Potsdam Conference
The July–August 1945 meeting of Truman, Stalin and Churchill (later Attlee) that set terms for occupied Germany and postwar Europe.
German question: The problem of whether Germany should be unified, partitioned, or kept weak after 1945. The conference's central business; it stayed unresolved and defined the Cold War's German fault line.
Potsdam Agreement: The conference's protocol on Germany: the five Ds — demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decartelization, decentralization. The operative document of the conference, whose divergent Soviet and Western readings caused later crisis.
Iron Curtain: The closed border dividing Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe from the West, named by Churchill in 1946. The unfinished Potsdam settlement congealed into this continental division within two years.
Harry S. Truman: US president from April 1945, informed of the atomic bomb test days before the conference opened. His newness and knowledge of the Trinity test changed American bargaining posture at Potsdam.
Yalta Conference: The February 1945 Big Three meeting that divided Europe into spheres and planned the United Nations. Potsdam was convened to settle what Yalta had left vague, especially Germany and Poland.
Reparations from Germany: Payments and equipment seizures levied on Germany; each power took them mainly from its own zone. The compromise that let the USSR take industrial capital from its zone plus a share of Western zones' output.
Marshall Plan: The 1948–1952 US aid program rebuilding Western European economies with roughly 13 billion dollars. Its design broke the economic deadlock left by Potsdam's unworkable all-German agreements.
Joseph Stalin: Soviet leader who had occupied Eastern Europe and demanded reparations and border recognition. He came to Potsdam holding territorial facts on the ground and conceded little.
Occupation of Germany: The division of defeated Germany into American, British, French and Soviet zones from 1945. The conference ratified the zonal occupation and issued directives to the Allied Control Council.
Potsdam Declaration: The July 26, 1945 ultimatum calling on Japan to surrender or face prompt and utter destruction. Issued during the conference, partly to announce Japan's postwar terms before the atomic bombs fell.