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After Germany's defeat in World War II, Europe lay in tatters. Millions of refugees were dispersed across the continent. Food and fuel were scarce. Britain was bankrupt, while Germany had been reduced to rubble. In July of 1945, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin gathered in a quiet suburb of Berlin to negotiate a lasting peace: a peace that would finally put an end to the conflagration that had started in 1914, a peace under which Europe could be rebuilt. The award-winning historian Michael Neiberg brings the turbulent Potsdam conference to life, vividly capturing the delegates' personalities: Truman, trying to escape from the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt, who had died only months before; Churchill, bombastic and seemingly out of touch; Stalin, cunning and meticulous. For the first week, negotiations progressed relatively smoothly. But when the delegates took a recess for the British elections, Churchill was replaced—both as prime minster and as Britain's representative at the conference—in an unforeseen upset by Clement Attlee, a man Churchill disparagingly described as “a sheep in sheep's clothing.\" When the conference reconvened, the power dynamic had shifted dramatically, and the delegates struggled to find a new balance. Stalin took advantage of his strong position to demand control of Eastern Europe as recompense for the suffering experienced by the Soviet people and armies. The final resolutions of the Potsdam Conference, notably the division of Germany and the Soviet annexation of Poland, reflected the uneasy geopolitical equilibrium between East and West that would come to dominate the twentieth century. As Neiberg expertly shows, the delegates arrived at Potsdam determined to learn from the mistakes their predecessors made in the Treaty of Versailles. But, riven by tensions and dramatic debates over how to end the most recent war, they only dimly understood that their discussions of peace were giving birth to a new global conflict.

Scholarly debate about the reasons for Korea's division at the 38th parallel in August 1945 has not been particularly intense. Early historical accounts accepted the u.s. government's claim that the United States and the Soviet Union made a hasty decision to partition the country as a matter of military convenience to coordinate the acceptance of the surrender of Japanese forces at the end of World War ii. By the early 1980s, however, new research had established that President Harry S. Truman planned to occupy all of Korea after using the atomic bomb, which was designed to force Japan's surrender before the Soviet Union entered the Pacific War. But when Premier Joseph Stalin sent the Red Army into Korea, Truman proposed dividing Korea to prevent the Soviets from imposing Communist rule on the entire nation. Recently, some South Korean scholars have challenged this interpretation. Relying on new research, they contend that during the Potsdam Conference, u.s. and Soviet officials negotiated a secret agreement to divide Korea at the 38th parallel. This research note examines Won Bom Lee's article making this argument, showing how it lacks evidentiary support to overturn the standard explanation for Korea's division.

With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants--almost all of them ethnic Germans--were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland. Uprooted examines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants.

Matt Sinnott interviews EB editor Jeff Wallenfeldt to talk about the 75th anniversary of VJ Day when Japan announced its unconditional surrender ending WWII in the Pacific.

Most Americans believe that the Second World War ended because the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan forced it to surrender. Five Days in August boldly presents a different interpretation: that the military did not clearly understand the atomic bomb’s revolutionary strategic potential, that the Allies were almost as stunned by the surrender as the Japanese were by the attack, and that not only had experts planned and fully anticipated the need for a third bomb, they were skeptical about whether the atomic bomb would work at all. With these ideas, Michael Gordin reorients the historical and contemporary conversation about the A-bomb and World War II. Gordin posits that although the bomb clearly brought with it a new level of destructive power, strategically it was regarded by decision-makers simply as a new conventional weapon, a bigger firebomb. To lend greater understanding to the thinking behind its deployment, Gordin takes the reader to the island of Tinian, near Guam, the home base for the bombing campaign, and the location from which the anticipated third atomic bomb was to be delivered. He also details how Americans generated a new story about the origins of the bomb after surrender: that the United States knew in advance that the bomb would end the war and that its destructive power was so awesome no one could resist it.

Nineteen authors have filed a communication to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights against Germany and the Russian Federation to enforce rehabilitation of their legal predecessors, who were victims of denazification (Russian: Денацификация) measures in Post-War Germany. They reprimand that they and the persons concerned are discriminated by the current German legislation against all other groups of comparably politically persecuted persons on the territory of the former Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany (Russian: Coвeтcкaя oккyпaциoннaя зoнa Гepмaнии), being excluded from the scope of the existing rehabilitation acts, which have come into force after the German Reunification. Whilst any other persecutees can be rehabilitated according to the existing rehabilitation acts (Criminal Rehabilitation Act and Administrative Rehabilitation Act), and whilst victims of denazification measures in the former Western Occupations Zones had been enabled to enforce their rehabilitation in the terms of German acts in the years between 1951 until 1955 after the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany, those persons who were victims of denazification measures in the former Soviet Occupation Zone are excluded from any rehabilitation. This exclusion is justified by the German legislator and the Federal Constitutional Court with the argument that otherwise the former USSR would not have agreed to the German Reunification.

Poland is an example of a national and ethnic structure which is inextricably linked with religion. Religion ought to be perceived as a multi-faceted phenomenon for it permeates all structures of the society. It exerts a profound influence on the functioning of families, local communities, the system of education, as well as on professional and other types of associations. Poland and its history constitute an excellent point of reference in that matter, for it has undergone a long and complex process of transformation from the country of multiculturalism to that of homogeneity. National and religious homogeneity was a rather short -lived experience because it was the outcome of the change of the country borders and expulsions of World War II. In the People’s Republic of Poland any manifestation of identity or difference was received with hostility. Depending on the area of social life, various degrees of repressive policies were implemented, and national and religious minorities became one of the targets of such politics. It can be argued that it exerted a particularly strong influence on the German minority, no longer able to cultivate its cultural and ethnic identity. The situation did not change until the socio -political transformation of 1989. It was then that a service in the German language was celebrated for the first time since the end of war. The place of celebration was no less significant - it was the Annaberg, a place which both Poles and Germans hold sacred.

The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that. Eventually, Roosevelt backed down, primarily because of intense British and French opposition. At the Potsdam conference in July 1945, the Allied governments quickly worked out a plan for the Japanese surrender in Indochina. The Chinese would accept the surrender of Japanese forces north of the sixteenth parallel, and the British troops would land in Saigon and deal with the Japanese south of the line. Although Great Britain was officially neutral about the French return to Indochina, most British officials were worried about their own empire. Insurgent nationalists were active in Malaya and Burma, and Mohandas Gandhi was steadily gaining power in India. The Korean war had already proven how difficult Asian land wars could be, and the terrain of Indochina was far worse, the stuff of which bloody, endless guerrilla wars are made.

Conference at Potsdam: procedure and administration. Views on outstanding agenda of conference