The First Publication from the Personal Diaries, Private Letters, Papers, and Revealing Interviews of Harry S. Truman (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1952), 115. 25. Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 341–342. 26. Ibid., 350; Hillman, Mr. President, 83; Nigel Hamilton, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 59. 27. Eden to Churchill, July 17, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 26, SU/45/135, folio 708, CRL; Lord Alanbrooke, diary entry for June 11, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA. Churchill’s allusion to Russia’s only further penetration of Western Europe refers to the Russian occupation of Paris following the first capitulation of Napoleon. The figure of twenty divisions is the high end of the estimate that Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, relayed to Truman. See Joseph Davies, Memorandum of June 29, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, June 26–30 Folder, 7, LOC. 28. William Leahy, diary entry for April 23, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, p. 62, LOC. 29. George Kennan, “Russia’s International Position at the Close of the War with Germany,” in Harry Hopkins Papers, Sherwood Collection, Book 11, Box 338, Hopkins in Moscow (1945) Folder, Harry Hopkins Papers Box 338, n.d., FDR. 30. John Lewis Gaddis, George Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 200–202. For the text of the Long Telegram, see National Security Archive, George Washington University, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar /documents/episode-1/kennan.htm. 31. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Triumph and Tragedy, Book 2 (London: Bantam, 1962), 489. 32. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, xxviii. Chapter Five: “A Vast Undertaking”: Coming to Potsdam 1. Eden to Churchill, July 17, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 26, SU/45/135, folio 708, CRL. 2. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 589. 3. Helen Rappaport, Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO, 1999), 118; Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege (New York: Penguin, 1998), 407. 4. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 504. 5. Robert van Hallberg, “Translation,” in Sacman Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 181; Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 18. 6. Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, Attlee: A Life in Politics (London: I. B. Taurus, 2010), 124. 7. Joseph Davies, “Potsdam: Prelude,” Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 6–10 Folder, LOC. 8. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: The Power of Words (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2012), 360. 9. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 792–793. 10. Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 306; Jenkins, Churchill, 774. 11. James Byrnes noted at Yalta that Roosevelt and Churchill had each “worried about how the other looked.” Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 10, CLEM; Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 310. 12. Joseph Davies to Truman, June 12, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, Box 4, vol. XI, Miscellaneous Papers, Reports by Joseph E. Davies, HSTL. 13. William Leahy, diary entry for July 31, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, LOC. 14. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 13, CLEM; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 138. 15. Charles Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975), 83; Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940–1945 (New York: Knopf, 2010), 473. 16. “Terminal Administrative Arrangements, June 27, 1945,” in Mrs. O. M. Margerison Papers, IWM 99/40/1. 17. Prime Minister to President Truman, June 4, 1945, Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, Message number 72, FDR. 18. Anthony Eden, The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon (Cambridge, UK: Riverside Press, 1965), 631. 19. Eden, Reckoning, 629. 20. Papers of Lord Ismay, 2/3/284/2a, LHCMA; Clement Attlee, As It Happened (New York: Viking, 1954), 204. 21. Scrapbook of Colonel J. W. E. Gainher, Spec Misc C10, IWM. 22. “Potsdam Symphony” and Brigadier O. M. Wales, “Report on Operation Terminal,” in Papers of Lieutenant Colonel Evelyn Lindsay-Young, Potsdam Conference, Germany, July 1945 Folder, LHCMA. 23. Eden, Reckoning, 634. 24. Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 331–332. 25. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 234; Truman to Alben Barkley, July 5, 1945, WHCF: OF 190, Potsdam Conference, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. Barkley soon became Truman’s vice president. On Senate reservations to both treaties, see Allen Drury, A Senate Journal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 464–466. Drury was the United Press’s Capitol Hill bureau chief. 26. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 16, Folder 12, CLEM. 27. Robert Messner, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Engines of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 80–83. 28. William Hillman, ed., Mr. President: The First Publication from the Personal Diaries, Private Letters, Papers, and Revealing Interviews of Harry S. Truman (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Young, 1952), 123. 29. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 66. 30. Ibid., 68. 31. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Collaboration with Russia (New York: Viking, 1947), 273. 32. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 403. 33. Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War, 68; Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 16, Folder 12, CLEM. 34. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 16, Folder 12, CLEM. 35. Charles Ross to Eben Ayers, July 19, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the Presidential Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference File, Communications to the Map Room Folder, HSTL. 36. Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), 442; McCullough, Truman, 430. 37. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 15. 38. Volkogonov, Stalin, 497–499; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 480, 498. 39. Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (London: Constable, 1966), 267; Oral History of George McKee Elsey, 27/11, 5–6, LHCMA; Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 37. Chapter Six: “What a Scene of Destruction” 1. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia (New York: Viking, 1947), 269. 2. Nigel Hamilton, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 57. See also Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), and Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, 1914–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 3. Martha Gellhorn, “Dachau,” in Reporting World War II, Part Two, American Journalism, 1944–1946 (New York: Library of America, 1995), 724. See also Peter Schrijvers, The Crash of Ruin: American Combat Soldiers in Europe During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 4. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 68. 5. Flight Lieutenant A. H. Coleman, 09/69/1, and L. M. I. Marston, 93/18/1, IWM. 6. J. E. Rhys, 12/35/1, IWM, and Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 7. Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York: Viking, 1960), 401–402; Lord Alanbrooke, diary entries for July 16 and July 19, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA. 8. Floyd Parks, Diary entry for July 16, 1945, Floyd Parks Papers, Box 1, “Diary, July-August 1945” Folder, USAHEC; President’s Trip to the Berlin Conference, MSS 90, James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 12, CLEM; Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 341. 9. “Potsdam Prelude,” Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 6–10 Folder, LOC. 10. Ibid.; Ismay, Memoirs, 402; Oral History Interview with Richard R. Beckman, July 5, 1991, HSTL, downloaded from Truman Library, Independence, Missouri, http://trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/beckmanr.htm, 62; David Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 392; Floyd Parks, diary entry for July 26, 1945, Floyd Parks Papers, Box 1, “Diary, July-August 1945 Folder,” USAHEC. 11. Lord Moran, Churchill, Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 289; Ismay, Memoirs, 402. 12. “Narrative, Lille, September, 1944 to Berlin, 1945,” in Lieutenant Colonel Evelyn Lindsay-Young Papers, LHCMA; Evelyn Lindsay-Young, entries for June 25 and July 28, 1945, ibid., LHCMA; Alan Brooke, diary entry for July 16, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA. 13. William Leahy, diary entry for July 16, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Box 6, Reel 4, LOC. 14. A. H. Colman, 09/69/1, IWM. 15. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 23; Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans from the East (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 60. 16. Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, 1, 8. 17. See Richard Bessel, Germany, 1945 (New York: Harper, 2009), 67–68; Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 1. 18. Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 31, 58–59. 19. Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 40–52. 20. Ibid., 65–73. 21. Bessel, Germany, 1945, 9, 235. 22. Beckman oral history, 60–61, HSTL. 23. Deane, Strange Alliance, 270; Walter J. Brown Papers, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 24. Richard Beckman to his wife, August 2, 1945, Papers of Richard Beckman, “An Accounting of Time to Scrapbook, 1942–1945 [1 of 2],” Box 1, Correspondence, 1945, Folder 2 of 2, HSTL. 25. Bessel, Germany, 1945, 134. 26. Carlo D’Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 686. Eisenhower ordered all American units able to make the trip to see the camp for themselves. “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for,” Eisenhower said. “Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.” 27. Lucius Clay, Papers of Lucius Clay, vol. 1, Germany 1945–1949 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 47. 28. O. M. Margerison to her husband, August 2, 1945, 99/40/1, IWM; Richard Beckman to his father, August 4, 1945, Papers of Richard Beckman, “An Accounting of Time to Scrapbook, 1942–1945 [1 of 2],” Box 1, Correspondence, 1945, Folder 2 of 2, HSTL. 29. Deane, Strange Alliance, 268. 30. Papers of A. H. Colman, 09/69/1, and O. M. Margerison, 99/40/1, IWM. 31. Papers of O. M. Margerison, 99/40/1, IWM; Papers of Harry S. Truman, President’s Secretary’s Files, Box 283, August 5, 1945, Folder, HSTL. 32. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 216. 33. William Leahy, diary entries for July 15 and 16, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Box 6, Reel 4, LOC; Truman to Churchill, April 19, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: White House Map Room Files, April 1945–January 1946, Outgoing Messages, Box 2, Top Secret File, April 1945, HSTL. 34. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (New York: Random House, 2012), 235. Chapter Seven: “In Seventeen Days You Can Decide Anything” 1. J. E. Rhys, Memoirs of a Soldier, 12/35/1, IWM. 2. Die Villa Ingenheim (Berlin: be.bra wissenschaft, 2005). 3. L. M. I. Marston to her mother, July 4, 1945, 93/18/1, IWM; “Information Bulletin, Tripartite Conference,” Papers of Harry S. Truman, SMOF: President’s Secretary Files, Box 141, Potsdam, Germany, Trip [July-August, 1 of 2] Folder, HSTL. 4. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 105. 5. John Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia (New York: Viking, 1947), 269; Joseph Davies, diary entry for July 15, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 14 Folder, LOC. 6. Truman to Hopkins, May 28, 1945, White House Cable No. 281558, Harry Hopkins Papers, Hopkins 338, FDR; David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 390. 7. O. M. Margerison to her husband, August 2, 1945, 99/40/1, IWM; C. R. Attlee, As It Happened (New York: Viking, 1954), 205. Today Cecilienhof is a hotel and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 8. “The Potsdam Conference,” July 22, 1945, Papers of Richard Beckman, “An Accounting of Time to Scrapbook, 1942–1945 [1 of 2],” Box 1, Potsdam Folder, HSTL. 9. Ibid. 10. Floyd L. Parks, diary entry for July 9, 1945, Floyd L. Parks Papers, Box 1, “Papers, 1944–1945,” “Diary, July-August 1945” Folder, USAHEC; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 151; “The Potsdam Conference.” 11. Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 38. 12. Lieutenant Colonel Evelyn Lindsay-Young, “Narrative, Lille, Sept. 1944, to Berlin, 1945,” entries for July 8, 9, and 15, 1945, LHCMA; George McKee Elsey, An Unplanned Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 88; Richard Beckman to his father, August 5, 1945, Papers of Richard Beckman, “An Accounting of Time to Scrapbook, 1942–1945 [1 of 2],” Box 1, Correspondence, 1945 [2 of 2] Folder, HSTL. 13. L. M. I. Marston to her mother, July 6, 1945, 93/18/1, IWM. 14. Brigadier O. M. Wales, “Report on Operation Terminal,” LHCMA; Richard Beckman to his father, July 15, 1945, Papers of Richard Beckman, “An Accounting of Time to Scrapbook, 1942–1945 [1 of 2],” Box 1, Correspondence, 1945 [2 of 2] Folder, HSTL; MSS 90, “Report on the Tripartite Conference of Berlin,” James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 10, CLEM. 15. V. Biriskov, Nuclear Age 12/9, LHCMA; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History (New York: Norton, 1973), 227. 16. Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 350, 364. 17. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 3286. 18. Halifax to Eden, April 23, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 30, US/45/101, folio 748, CRL; Joseph Davies, diary entry for July 13, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 11–13 Folder, LOC. 19. Map Room Messages of President Truman, *2H-726, Reel 2, NYPL, June 8, 1945. 20. Truman, Memoirs, 386. 21. Floyd L. Parks, diary entries for July 31 and August 1, 1945, Floyd L. Parks Papers, Box 1, “Papers, 1944–1945” “Diary, July-August 1945” Folder, USAHEC; Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 22. Papers of L. M. I. Marston, 93/18/1, IWM; Scrapbook of Colonel J. W. E. Gainher, Spec Misc C10, IWM; O. M. Margerison to her husband, August 2, 1945, 99/40/1, IWM. 23. Floyd L. Parks, diary entry for July 14, 1945, Floyd L. Parks Papers, Box 1, “Papers, 1944–1945,” “Diary, July-August 1945” Folder, USAHEC. 24. Truman, Memoirs, 370. 25. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 406. Canfil gave Harry Truman his famous plaque reading “The Buck Stops Here.” 26. Clay, Decision in Germany, 45; Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 234; Truman to Alben Barkley, July 5, 1945, WHCF: OF 190, Potsdam Conference, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. Barkley soon became Truman’s vice president; on Senate reservations to both treaties, see Allen Drury, A Senate Journal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 464–466. 27. Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 389, folio 63, and vol. 30, US/45/157, folio 813, CRL; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Correspondence Between the Chairmen of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the USSR and the Presidents of the USA and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), 370; Charles Ross to Eben Ayers, July 13, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference File, Communications to the Map Room, July 7–14, 1945, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. 28. Acting Secretary of State to Secretary of State, July 21, 1945, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder, Entries 307 and 308, Box 8b, Record Group 43, NARA. 29. “The Berlin Conference,” Life, August 6, 1945, 15–28; Robert Ferrell, ed., Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 55. Ayers served as Truman’s assistant press secretary. 30. Acting Secretary of State to Secretary of State, July 20, 1945, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder, Entries 307 and 308, Box 8b, Record Group 43, NARA; Lindsay-Young, “Narrative,” entry for July 19, 1945; Charles Ross to Eben Ayers, July 19 and July 24, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference File, Communications to the Map Room, July 15–25, 1945, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL; and Ross to Ayers, July 24, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference File, Communications to the Map Room, July 7–14, 1945, Folder 2 of 2, HSTL. 31. Ferrell, ed., Truman in the White House, 204. 32. Truman, Memoirs, 349. 33. Ibid., 394; Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948 (New York: Norton, 1977), 84, 88. 34. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 58. 35. Italy sent a corps to support the German invasion of Russia in 1941. The 130,000-man strong Italian Eighth Army fought with the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad. See MacGregor Knox, Hitler’s Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940–43 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 36. See Michael S. Neiberg, The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944 (New York: Basic Books, 2012), Chapter 9. 37. Truman to Churchill, June 5, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: White House Map Room Files, April 1945–January 1946, Outgoing Messages, Box 2, Top Secret File, June 1945 Folder, HSTL. 38. Joseph Davies, diary entry for July 14, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 11–13 Folder, LOC; Irwin Gellman, Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Wells (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 401. 39. Roll, The Hopkins Touch, 379; Walter J. Brown Papers, Box 8, Folder 13, CLEM. 40. Churchill headed the British government, but King George VI was its head of state. Stalin held the official title of general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was not the equivalent of a head of state. Chapter Eight: “I Dreamed That My Life Was Over” 1. Albert L. Weeks, Assured Victory: How ‘Stalin the Great’ Won the War but Lost the Peace (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 139. For more on Hopkins and his impressions, see Matthew B. Wills, Wartime Missions of Harry L. Hopkins (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2004), and David I. Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. “Conversation, 30 July, 1945, 4:30 pm,” in Potsdam Conference Minutes, Record Group 43, Entry 307, Box 8a, p. 11, NARA; Averill Harriman to Truman, June 8, 1945, Map Room Messages of President Truman, *2H-726, Reel 2, NYPL; Joseph Davies, untitled document, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 1–5 Folder, LOC; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 347–348. 3. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 491. In 1970, the KGB ordered Hitler’s remains removed from the grave at Magdeburg, the body cremated, and the ashes scattered. 4. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Row, 1947), 68; “First Meeting, Kremlin 8 pm, May 26, 1945,” in Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, 7, FDR. This might well be the origin of the popular myth that Hitler had somehow escaped to South America after the war. 5. Montefiore, Stalin, 497–498; Oral History of Valentin Berezhekov, prepared for the documentary The Nuclear Age, 12/8, vol. 2, 8, LHCMA. 6. Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (New York: Crown, 2014). 7. Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 307–308; Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. These were not new patterns for Churchill, as previously unpublished World War I diaries from Lewis Harcourt and Margot Asquith will demonstrate. Harcourt, a cabinet member, wrote of Churchill, “I think he has gone mad.” Asquith, the wife of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, called Churchill, “insolent” and said that his “vanity is septic.” See Hannah Furness, “Revealed: War Diary Meant to Stay Secret,” The Telegraph, June 8, 2014, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10883656 /Revealed-war-diary-meant-to-stay-secret.html; Dalya Alberge, “‘Insolent’ Churchill, ‘Ignorant’ Kitchener: Waspish Wartime Diaries of Margot Asquith,” The Guardian, June 7, 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/08/margot -asquith-diaries-insolent-churchill-ignorant-kitchener; and Michael Brock, ed., Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8. Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940–1945 (New York: Knopf, 2010), 475. 9. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 6186. 10. Nigel Hamilton, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 85. 11. Charles Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975), 96, 100; Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 363; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 189. 12. Feis, Between War and Peace, 188; William Leahy, diary entry for July 20, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, 1945, LOC. 13. Lord Alanbrooke, diary entry for July 23, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA. 14. Eden to Cadogan, June 17, 1945, in Anthony Eden (Lord Avon) Papers, Conf/45/126, folio 287, CRL. 15. Anthony Eden, The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon (Cambridge, UK: Riverside Press, 1965), 630, 632. 16. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 17. Field Marshal Brooke was one British leader who told Churchill to resist Labour’s demands for an early election. After Churchill’s defeat, Brooke complained to his diary “What was my advice to him, a mere soldier!!!” Lord Alanbrooke, diary entry for July 26, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA. 18. Mrs. O. M. Margerison to her husband, August 2, 1945, 99/40/1, IWM (emphases in original). 19. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 3 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 101; Churchill, after all, is the man who said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” On Churchill and his memoirs, see David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005). 20. Eden, Reckoning, 635. 21. Ibid., 636. 22. Clement Attlee, Twilight of Empire: The Memoirs of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), 69; Eden, Reckoning, 638. 23. Clement Attlee, As It Happened (New York: Viking, 1954), 207; William Leahy, diary entry for July 26, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, LOC. 24. McCullough, Truman, 446; Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), 501. 25. Attlee, Twilight of Empire, 71. 26. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 233; Hastings, Winston’s War, 476; Lord Alanbrooke, diary entry for July 26, 1945, LHCMA. 27. James, Anthony Eden, 311; Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 232. 28. Attlee, Twilight of Empire, 9. 29. Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 7, Folder 5, CLEM; Hastings, Winston’s War, 478. 30. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 232; James, Anthony Eden, 311. 31. Lieutenant General Burrows to General Lionel Ismay, August 17, 1945, in Burrows Papers, 4/4/1–9, LCHMA. 32. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 45, 254. 33. McCullough, Truman, 447–448. 34. Lieutenant General Burrows to General Ismay, August 17, 1945, in Burrows Papers, 4/4/1–9, LHCMA; Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 251. 35. Truman, Memoirs, 395; Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 39. 36. “Clement Richard Attlee,” Life, August 6, 1945, 27; Truman, Memoirs, 389. 37. Walter J. Brown Papers, Journals, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 38. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 79. 39. Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 567. 40. Eden, Reckoning, 635. Chapter Nine: “Dismemberment as a Permanent Fate”? Solving the Problem of Germany 1. See David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), Chapter 3. 2. Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 38; Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 367. 3. S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Penguin, 2010), 111; Truman, Memoirs, 370; FRUS, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1945), 795–797. 4. George Kennan, “Russia’s International Position at the Close of the War with Germany,” n.d. [but almost certainly May 1945], Harry Hopkins Papers, Sherwood Collection, Book 11, Box 338, Hopkins in Moscow Folder, 10, FDR. 5. “Wilson’s War Message to Congress,” April 2, 1917, World War I Document Archive, http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Wilson’s_War_Message _to_Congress. 6. Henry Stimson, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 583; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 57; Joseph Grew to James Byrnes, July 21, 1945, NARA II, Record Group 43, entries 307 and 308, Box 8b, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder; Proposal by the Soviet Delegation, July 23, 1945, FRUS, 755–756. 7. Proposal by the Soviet Delegation, July 23, 1945, FRUS, 810. 8. Ibid., 802–804. 9. Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 132, 134. 10. Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 231. 11. Floyd L. Parks Papers, Box 1, “Papers, 1944–1945,” “Diary July-August, 1945,” Folder 1, USAHEC. 12. Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 31, WARC/45/5, folios 67–73, CRL. 13. Interview with Dick Hottelet, Parks Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, USAHEC. 14. Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life (New York: Henry, Holt, 1990); Jennifer Fay, Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 15. Plokhy, Yalta, 92, 109; “Dismemberment of Germany,” July 11, 1945, Papers of William L. Clayton, Chronological File 1945, June 1945–December 31, 1945, Box 1, Berlin Conference, July-August 1945, Folder 2, HSTL. 16. Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 283. 17. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), 624; Steil, Battle of Bretton Woods, 287. 18. “Third Meeting, Kremlin, 8 pm, May 28, 1945,” in Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, FDR; Steil, Battle of Bretton Woods, 283, 286. 19. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Viking, 1947), 82; Truman to Joseph Davies, July 20, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part II, Box 42, Correspondence, June-July 1945 Folder, LOC. 20. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (New York: Penguin, 2003), 771. 21. Averill Harriman to the Secretary of State, July 6, 1945, NARA II, Record Group 43, entries 307 and 308, Box 8b, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder. 22. Recommendations from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, June 26, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 2, vol. V, HSTL. 23. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 34; Clement Attlee, Twilight of Empire: Memoirs of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), 77. 24. Thomas Lamont, quoted in Margaret Macmillan, Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 180; Foreign Ministers Meeting, July 27, 1945, Record Group 43, Entry 307, Box 8a, NARA. 25. Pauley to Molotov, July 27, 1945, FRUS, 896. 26. Potsdam Conference Minutes, entries for July 23 and July 27, 1945, NARA II; FRUS, 876, 889; “Russian Machinery Removals from Berlin,” July 25, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, Box 4, vol. XI, Miscellaneous Papers, Reparations, HSTL. 27. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 83–84; Bohlen, Witness to History, 233; Shephard, Long Road Home, 149; Truman, Memoirs, 357; FRUS, 918, 927. 28. Truman, Memoirs, 360; FRUS, 809, 837, 961. 29. Potsdam Conference Minutes, Foreign Ministers Meeting, July 23, 1945, 4 pm, Record Group 43, Entry 307, Box 8a, NARA; Memorandum, July 18, 1945, Record Group 43, entries 307 and 308, Box 8b, NARA. 30. “Proposal for the Establishment of a Council of Foreign Ministers,” Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 171, “Big Three Conference Agenda (Potsdam),” July 1945, tabs 1, 2, 9, 14, 15, FDR; FRUS, 896. 31. FRUS, 993–997. Chapter Ten: “The Bastard of Versailles” 1. Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 96. 2. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 128. 3. For more on Soviet crimes against Poles, see Snyder, Bloodlands. Zaolzie had a plurality of ethnic Poles, but not a majority. It also had a key rail juncture and valuable coal mines. The Germans were happy to give Poland a piece of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference in order to make the point that Germany was not solely responsible for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. 4. John Owens, editorial from the Baltimore Sun “sent to the President for Potsdam,” Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, June 26–30 Folder, LOC. 5. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 226. The main difference in the two lines existed around the town of Bialystok, which lay west of the Curzon Line but east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line. 6. Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 439, 445; Arthur Bliss Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to the American People (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1948), 60; Churchill to Truman, April 29, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, Churchill to Truman, April 1945 Folder, HSTL. 7. Bela Grünwald Ivanyi and Alan Bell, Route to Potsdam: The Story of the Peace Aims, 1939–1945 (London: Allan Wingate, 1946), 72, 96; Lane, Poland Betrayed, 84. Lane estimated that in fact 12 million Poles then lived between the Curzon and Riga lines, although this number may be too high. 8. Snyder, Bloodlands, 307; “The Polish Problem, 1943–1945,” April 25, 1945, Papers of William L. Clayton, Chronological File 1945, June 1945–December 31, 1945, Box 1, Historical Reports and Research Notes—Poland Folder, HSTL. 9. Henry Lewis Stimson Diaries in the Yale University Library, microfilm reel 9, entry for April 2, 1945, USAHEC; Recommendations from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, June 26, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 2, vol. V, HSTL. 10. Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 331. 11. S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Penguin, 2010), 177–178; David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 371; July 18 Meeting of the Heads of State, MSS 90, James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 6, CLEM. 12. Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 452, 455; Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans from the East (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 47–49; “Summary of the Views Expressed by the Polish Delegation,” July 24, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, Box 4, vol. XI, Miscellaneous Papers, Poland, HSTL. 13. Roll, Hopkins Touch, 371. 14. “Summary of the Views Expressed by the Polish Delegation,” HSTL. 15. Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 1919; “The Polish Problem, 1943–1945.” 16. Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 152, 167; FRUS, vol. V, 362. 17. Lane, Poland Betrayed, i; George Kennan, Memoirs, vol. 1, 1925–1950 (Boston: Atlantic–Little Brown, 1967), 263; Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 515. 18. Truman to Stalin, May 4, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: White House Map Room Files: April 1945–January 1946, Outgoing Messages, Box 2, Top Secret File, May 1945 Folder, HSTL; Draft Submitted by the Soviet Delegation, July 18, 1945, MSS 90, James Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 6, CLEM. 19. Richard Bessel, Germany, 1945 (New York: Harper, 2009), 69–70, 214; Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 545; FRUS, vol. V, 277; Joseph Grew to James Byrnes, July 25, 1945, Record Group 43, Entry 307, Box 8b, NARA. 20. For more on this issue, see Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 514–515. 21. Messages of June 3 and June 6, 1945, Map Room Messages of President Truman, *2H-726, Reel 2, NYPL; J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 85. In the end three of the men were acquitted; one was sentenced to ten years in prison, another to eight years, and three men to five years; the rest received sentences of between four months and one year. Three of the men died in prison. See Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 534–536. 22. Halifax to Eden, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, May 14, 1945, US/45/114, folio 765, CRL; Clement Attlee, Twilight of Empire: Memoirs of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), 76; Joseph Davies, Memorandum of June 29, 1945, Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, June 26–30 Folder, LOC; Robert Messner, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 50; FRUS, vol. V, 252; Harry Hopkins to Truman, June 3, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: White House Map Room Files, Incoming Messages, Top Secret File, June 1945 Folder, HSTL. 23. Halifax to Eden, May 14, 1945; “Second Meeting, Kremlin—8 pm, May 27, 1945,” and “Fifth Meeting, Kremlin—6 pm, May 31, 1945,” Harry Hopkins Papers, Sherwood Collection, Box 338, Hopkins in Moscow Folder, FDR. 24. “Territorial Studies,” July 6, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Berlin Conference File, Box 1, vol. III, Tabs 12, 17–24, HSTL. 25. Charles Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975), 171; “President’s Trip to the Berlin Conference,” James F. Byrnes Papers, MSS 90, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 12, CLEM; Anthony Eden, The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon (Cambridge, UK: Riverside Press, 1965), 630–631; Dobbs, Six Months in 1945, Kindle location 1214. 26. Eden, Reckoning, 630–631; Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 819; Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 369. 27. Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 232; Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 177, 179. 28. Bessel, Germany, 1945, 232; Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 538. 29. Oral History of Kathleen Harriman Mortimer, Cold War 27/80, 22, 29–30, LHCMA; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 211. 30. John Lewis Gaddis, George Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 202. 31. Zayas, Nemesis, 53; William Leahy, diary entry for July 31, 1945, William Leahy Papers, Diary Box 6, Reel 4, LOC; Bessel, Germany, 1945, 228, 234–237, 240. 32. Joseph Grew to James Byrnes, July 25, 1945, Record Group 43, Entry 307, Box 8b, NARA. 33. FRUS, vol. V, 257. 34. Ibid., 263. 35. Feis, Between War and Peace, 229; Dobbs, Six Months in 1945, Kindle locations 6160, 6168. 36. FRUS, vol. V, 254, 265; Churchill to Truman, April 29, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 7, Churchill to Truman, April 1945 Folder, HSTL. 37. “Second Draft of Speech by President Truman on Berlin Conference,” n.d., Papers of William L. Clayton, Chronological File 1945, June 1945–December 31, 1945, Box 1, Berlin Conference, July-August 1945, Folder 1, HSTL. 38. Anne Applebaum, Behind the Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 17. Chapter Eleven: Dr. Groves’s Son and the Fate of East Asia 1. See Guoqi Xu, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 2. Margaret Macmillan, Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 338. 3. A Chinese version of these events is in Hu Sheng, From the Opium War to the May Fourth Movement, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991), 646ff. 4. Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, July 6–10 Folder, LOC. 5. “Third Meeting, Kremlin—8 pm, May 28, 1945,” Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 338, 6, FDR. See also Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 263–265, and Zhang Baijia, “China’s Quest for Foreign Military Aid,” in Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 283–307. 6. “Third Meeting, Kremlin—8 pm, May 28, 1945”; Hopkins to Truman, May 29, 1945, Map Room Messages of President Truman, *2H-726, Reel 2, NYPL; Baijia, “China’s Quest for Foreign Military Aid,” 292. 7. ALUSNA [American Legation United States Naval Attaché, the office responsible for coding and sending secret messages] Moscow to Truman, July 9, 1945; Harriman to Truman, July 11, 1945; and COMNAVGROUP China to Byrnes, July 19 and 20, 1945, “Potsdam to Babelsberg (From Other Sources)” Folder, Record Group 43, Box 8b, NARA; FRUS 1945, vol. II (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1945), 1223. 8. James I. Matray, “Fighting the Problem: George C. Marshall and Korea,” in Charles F. Brower, ed., George C. Marshall: Servant of the American Nation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 81; Henry Lewis Stimson Diaries in the Yale University Library, microfilm reel 9, entry for April 5, 1945, USAHEC; Papers and Minutes of Meetings of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 2, vol. VI, 33, HSTL. 9. George Kennan to Truman, April 23, 1945, and Harry Hopkins to Truman, May 30, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: White House Map Room Files, Incoming Messages, Top Secret File, April 1945–May 1945, HSTL. 10. Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 382; Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York: Viking, 1960), 401. 11. [Joseph] Grew to [James] Byrnes, July 21, 1945, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder, Record Group 43, Box 8b, NARA; USS Augusta Morning Press, August 5, 1945, Presidential Secretary’s Files, Box 141, Potsdam Germany Trip, July-August 1945, Folder 1 of 2, and Frank Boykin to Truman, July 25, 1945, WHCF: OF 190, Miscellaneous (1945), Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. 12. Stimson Diary, entry for July 23, 1945, USAHEC. 13. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), 493. 14. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia (New York: Viking, 1947), 272–276; Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), 74. 15. Truman, Year of Decisions, 382, David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 424; Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1995), 268; Meeting of Heads of Government, July 19, 1945, 5 pm, MSS 90, James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 6, CLEM. 16. J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 224; Stimson Diary, entry for July 24, 1945, USAHEC; Millis, Forrestal Diaries, 80. 17. Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 1594. 18. State [Department] to Babelsberg, July 21, 1945, “Outgoing Potsdam” Folder, Record Group 43, Box 8b, NARA; Millis, Forrestal Diaries, 53; Background Information, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Berlin Conference Files, Box 1, vol. II, 63, HSTL. 19. Harry Hopkins to Truman, May 30, 1945, Map Room Messages, HSTL; Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. 20. Millis, Forrestal Diaries, 52, 69–71. 21. J. David Kidwell to Truman, May 10, 1945, Fred Burdick to Truman, July 14, 1945, and New York Times, May 11, 1945, in WHCF: OF 190, Miscellaneous (1945), Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. 22. Ferenc Szasz, The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 145. The full text of Groves’s two notes and the much longer reports that followed are in FRUS, vol. II, 1360ff. 23. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 149; Michael Dobbs, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle location 4429; Stimson Diary, entry for July 21, 1945, USAHEC. 24. Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM. See also Barrett Tillman, Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 25. Robert H. Ferrell, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 55–56. 26. Lord Alanbrooke, diary entry for July 23, 1945, 5/1/11, LHCMA (emphasis in original). 27. McCullough, Truman, 393; Clement Attlee, Twilight of Empire: Memoirs of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), 73. 28. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, 206, 289; Ismay, Memoirs, 401. 29. Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 112; McCullough, Truman, 444. 30. Anthony Eden, The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon (Cambridge, UK: Riverside Press, 1965), 634; Dobbs, Six Months in 1945, Kindle location 4454; Charles Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975), 110. 31. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 498. 32. Montefiore, Stalin, 499. Curiously, Anthony Eden, who was standing nearby, said that Stalin only replied “Thank you.” A Russian aide later said that Stalin only shook his head. See David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 117. 33. Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 237; Messner, End of an Alliance, 112; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 177. 34. Oral histories of Valentin Berezhkov and V. Biriskov, Nuclear Age, 12/8 and 12/9, LHCMA; Montefiore, Stalin, 500; Messner, End of an Alliance, 104. 35. Charles Ross to Eben Ayers, July 24, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 5, Berlin Conference, Communications to the Map Room, July 15–25, 1945, Folder 1 of 2, HSTL. 36. The full declaration is available at National Diet Library, Birth of the Constitution of Japan, Text of the Constitution and Other Important Documents, Potsdam Declaration, www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html. 37. FRUS, vol. II, 1293. 38. McCullough, Truman, 785–786; Feis, Between War and Peace, 115. Rusk, of course, went on to become secretary of state from 1961 to 1969. Conclusion 1. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 62, 285. 2. MSS 90, James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 6, CLEM; MSS 243, Walter J. Brown Papers, Box 8, Folder 10, CLEM. 3. Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), Jennifer Fay, Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) all show the far more aggressive role of US government agencies in using soft and hard power to influence events in Europe in the 1940s compared to the 1920s. 4. Nigel Hamilton, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 59; Truman to Eben Ayers, Papers of Harry S. Truman, SMOF: President’s Secretary’s Files, Box 197, Potsdam Conference, 1945 Folder, HSTL; Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 331. 5. Walter J. Brown Papers, Box 8, Folder 12, CLEM; Hamilton, American Caesars, 59. Debates over sharing the atomic bomb show the continued tensions between the United States and Great Britain. In the fall of 1946, after a meeting with Byrnes on the subject, Ernest Bevin told Clement Attlee: “I don’t want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked at, or to, by the Secretary of State in the United States as I just have in my discussions with Mr. Byrnes. We’ve got to have this thing [the atomic bomb] over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.” Gerard de Groot, The Bomb: A Life (London: Pimlico, 2005), 219. 6. MSS 90, James F. Byrnes Papers, Series 5, Box 16, Folder 6, CLEM. 7. George McKee Elsey, An Unplanned Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 91; Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 410–412. 8. Lukas E. Hoska, A Critical Analysis of the Summit Conferences of Tehran, the Crimea, and Berlin (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Affairs, 1960), 173–179, USAHEC; Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 39–43; James Forrestal, The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), 78. 9. Richard M. Brickner, Is Germany Incurable? (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1943). Brickner saw some hope, noting that the very different attitudes of ethnic Germans in the United States proved that the problem was societal, not racial. See Fay, Theaters of Occupation, 17–26. 10. Papers of Wallace R. Deuel, Box 61, Potsdam Conference Folder, LOC. 11. Vol. II, Background Information, and vol. IV, Papers Prepared by the Department of State for Discussion, Papers of Harry Truman, SMOF: Naval Aide to the President Files, 1945–1953, Box 1, HSTL. 12. Eden to Churchill, February 2, 1945, Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) Papers, FO 954, vol. 19, Pal/45/2, folio 72–73, Palestine 1936–1945 and Peace Settlement, CRL. 13. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Mariner Books, 2000), Chapter 4. For more on the extremely complex reactions of the Soviet Union to the Holocaust, see Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: Court of the Red Czar (New York: Vintage, 2003), 545–547. 14. Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 103, 110–114; Alex Grobman, Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1945–1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 81. 15. Shephard, Long Road Home, 113–118; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 595. Harrison was then dean of the law school at the University of Pennsylvania and a former senior official with the US Immigration Department. 16. James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 86–87. 17. Joseph Davies Papers, Chronological File Part I, Box 17, 28, LOC; Montefiore, Stalin, 502; Student Research File, Potsdam Conference, Folder 1, HSTL. 18. Walter J. Brown Papers, MSS 243, Box 8, Folder 13, CLEM; McCullough, Truman, 454.
Hubert Netzer's 1897 ‘Narzissbrunnen,’ originally displayed at the ‘Berliner Kunstausstellung' in 1903. This was the second such bronze cast- Munich, from where Netzer hailed, decided to buy the first cast after it appeared on sale at the 1897 Internationalen Kunstausstellung im königlichen Glaspalaste zu München and had it installed in 1896 in the southwestern garden part of the Bavarian National Museum in Munich where it resides today beside a snack bar- and was bought by Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria and placed in 1904 in the Rosengarten near the Neue Palais at Sanssouci. In 1976 the fountain was relocated here to the courtyard of Cecilienhof Palace. The figure of Narcissus is shown bent over and leaning on the edge of a seat-high, water-filled fountain with a trough in his right hand. This in turn stands in a wide fountain below; both are made of bronze. The image captures the decisive moment in the myth when Narcissus is overwhelmed by his own beauty when he looks at his face in the 'water mirror'.
Beside a reproduction of the Potsdam Map at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin, created by the globemakers Greaves and Thomas who write as follows:
Illustrated here is our copy of the Potsdam Map, the original is now displayed in the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall. We worked with the Machine Shop in order to make this facsimile for display in a museum in Germany. Clearly the acetate had shrunk by the time the allies used it as reference because they then had to draw their proposed divisions across not only the acetate but also on the map itself where the shrinking acetate had exposed the map.
It is interesting to note that the outside case has its weight recorded of 18lbs clearly a necessity for the flight to Potsdam. Also the case is adapted, the internal rexine material has been cut away to enable the 1944 National Geographic map to be displayed, clearly a case of having to make do with limited resources.The chain which encircles one of the handles, is cold riveted to itself , is padlock secured to the end of it is for securing the chain to another chain, not for keeping the folio shut but possibly for securing to the folio to the person assigned to carry it.
Churchill began Chapter XL of his final volume of the Second World War with "FRUSTRATION was the fate of this final Conference of “the Three”. As he confided to his personal physician, Lord Moran, “After I left Potsdam, Joe did what he wanted. The Russians have been allowed to move their borders westward, leaving eight million poor devils homeless. I would not have allowed it, and the Americans would have supported me." Even if the pessimistic basic tenor was certainly partly determined by the election results of July 26, which were disastrous for him, when his opponent Clement Attlee of the Labor Party won a landslide victory, Churchill's criticism of Poland's western border shift was one, if not the most far-reaching and at the same time the most controversial decision of the Potsdam Conference after it came to an end on the night of August 1st-2nd, 1945. Whilst the most pressing international issues were addressed after the most devastating war in human history, at the end of the negotiations there was a wide gap between the promises and the reality, which led Churchill to title his final volume of his memoirs 'Triumph and Tragedy.' Such conflicts as the dispute over the definition of the German-Polish border were not resolved but postponed to the future. In addition, vague and non-binding formulations, which were intended to unify, would later enable each side to make their own interpretation resulting in both sides of the Cold War each other of violating the Potsdam Communiqué. 
Nevertheless, Potsdam was not a peace conference and was never planned as such- this would have required months of negotiations similar to the Paris peace settlements of 1919 and 1920. At Potsdam however, real and power politics triumphed - clearly evident in the heated question of borders. The policy of the lowest common denominator was being pursued in Potsdam, and it was the policy of concession by the Western powers to a dominant and assertive Soviet stance. Fearing a confrontation, all of Eastern Europe was handed over to Stalin, then at the height of his power and having emerged largely victorious from his first encounter with Truman. The British and Americans were only able to assert themselves on the question of reparations, but the Soviets retained unrestricted access to the Soviet-occupied part of Germany. What, on the other hand, could not be compensated for so quickly was the power-political advantage the Americans enjoyed through the atomic bomb. Stalin had to accept this military weakness and include it in his foreign policy calculations. The age of politics in the shadow of the atomic bomb had begun and nothing changed even after the successful Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. The spiral of the arms race only turned all the faster. And it began on July 24, 1945 in the conference hall of Cecilienhof Palace, when Truman casually informed Stalin about the atomic bomb.
Sans Souci
Men
of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the ϟϟ "Handschar" (1st
Croatian) at Sanssouci during a three-week training course for imams in
July 1943. The Handschar was a mountain infantry division of the
Waffen-ϟϟ which from March to December 1944 fought a counter-insurgency
campaign against communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance forces in
Croatia. It was given the title Handschar after a local fighting knife
or sword carried by Ottoman policemen. It was the first non-Germanic
Waffen-ϟϟ division, and its formation marked the expansion of the
Waffen-ϟϟ into a multi-ethnic military force. Comprising of Bosnian
Muslims with some Catholic Croat soldiers and mostly German and Yugoslav
Volksdeutsche officers and non-commissioned officers, it took an
oath of allegiance to both Hitler and the Croatian leader Ante Pavelić,
fighting briefly in the Syrmia region before crossing into northeastern
Bosnia. It earned a reputation for savagery, not only during combat
operations, but also through atrocities committed against Serb and
Jewish civilians. In late 1944, parts of the division were transferred
briefly to the Zagreb area, after which the non-German members began to
desert in large numbers. Over the winter of 1944–45, it was sent to the
Baranja region where it fought against the Red Army and Bulgarians
throughout southern Hungary, falling back via a series of defensive
lines until they were inside the Reich frontier. Most of the remaining
members became prisoners of the British Army; 38 officers were
extradited to Yugoslavia with ten executed. Hundreds of former members
of the division fought in the 1947–48 Civil War in British Palestine and
the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
With the hakenkreuz flying above and today.
The library and Kleine Galerie, completely unchanged
The Ares Ludovisi in the vestibule of Schloss Sanssouci. This marble copy after the Ares Ludovisi was created by Lambert Sigisbert Adam in 1730 as a thank-you gift to King Louis XV of France for the scholarship accompanying the Grand Prix de Sculpture of 1723, which enabled him to study in Rome for several years. It is a copy of a late 4th century BCE work's Roman copy in the Thermenmuseum in Rome. Together with four other sculptures, the sculpture arrived in 1750 as a gift from the French king to Frederick II of Prussia, who had it erected here in the vestibule of Sanssouci Palace.
The entrance then and now
The
Chinese House garden pavilion which Frederick the Great had erected
about seven hundred metres southwest of Sanssouci palace to decorate its
ornamental garden and vegetable garden. The master builder Johann
Gottfried Büring was commissioned with the planning, who, according to
sketches by the king in the years 1755 to 1764, created a pavilion in
the contemporary taste of the Chinoiserie, a mixture of ornamental
stylistic elements of Rococo and parts of East Asian styles. The
unusually long construction period of nine years is due to the Seven
Years' War , during which the economic and financial situation of
Prussia suffered considerably. Only after the end of the war, 1763, the
cabinets were equipped inside the garden pavilion. Since the building,
in addition to its function as a decorative garden architecture
occasionally served as an exotic backdrop for smaller festivities,
Frederick the Great gave orders to build a Chinese kitchen a few metres
southeast of the Chinese House. After a renovation in 1789, only the
hexagonal windows remind of the East Asian character of the former
utility building.Small surviving remnants of this wall covering were
used during the restoration from 1990 to 1993 as a model for a
reconstruction of the original.
Next
to the Chinese house there is a tall incense burner with the
inscription 製年元正雍清大- Daqing Yongzheng yuannian-zhi which translates as
"Made in the 1st year of the reign of Emperor Yongzheng " (ie. 1723). In
the guide book of the Chinese House it states that the burner came as a
gift from the king of Siam Chulalongkorn in 1897 and stood until 1955
in the former rose garden at the New Palace . The swastika ornament of
course was widespread in Europe and Asia and is not connected in this
case to the Nazis.
Bernau bei Berlin
Memorial to the victims of Fascism. The Bundesschule of the General German Trade Union Confederation (ADGB) was expropriated on May 2 1933 to a Reichsführerschule of the NSDAP and the DAF. The opening on July 16 1933 happened in the presence of Hitler. From 1936 to 1945, the security service school of the security police and SD was in the building. From the summer of 1943 there was an outside camp in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, of which 300 prisoners were employed in a police station. A memorial in front of the station on a green area on the Breitscheidstrasse has reminded the victims of fascism since September 11, 1949. On the morning of April 20, 1945, Bernau was taken by the Red Army. The city was largely spared from destruction during the war.
1937 and today, with the B 109 now directing traffic past the Marienkirche and Mitteltorturm. During the Nazi era the town synagogue, erected in 1832, was desecrated and destroyed during the November pogrom in 1938, as did the two Jewish cemeteries at the Wasserturm in today's Stadtpark, whose crushed tombstones were used as street pavements. The New Jewish Cemetery at Puschkinstraße 60 was rebuilt after 1945. During the war Prenzlau suffered roughly 600 fatalities. At the end of April 1945 about 85% of Prenzlauer Stadtkerns was destroyed. Reconstruction began in 1952. Because of the scarcity of housing and the low economic power in the post-war years, mainly prefabricated buildings were erected, which however were popular with the population.
Velten
Bahnhofsplatz during the funeral of Carin Goering. In 1920, while she was estranged from her first husband, Carin met Hermann Göring at Rockelstad Castle while she was visiting her sister Mary. Four years younger than she, he was working in Sweden as a commercial pilot for the short-lived airline Svensk Lufttrafik and was at the castle because he had flown Count Eric von Rosen, her sister Mary's husband, there. Göring fell in love with Carin and soon started meeting her in Stockholm, even though, scandalous at the time, she was a separated married woman with a young child. She was divorced from von Kantzow in December 1922 and married Göring on 3 January 1923. After their marriage, the Görings first lived in a house in the suburbs of Munich. Carin followed her husband and became a member of the Nazi Party. When Göring was badly injured in the groin during the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, Carin took him to Austria, then on to Italy, and nursed him back to health; their romance was used by the propaganda machine of Goebbels and the couple toured around the nation to boost the popularity of the Nazi Party. Carin suffered from tuberculosis by her early forties. When her mother, Huldine Fock, died unexpectedly on September 25, 1931, it came as a great shock to the 42-year-old Carin. Although her health was still fragile, she went to Sweden for her mother's funeral. The next day, she suffered a heart attack in Stockholm. On the news reaching Göring, he joined her there and stayed with her until she died of heart failure on October 17, 1931, four days before her 43rd birthday. After her death, Carin's older sister Fanny wrote a biography of her which quickly became a bestseller in Germany. By 1943, it had sold 900,000 copies. Carin's death came as a great blow to Göring. In 1933 he began to build a hunting lodge, which became his main home, and named it Carinhall in her honour. It was there that he had her body re-interred from her original grave in Sweden, in a funeral attended by Hitler. Göring filled Carinhall with images of Carin, as he did his flat in Berlin, where he created an altar in memory of her which remained even after he remarried in 1935. Carinhall was demolished on Göring's orders as Soviet troops advanced in 1945. Following the war, remains believed to be those of Carin were recovered by the Fock family, cremated, and re-buried in Sweden. In 1991, remains were found that could also be Carin Göring's and were sent to Sweden for identification. Evidence suggested that these new remains were hers, and were reburied.
The
Haesler Siedlung (1928–31) featuring Otto Haesler's "trademark"
three-sided glazed stair housing on what had been renamed
Adolf-Hitler-Ring during the Nazi era. Haesler had been an influential
German architect often grouped with Bruno Taut, Ernst May and Walter
Gropius as being among the most significant representatives of the
Modernist ("Neues Bauen") architecture that became important initially
during the Weimar period, notably in respect of residential
accommodation. Violently attacked by the regime, in 1934 Haesler went
into a form of internal exile, closing down his office in Celle and
relocating to Eutin, a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, some 80 miles
from the Danish border. Here he continued to build houses, now using the
traditional brick construction characteristic of the region, but still
with structural elements of modern architecture. In 1939 Germany
invaded Poland, triggering a more general war across much of Europe. By
this time Haesler had evidently returned to favour sufficiently to be
appointed Deputy City Building Consultant for Lodz , controlled by
Germany and increasingly populated by ethnic Germans between 1939 and
1945, and for Lemberg (under German control between 1941 and 1944). In
1943 Haesler was also part of a planning project for the reconstruction
of Sebastopol which had recently been largely destroyed in fighting.
The
Marienkirche with the Nazi flag and today. During the Nazi era the
town's historic court gaol on Collegienstraße served as the Gestapo
prison from 1933 to 1945. After Germany's defeat it was used by the NKVD
and the MfS as an investigative detention centre; today it's a music
and art school.
During the November pogroms of 1938, the interior of the synagogue built by the then large Jewish community was destroyed by the Nazis in 1822.
During the war the city was largely spared as there were hardly any important industrial or military installations. With the beginning of the Vistula-Oder operation of the Soviet forces, a large wave of refugees from the Germans began, which also moved to Frankfurt (Oder). The total number of refugees in transit amounted to 264,000 to 300,000 people. The city was declared a fortress on January 26, 1945. It was planned to prepare the city for all-round defense and to use it as cover for Berlin. The dam suburb (today Słubice) was to serve as a bridgehead. On the morning of the 16th of April, with the drum-fire of the Red Army, the large-scale offensive against Berlin began. On April 19 at 5:29 am the Oderbrücke was blown up by the Wehrmacht. Russian aviation attacks took place from 20 to 23 April. On the afternoon of the 21st of April, the fortress status was abolished, and a day later the retreat of the fortress troops began. On April 22 and 23, Soviet bomber raids flew. This led to numerous fires, especially in the centre of Frankfurt. On the morning of 23 April 1945 the first Soviet units reached Frankfurt. By the previous bombardment and incendiary bombings, which began in the following days, the inner city was destroyed to 93%. On the evening April 24, the tower of this church, in English the Church of the Virgin Mary, burned and the vault of the church collapsed months later.
The schloss flying a Nazi flag from its tower and today, considerably altered. In the Soviet memorial cemetery next to the Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof Güterfelde on Potsdamer Strasse nearby is the burial place for an extremely high number of prisoners of war, forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners . An obelisk commemorates 1389 Soviet citizens, 101 Poles, four Yugoslavs, two Italians and a Czech. In the forest cemetery itself is a memorial to 383 Polish and 720 German prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp who died in 1942.
The 5.50 metre-high statue of Roland in sandstone located on the
northeast side of the market square in front of the former library shown
with and without the Nazi flag. He is a knight with decorated plate
armour, holding up a sword in his right hand and with his left hand
holding a shield featuring the Brandenburg eagle. Roland is supported by
a pillar at the back upon which the year 1546 is engraved. In 1954 the
statue was relocated due to the increasing traffic on the former F5 and
hence shifted about 1.60 metres from the Town Hall.
Bernau bei Berlin
Memorial to the victims of Fascism. The Bundesschule of the General German Trade Union Confederation (ADGB) was expropriated on May 2 1933 to a Reichsführerschule of the NSDAP and the DAF. The opening on July 16 1933 happened in the presence of Hitler. From 1936 to 1945, the security service school of the security police and SD was in the building. From the summer of 1943 there was an outside camp in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, of which 300 prisoners were employed in a police station. A memorial in front of the station on a green area on the Breitscheidstrasse has reminded the victims of fascism since September 11, 1949. On the morning of April 20, 1945, Bernau was taken by the Red Army. The city was largely spared from destruction during the war.
Falkensee
Situated
at the western border of Berlin in Brandenburg, during the Second World
War the Demag-Panzerwerke subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration
camp was located here. At its height, 2,500 people were imprisoned in
the camp and used as slave labour. Schlageterstraße, named after the
pre-Nazi nationalist martyr, then and now as Hansa-Straße.
Belzig
Showing Eisenhardt Castle then and now, Bad Belzig is the capital of the Potsdam-Mittelmark district 43 miles southwest of Berlin.
In 1934 ammunition works were established in Bad Belzig including a
labour camp with about 1500 forced labourers. During the years
1936-1945, Burg Eisenhardt was the site of the Reichsschule (leadership
school) for the Technischen Nothilfe ('technical emergency relief').
(The Technische Nothilfe was abolished in May, 1945, but the idea was
revived by Otto Lummitzsch in the form of the Technisches Hilfswerk in
1950, which exists to this day as one of the pillars of the German civil
protection infrastructure.) Between 1940 and 1945 a subcamp of the
women's concentration camp Ravensbrück with about 750 inmates was also
located nearby. Bad Belzig was also the site of a large radio
transmitter station, erected in 1939.
Chorin
The
cloisters were founded by Cistercian monks in 1273, and 500 of them
laboured over six decades to erect what is widely considered to be among
the finest red-brick Gothic structures in northern Germany. The
monastery was secularised in 1542 and fell into disrepair after the
Thirty Years’ War. Renovation has gone on in a somewhat haphazard
fashion since the early 19th century. Here shown during the Nazi-era and
today
Prenzlau Uckermark
The war memorial on Adolf Hitler Platz then and now
1937 and today, with the B 109 now directing traffic past the Marienkirche and Mitteltorturm. During the Nazi era the town synagogue, erected in 1832, was desecrated and destroyed during the November pogrom in 1938, as did the two Jewish cemeteries at the Wasserturm in today's Stadtpark, whose crushed tombstones were used as street pavements. The New Jewish Cemetery at Puschkinstraße 60 was rebuilt after 1945. During the war Prenzlau suffered roughly 600 fatalities. At the end of April 1945 about 85% of Prenzlauer Stadtkerns was destroyed. Reconstruction began in 1952. Because of the scarcity of housing and the low economic power in the post-war years, mainly prefabricated buildings were erected, which however were popular with the population.
Treuenbrietzen
Adolf-Hitler-Strasse
then and now (renamed the Großstraße), with the Heilig-Geist-Kapelle
(now serving the Heimatmuseum) in the foreground leading to the rathaus.
Velten
Adolf-Hitler-Haus and today, on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse
The church with the ehrenmal and today
Niederfinow
The Schiffshebewerk Niederfinow, shown flying numerous hakenkreuzen, is the oldest working boat lift in Germany.
Wusterhausen an der Dosse
The rathaus on Adolf Hitler Platz (with swastika) and today
Brandenburg an der Havel
Looking at the town from Adolf Hitler Brücke and today.
A
concentration camp, one of the first in Germany, was located on
Neuendorfer Straße in Brandenburg Old Town. After closing this inner
city concentration camp, the Nazis used the Brandenburg-Görden Prison,
located in Görden, a suburb of Brandenburg. Later the old gaol became
the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre where the Nazis killed people with
mental diseases, including children. They called this operation "Action
T4" because of the Berlin address, Tiergartenstraße 4, the headquarters
of this planned and well-organised killing "euthanasia" organisation.
Brandenburg an der Havel was one of the very first locations in the
Third Reich where the Nazis experimented with killing their victims by
gas. Here, they prepared the mass killings in Auschwitz and other
extermination camps. After complaints by local inhabitants about the
smoke, the mobile furnaces used to burn the corpses ceased operation.
Shortly after this, the Nazis closed the old prison. Bunker of the type
designed by Leo Winkel in Kirchmöser In 1934, the Arado Aircraft
Company (Arado Flugzeugwerke), which originated in Warnemünde, began
building a satellite factory in Brandenburg that began producing planes
in 1935. The factory was expanded over the next five years, and during the war it produced trainers and other aircraft for the Luftwaffe. The
existence of this factory was one of the reasons Brandenburg was
heavily bombed in later stages of the war; by 1945 the city was 70
percent destroyed. Friedrich Fromm, a German officer involved in the
July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, was executed here in March 1945 for
his part in the plot, even though Fromm betrayed those conspirators he
knew and ordered their execution.
Eberswalde
The
rathaus with and without Nazi flag. Hitler spoke here on July 27, 1932 during the election campaign. In the 1938 pogroms, Eberswalde's
synagogue was destroyed. During the war several factories employed
forced labourers and inmates of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. At
the end of the war, the town centre was attacked by the German
Luftwaffe, in an attempt to delay the Soviet advance.
Bahnhofsplatz during the funeral of Carin Goering. In 1920, while she was estranged from her first husband, Carin met Hermann Göring at Rockelstad Castle while she was visiting her sister Mary. Four years younger than she, he was working in Sweden as a commercial pilot for the short-lived airline Svensk Lufttrafik and was at the castle because he had flown Count Eric von Rosen, her sister Mary's husband, there. Göring fell in love with Carin and soon started meeting her in Stockholm, even though, scandalous at the time, she was a separated married woman with a young child. She was divorced from von Kantzow in December 1922 and married Göring on 3 January 1923. After their marriage, the Görings first lived in a house in the suburbs of Munich. Carin followed her husband and became a member of the Nazi Party. When Göring was badly injured in the groin during the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, Carin took him to Austria, then on to Italy, and nursed him back to health; their romance was used by the propaganda machine of Goebbels and the couple toured around the nation to boost the popularity of the Nazi Party. Carin suffered from tuberculosis by her early forties. When her mother, Huldine Fock, died unexpectedly on September 25, 1931, it came as a great shock to the 42-year-old Carin. Although her health was still fragile, she went to Sweden for her mother's funeral. The next day, she suffered a heart attack in Stockholm. On the news reaching Göring, he joined her there and stayed with her until she died of heart failure on October 17, 1931, four days before her 43rd birthday. After her death, Carin's older sister Fanny wrote a biography of her which quickly became a bestseller in Germany. By 1943, it had sold 900,000 copies. Carin's death came as a great blow to Göring. In 1933 he began to build a hunting lodge, which became his main home, and named it Carinhall in her honour. It was there that he had her body re-interred from her original grave in Sweden, in a funeral attended by Hitler. Göring filled Carinhall with images of Carin, as he did his flat in Berlin, where he created an altar in memory of her which remained even after he remarried in 1935. Carinhall was demolished on Göring's orders as Soviet troops advanced in 1945. Following the war, remains believed to be those of Carin were recovered by the Fock family, cremated, and re-buried in Sweden. In 1991, remains were found that could also be Carin Göring's and were sent to Sweden for identification. Evidence suggested that these new remains were hers, and were reburied.
Finsterwalde
Adolf-Hitler-Straße and today. During the war, 963 war prisoners and 2,755 men and women from the countries occupied by Germany had to carry out forced labour for Kjellberg Electrode und Maschinen GmbH, Reichelt Metall-Schrauben AG, and cloth
factories. They were accommodated in several warehouses, including the
Siemens warehouse. 392 deaths were registered with the forced labourers
of the large enterprises. Between 1945 and 1950 at least 685 persons
were arrested in the Finsterwalde district by the secret police of the
Soviet NKVD. About 250 people were killed in Soviet special camps or
military gaols.
Wittenberge in der Prignitz
Hotel
Germania on Adolf Hitler Straße. From August 15, 1942 until February
17, 1945 a concentration camp was established here in Wittenberge which
served as a subcamp to the Neuengamme concentration camp. Between the
wars much architecture characteristic of the period was built in the
form of workers' housing for the rapidly increased population. It
suffered as most German towns did during the war. Only the railway
workshops remain as significant employers of the old industries but the
large, skilled workforce remains for the newer industries of precision
engineering and applied chemistry.
Diedersdorf
The Schloss from a Nazi-era postcard and today
Rathenow
The
Haesler Siedlung (1928–31) featuring Otto Haesler's "trademark"
three-sided glazed stair housing on what had been renamed
Adolf-Hitler-Ring during the Nazi era. Haesler had been an influential
German architect often grouped with Bruno Taut, Ernst May and Walter
Gropius as being among the most significant representatives of the
Modernist ("Neues Bauen") architecture that became important initially
during the Weimar period, notably in respect of residential
accommodation. Violently attacked by the regime, in 1934 Haesler went
into a form of internal exile, closing down his office in Celle and
relocating to Eutin, a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, some 80 miles
from the Danish border. Here he continued to build houses, now using the
traditional brick construction characteristic of the region, but still
with structural elements of modern architecture. In 1939 Germany
invaded Poland, triggering a more general war across much of Europe. By
this time Haesler had evidently returned to favour sufficiently to be
appointed Deputy City Building Consultant for Lodz , controlled by
Germany and increasingly populated by ethnic Germans between 1939 and
1945, and for Lemberg (under German control between 1941 and 1944). In
1943 Haesler was also part of a planning project for the reconstruction
of Sebastopol which had recently been largely destroyed in fighting.
After
the fall of the Soviet Union, it was revealed that the remains of
Hitler and his assistants were secretly buried in graves near Rathenow. In Vinogradov's Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB, there is reproduced a Soviet map showing that
the bodies were buried in a field near the village of Neu
Friedrichsdorf, approximately one kilometre east of Rathenow.
Luckenwalde
Swastikas
adorning the marktturm. During the war there was a Stalag for prisoners
of war (Stalag IIIa). There was also a work camp for civilians. The
Nazis forced people to work for their war effort or else the families of
people who worked there would perish. Lack of food and hard work killed
thousands. Among them were Poles, Italians, French and many more. There
were several places in the town and surrounding areas where they
worked. Luckenwalde was taken by the Red Army on April 22, 1945.
Frankfurt an der Oder
The
Marienkirche with the Nazi flag and today. During the Nazi era the
town's historic court gaol on Collegienstraße served as the Gestapo
prison from 1933 to 1945. After Germany's defeat it was used by the NKVD
and the MfS as an investigative detention centre; today it's a music
and art school.During the November pogroms of 1938, the interior of the synagogue built by the then large Jewish community was destroyed by the Nazis in 1822.
During the war the city was largely spared as there were hardly any important industrial or military installations. With the beginning of the Vistula-Oder operation of the Soviet forces, a large wave of refugees from the Germans began, which also moved to Frankfurt (Oder). The total number of refugees in transit amounted to 264,000 to 300,000 people. The city was declared a fortress on January 26, 1945. It was planned to prepare the city for all-round defense and to use it as cover for Berlin. The dam suburb (today Słubice) was to serve as a bridgehead. On the morning of the 16th of April, with the drum-fire of the Red Army, the large-scale offensive against Berlin began. On April 19 at 5:29 am the Oderbrücke was blown up by the Wehrmacht. Russian aviation attacks took place from 20 to 23 April. On the afternoon of the 21st of April, the fortress status was abolished, and a day later the retreat of the fortress troops began. On April 22 and 23, Soviet bomber raids flew. This led to numerous fires, especially in the centre of Frankfurt. On the morning of 23 April 1945 the first Soviet units reached Frankfurt. By the previous bombardment and incendiary bombings, which began in the following days, the inner city was destroyed to 93%. On the evening April 24, the tower of this church, in English the Church of the Virgin Mary, burned and the vault of the church collapsed months later.
Ravensbrück
Himmler
visiting the camp and the same site today. The Ravensbrück
concentration camp was the largest concentration camp for women in
Germany, and second in size only to the women's camp in
Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the closure of the Lichtenburg camp in 1939,
Ravensbrück was also the only main concentration camp, as opposed to
subcamp, designated almost exclusively for women. The Germans began
construction of the camp in November 1938 as ϟϟ authorities transported
about 500 male prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to
the proposed site to construct the Ravensbrück camp. By the end of 1942,
the female inmate population of Ravensbrück had reached about 10,000.
In January 1945, the camp had more than 50,000 prisoners, mostly women,
from over 30 countries including political prisoners, “asocials”, Jews,
Jehovah's Witnesses, "criminals," "work-shy," and "race defilers."
By January 1945 the barracks were horribly overcrowded. This overcrowding, aggravated by abominable sanitary conditions, resulted in a typhus epidemic that spread throughout the camp. Periodically, the ϟϟ authorities subjected prisoners in the camp to "selections" in which the Germans isolated those prisoners considered too weak or injured to work and killed them. At first, "selected" prisoners were shot. In early 1945, the ϟϟ constructed a gas chamber in Ravensbrück near the camp crematorium, gassing between 5,000 and 6,000 prisoners before Soviet troops liberated the camp in April 1945. Starting in the summer of 1942, ϟϟ medical doctors subjected prisoners at Ravensbrück to unethical medical experiments which involved in experimenting with treating wounds with various chemical substances (such as sulfanilamide) to prevent infections. They also tested various methods of setting and transplanting bones; such experiments included amputations. The ϟϟ selected nearly 80 women, mostly Polish, for these experiments. Many of the women died as a result, the survivors often suffering permanent physical damage.
By January 1945 the barracks were horribly overcrowded. This overcrowding, aggravated by abominable sanitary conditions, resulted in a typhus epidemic that spread throughout the camp. Periodically, the ϟϟ authorities subjected prisoners in the camp to "selections" in which the Germans isolated those prisoners considered too weak or injured to work and killed them. At first, "selected" prisoners were shot. In early 1945, the ϟϟ constructed a gas chamber in Ravensbrück near the camp crematorium, gassing between 5,000 and 6,000 prisoners before Soviet troops liberated the camp in April 1945. Starting in the summer of 1942, ϟϟ medical doctors subjected prisoners at Ravensbrück to unethical medical experiments which involved in experimenting with treating wounds with various chemical substances (such as sulfanilamide) to prevent infections. They also tested various methods of setting and transplanting bones; such experiments included amputations. The ϟϟ selected nearly 80 women, mostly Polish, for these experiments. Many of the women died as a result, the survivors often suffering permanent physical damage.
Grünewalde (Lauchhammer)
The Adolf Hitler oak tree planted in front of the school.
Gütergotz
The schloss flying a Nazi flag from its tower and today, considerably altered. In the Soviet memorial cemetery next to the Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof Güterfelde on Potsdamer Strasse nearby is the burial place for an extremely high number of prisoners of war, forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners . An obelisk commemorates 1389 Soviet citizens, 101 Poles, four Yugoslavs, two Italians and a Czech. In the forest cemetery itself is a memorial to 383 Polish and 720 German prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp who died in 1942.
Perleberg in der Prignitz
The 5.50 metre-high statue of Roland in sandstone located on the
northeast side of the market square in front of the former library shown
with and without the Nazi flag. He is a knight with decorated plate
armour, holding up a sword in his right hand and with his left hand
holding a shield featuring the Brandenburg eagle. Roland is supported by
a pillar at the back upon which the year 1546 is engraved. In 1954 the
statue was relocated due to the increasing traffic on the former F5 and
hence shifted about 1.60 metres from the Town Hall.