Victory in Europe: End of WWII

Berlin, like other battle-scarred landscapes filled with war-weary and/or typhus-carrying people, was a place of homelessness and despair coupled with joy that the war was over. Occupation forces provided bread rations and other minimal needs of daily life.

Many people, in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, lived in cellars (if any could be located) or shacks among ruins. If bricks were available, people salvaged them - to start again.

Displaced persons from Central and Eastern Europe, like these at the Weimar train yards, returned home. But what would they face when they arrived? Newly displaced people, such as prisoners of war, were lining up across Germany - like these in Munich.

Amidst the turmoil, Allied leaders with widely divergent world views (communism versus democracy, state-controlled economies versus capitalism) met at Potsdam to draw-up new boundaries (scroll down 70%) for Central and Eastern Europe. How could they work together, now that their common purpose had been achieved?

Stalin, who had once made a deal with Hitler (in 1939), would play a major role in the decisions. Churchill didn’t trust him at all. Truman (who would not be elected in his own right until 1948) was at least relieved Stalin was willing to join the war against Japan. 

The decision-makers divided Germany into East (the German Democratic Republic) and West (the Federal Republic of Germany). Berlin, located in Soviet-controlled East Germany, was also partitioned. Soviet troops occupied East Berlin; Allied troops (from the United Kingdom, America and France) controlled West Berlin.

Looking back, one could fairly ask whether that wasn’t a potential formula for disaster.