The Pottsdam Potsdam Evaluation

As World War II drew to a close, the Allied Powers gathered first at Yalta, and later at Potsdam, to plan for the post-war world with a United Nations and a divided Germany. The Allies considered the fact that Germany had been the aggressors in three major wars in Europe over the past 70 years, and they wanted it to stop. The Allies (Great Britain, France, the United States, and Russia) had four objectives they were trying to accomplish in dividing Germany: (1) Demilitarization; (2) Denazification; (3) Democratization; and finally (4) Disarmament. In one of those tricks of fate that seem to happen on the world stage, the Allies achieved their stated goals, but in a completely different process than they had planned. After the end of the war in 1945, while politicians and diplomats argued about that had been agreed to in Potsdam, the people on the ground in the occupied zones did what they thought was best leading to a process that saw Germany, and the world, firmly divided between East and West. The Allied plan to create a unified Germany and a united world seemed instead to harden the division between Soviet Russia and the West.

The Potsdam Conference was held from July 17, 1945 to August 2, 1945 in Potsdam a small city in the outskirts of Berlin, Germany. This conference, held between the Allied Forces, was going to determine Germany’s punishment for the devastating war that they caused. Britain, France, America, and the Soviet Union all decided to split Germany amongst themselves; Britain in the Northwest, France in a small zone in the West, America in the Southwest, and finally the Soviet Union in the East. This division will affect Germany in a way that three out of the four Allied Forces were not expecting.

The plan went as...

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...t included light reparations and support for Germany to become self-sufficient but not overly industrial. It also provided for the Soviets to exercise unfettered control over their sector. This open approach and equal treatment of Russia (who it should not be forgotten cooperated with Germany in the partitioning of Poland at the start of WWII) instead contributed to the Cold War, creating conflict but not open warfare. The high cost of that conflict and the difference in economic productivity of the two isolated systems (Communism versus Capitalism) in turn led to the collapse of Soviet Russia and the creation of a unified, peaceful, economically successful country. Through a long tortured path the structure set-up to avoid conflict in fact caused it, but ultimately resulted in achieving the goals established at the start - a unified, peacefully, democratic Germany.