Post 1945 arrangements in Europe. Nuremberg Trial.

Emergence of Two German

States. The End of the Grand Alliance, 1945-1948. President Truman‘s response to
the events in Europe
Ivan Nemchenko. Essay on the subject “History of International Relations after 1945”

1. Nuremberg Trial (1945–1948)

Following World War II, the victorious Allied governments established the first
international criminal tribunals to prosecute high-level political officials and military
authorities for war crimes and other wartime atrocities. The four major Allied powers—
France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—set up the
International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, Germany, to prosecute and punish “the
major war criminals of the European Axis.” The IMT presided over a combined trial of
senior Nazi political and military leaders, as well as several Nazi organizations. The lesser-
known International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) was created in Tokyo,
Japan, pursuant to a 1946 proclamation by U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur,
Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in occupied Japan. The IMTFE presided over a
series of trials of senior Japanese political and military leaders pursuant to its authority “to
try and punish Far Eastern war criminals.”

The origins, composition, and jurisdiction of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals differed in
several important respects beyond their geographical differences and personalities. Plans to
prosecute German political and military leaders were announced in the 1942 St. James

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Declaration. In the declaration, the United States joined Australia, Canada, China, India,
New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, the Soviet Union, and nine exiled governments of
German-occupied countries to condemn Germany’s “policy of aggression.” The Declaration
stated that these governments “placed among their principal war aims the punishment,
through the channel of organized justice, of those guilty of or responsible for these crimes,
whether they have ordered them, perpetrated them or participated in them.”
In August 1945, the four major Allied powers therefore signed the 1945 London
Agreement, which established the IMT. The following additional countries subsequently
“adhered” to the agreement to show their support: Australia, Belgium, Czechoslovakia,
Denmark, Ethiopia, Greece, Haiti, Honduras, India, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Poland, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia.
The Charter of the International Military Tribunal (or Nuremberg Charter) was annexed to
the 1945 London Agreement and outlined the tribunal’s constitution, functions, and
jurisdiction. The Nuremberg tribunal consisted of one judge from each of the Allied powers,
which each also supplied a prosecution team. The Nuremberg Charter also provided that the
IMT had the authority to try and punish persons who “committed any of the following
crimes:”
(a) Crimes Against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war
of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or
assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the
accomplishment of any of the foregoing;

(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall
include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or
for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-
treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of
public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or
devastation not justified by military necessity;

(c) Crimes Against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation,

and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the
war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection
with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of
domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The IMT prosecutors indicted twenty-two senior German political and military leaders,
including Hermann Goering, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg,
and Albert Speer. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was not indicted because he had committed
suicide in April 1945, in the final days before Germany’s surrender. Seven Nazi
organizations also were indicted. The prosecutors sought to have the tribunal declare that
these organizations were “criminal organizations” in order to facilitate the later prosecution
of their members by other tribunals or courts.

The Nuremberg Trial lasted from November 1945 to October 1946. The tribunal found
nineteen individual defendants guilty and sentenced them to punishments that ranged from
death by hanging to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Three defendants were found not guilty,
one committed suicide prior to trial, and one did not stand trial due to physical or mental
illness. The Nuremberg Tribunal also concluded that three of the seven indicted Nazi
organizations were “criminal organizations” under the terms of the Charter: the Leadership

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Corps of the Nazi party; the elite “SS” unit, which carried out the forced transfer,
enslavement, and extermination of millions of persons in concentration camps; and the Nazi
security police and the Nazi secret police, commonly known as the ‘SD’ and ‘Gestapo,’
respectively, which had instituted slave labor programs and deported Jews, political
opponents, and other civilians to concentration camps.

2. President Truman‘s response to the events in Europe.

The Truman Doctrine, 1947
With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman established that the United States
would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under
threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. The Truman Doctrine effectively
reoriented U.S. foreign policy, away from its usual stance of withdrawal from regional
conflicts not directly involving the United States, to one of possible intervention in far away
conflicts.
President Harry Truman.
The Truman Doctrine arose from a speech delivered by President Truman before a joint
session of Congress on March 12, 1947. The immediate cause for the speech was a recent
announcement by the British Government that, as of March 31, it would no longer provide
military and economic assistance to the Greek Government in its civil war against the Greek
Communist Party. Truman asked Congress to support the Greek Government against the
Communists. He also asked Congress to provide assistance for Turkey, since that nation,
too, had previously been dependent on British aid.

At the time, the U.S. Government believed that the Soviet Union supported the Greek
Communist war effort and worried that if the Communists prevailed in the Greek civil war,
the Soviets would ultimately influence Greek policy. In fact, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had
deliberately refrained from providing any support to the Greek Communists and had forced
Yugoslav Prime Minister Josip Tito to follow suit, much to the detriment of Soviet-
Yugoslav relations. However, a number of other foreign policy problems also influenced
President Truman’s decision to actively aid Greece and Turkey. In 1946, four setbacks, in
particular, had served to effectively torpedo any chance of achieving a durable post-war
rapprochement with the Soviet Union: the Soviets’ failure to withdraw their troops from
northern Iran in early 1946 (as per the terms of the Tehran Declaration of 1943); Soviet
attempts to pressure the Iranian Government into granting them oil concessions while
supposedly fomenting irredentism by Azerbaijani separatists in northern Iran; Soviet efforts
to force the Turkish Government into granting them base and transit rights through the
Turkish Straits; and, the Soviet Government’s rejection of the Baruch plan for international
control over nuclear energy and weapons in June 1946.

In light of the deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union and the appearance of Soviet
meddling in Greek and Turkish affairs, the withdrawal of British assistance to Greece
provided the necessary catalyst for the Truman Administration to reorient American foreign
policy. Accordingly, in his speech, President Truman requested that Congress provide
$400,000,000 worth of aid to both the Greek and Turkish Governments and support the
dispatch of American civilian and military personnel and equipment to the region.

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 Truman justified his request on two grounds. He argued that a Communist victory in the
Greek Civil War would endanger the political stability of Turkey, which would undermine
the political stability of the Middle East. This could not be allowed in light of the region’s
immense strategic importance to U.S. national security. Truman also argued that the United
States was compelled to assist “free peoples” in their struggles against “totalitarian
regimes,” because the spread of authoritarianism would “undermine the foundations of
international peace and hence the security of the United States.” In the words of the Truman
Doctrine, it became “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting
attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
Truman argued that the United States could no longer stand by and allow the forcible
expansion of Soviet totalitarianism into free, independent nations, because American
national security now depended upon more than just the physical security of American
territory. Rather, in a sharp break with its traditional avoidance of extensive foreign
commitments beyond the Western Hemisphere during peacetime, the Truman Doctrine
committed the United States to actively offering assistance to preserve the political integrity
of democratic nations when such an offer was deemed to be in the best interest of the United
States.

3. The End of the Grand Alliance, 1945-1948.

In World War II, the three great Allied powers—Great Britain, the United States, and the
Soviet Union—formed a Grand Alliance that was the key to victory. But the alliance
partners did not share common political aims, and did not always agree on how the war
should be fought.
Churchill and US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been working together for some
time when the United States entered the war in 1941. Roosevelt believed a British victory
over the Axis was in America’s best interests, while Churchill believed such a victory was
not possible without American assistance. In 1940, the two leaders worked to find ways for
America to help Britain hold on without violating its neutrality. The following year they met
off the coast of Newfoundland to begin planning, in sweeping terms, the postwar world.
Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin was a late addition to the Big Three. On New Year’s Day
1942, representatives of all three nations signed the United Nations Declaration, pledging to
join hands to defeat the Axis powers.
The Big Three faced considerable challenges in coordinating their efforts. Thousands of
miles separated their capitals, which meant important decisions often had to be made by
telephone or telegraph. Although their representatives met frequently during the war,
Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill only met twice in person.
Politics and history also made the relationship difficult. Stalin was deeply suspicious, to the
point of paranoia, of both Roosevelt and Churchill. He knew his capitalist allies would likely
oppose any attempt to expand Soviet influence in eastern Europe when the war ended. Stalin
also complained incessantly about the Allied failure to mount a second front in western
Europe before June 1944. This front, he said, would reduce pressure on the Soviet Union by
forcing Hitler to transfer forces from Russia to meet the Anglo-American invasion.

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 Planning for the postwar era further strained relations between the Allied leaders. By the
time the Big Three gathered for the last time at Yalta in February 1945, the Allies were
closing in on Germany from both the east and west. Several major questions had to be
settled, chief among them the fate of Poland, which was then occupied by Soviet troops that
were advancing on Berlin. Stalin demanded that part of Poland be transferred to the Soviet
Union and that a Soviet-friendly communist government in the city of Lublin control the
remainder of the country. He also insisted that each of the Soviet Union’s satellite republics
in eastern Europe receive separate votes in the newly created United Nations, even though
these countries were controlled from Moscow. This alarmed Roosevelt and Churchill, but
they were powerless to force Stalin to guarantee a democratic and independent Poland.
Stalin’s armies already occupied most of the region, and the Western allies could not force
them out without fighting the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Roosevelt hoped to have Stalin’s
help in finishing off Japan.

The Yalta Conference ended in a compromise. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Stalin’s
demands regarding Poland and the United Nations. Stalin, in return, agreed to hold elections
in Poland so its people could choose their own government. He also agreed to declare war
against Japan shortly after the German surrender.

The end of the war marked the end of the Grand Alliance. Roosevelt died in April 1945 and
was succeeded by his vice president, Harry S. Truman, a committed anticommunist.
Churchill met briefly with Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, but was replaced halfway
through it by a newly elected prime minister, Clement Attlee. Ongoing disputes between the
Soviets and the democratic allies about how to organize the postwar world eventually killed

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the alliance. Stalin continued to expand Soviet influence in eastern Europe, while America
and Britain were determined to stop him without provoking another war. This tense standoff
between the former allies, which became known as the Cold War, would last for decades.
Notably, however, it was the conflicts that arose between 1943-46, disagreements over the
issues of Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe, that were the most significant in causing the
breakdown of the Grand Alliance. Although factors such as ideology may be conceded for
their role in exacerbating tensions in the leadup to the escalation, this is not an all-
encompassing argument that accounts for a sudden breakdown in relations in 1945, after the
three post-war conferences.

4. Emergence of Two German States.

In July of 1945, the “Big Three” met again at the Potsdam Conference. At Yalta, the Allies
had agreed to a broad framework that included the demilitarization, democratization and
denazification of Germany. With the war officially over, it was time to initiate a “nuts and
bolts” action plan for an Allied occupation of Germany.
Instead of administering and policing Germany side by side, as the Allies did in postwar
Austria, the decision was made at Potsdam to divide Germany into four distinct occupation
zones, one for each Allied nation (including France). The British were assigned the
northwest quadrant, the French the southwest, and the Americans the southeast. Since the
Soviet army already occupied much of eastern Germany, the Soviet Union was put in charge
of the northeast quadrant, which included the capital Berlin.
Berlin itself was also subdivided into four quadrants, with the British, French, Soviets and
Americans each policing a different zone of the capital, which was fully surrounded by
Soviet-occupied territory.

“At the Potsdam Conference, the idea was that a central authority called the Allied Control
Council would issue joint directives that would then be executed at a lower level by each
Ally in their occupation zone,” says Boghardt, author of Covert Legions: U.S. Army
Intelligence in Germany, 1944-1949. “The devil was in the details, though, and the longer
the occupation lasted, it became clear that this was not workable.”
Rifts Between Soviet and Other Occupied Zones
From the start, the Soviets ran their occupation zone very differently than the British, French
and Americans.
“The Soviet army and Russian civilians had suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis
during the war,” - says Boghardt. “So when it came to carrying out the joint directive of
denazification, for example, they not only arrested Nazi officials, but they considered all
major German landowners to be Nazis. So they confiscated their land.”
The same was true of the joint directive to establish free and democratic elections in each
zone of occupation. On the surface, the Soviets allowed the formation of independent
political parties in their zone, but they soon forced all parties to merge under a Communist
“coalition” controlled by Moscow. The move was heavily criticized by the Western Allies.
But the biggest rift between the Soviet Union and the rest of the occupying nations formed
around the issue of war reparations. One of the reasons that the German economy collapsed
after World War I was that it had to pay billions of dollars in reparations demanded by the

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Treaty of Versailles. The British, French and Americans wanted to avoid that mistake, but
the Soviet Union, whose own economy was heavily damaged by the Germans during World
War II, wanted Germany to pay up.
A deal was struck in which the Soviet Union agreed to trade food grown in its occupation
zone for cash reparations and finished goods from German factories in the western
occupation zones. But when the Soviets failed to keep up with their agricultural shipments,
the Western Allies cut off reparation payments.
By 1946, tensions escalated further as Soviet military forces helped to establish Communist
regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania. In a famous speech, Winston
Churchill, the former British Prime Minister, described the threat of Soviet Communism as
an “iron curtain” descending across the European continent, signaling the start of the Cold
War. Any chance of cooperation between the Western and Soviet occupying forces was
fading fast.
In 1947, Great Britain and the United States decided to merge their two occupation zones
in order to foster more economic cooperation between the regions. The large new territory
was called “Bizonia” referring to the two zones that made up its borders.
Then the western Allies took things a step further by stepping up economic aid to Bizonia
and the French occupied territory with cash from the Marshall Plan. They also replaced
Germany’s badly inflated currency, the Reichsmark, with a new and more stable Deutsche
mark. All of these actions were taken without Soviet approval.
Tensions came to head when the western Allies tried to circulate the new Deutsche mark in
Berlin. The Soviets boycotted the Allied Control Council, and when the West didn’t bow to
their demands, Joseph Stalin ordered a total blockade of Berlin, located 100 miles inside
Soviet-occupied territory.
“Berlin is an island in the Soviet zone,” says Boghardt. “Stalin decided to squeeze the
western Allies where they were most vulnerable. He cut off all access to West Berlin by
road, train and ship, but not by air.”
Such conflicts show that the USSR and Western countries had a completely different vision
for the future of Germany and neither side was going to compromise. Joseph Stalin was
afraid of the spread of the influence of the United States and Western countries on his
occupation zone of Germany, and therefore, with all his might, he wanted to isolate himself
from the West as much as possible. The countries of the Eastern bloc could not count on the
post-war assistance of the Marshall Plan, as they were in the Soviet zone of occupation and
influence. The same fate awaited the eastern part of Berlin, which was much poorer than the
western. This demonstrated the weakness of the economic system of the USSR in
comparison with the US doctrine. The Berlin crisis will go down in history as one of the first
conflicts of the new Cold War.

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 The Americans, British and French responded with the Berlin Airlift, a months-long air
campaign to drop food and fuel into West Berlin that ultimately broke the Soviet blockade
in 1949.
Later that same year, France officially merged its occupied territory with Bizonia, creating
the Federal Republic of Germany, or what became known as West Germany. In October of
1949, the Soviet Union responded with the establishment of the German Democratic
Republic, a Communist state known as East Germany.
In 1952, East Germany began policing its Western border to stop the flight of engineers,
scientists and doctors to West Germany. Interestingly, the border within Berlin wasn’t as
tightly controlled.
“For eight years, there was that loophole,” says Boghardt, “when it was very easy for
anybody who wanted to flee East Germany to do so. All you had to do was hop on a subway
in East Berlin and exit in West Berlin.”
On the night of August 12 to August 13, 1961, East German soldiers in Berlin laid out miles
of barbed wire that would become the Berlin Wall, sealing the border with West Germany
for the next 28 years.

5. Post 1945 arrangements in Europe.

Despite their wartime alliance, tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States and
Great Britain intensified rapidly as the war came to a close and the leaders discussed what to
do with Germany. Post-war negotiations took place at two conferences in 1945, one before
the official end of the war, and one after. These conferences set the stage for the beginning
of the Cold War and of a divided Europe.

The Yalta Conference

In February 1945, when they were confident of an Allied victory, U.S. President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Stalin met near Yalta, Crimea,

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to discuss the reorganization of post-WWII Europe. Each country’s leader had his own set
of ideas for rebuilding and re-establishing order in the war-torn continent. Roosevelt wanted
Soviet participation in the newly formed United Nations and immediate support from the
Soviets in fighting the ongoing war in the Pacific against Japan. Churchill argued for free
and fair elections leading to democratic regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, especially
Poland. Stalin, on the other hand, wanted Soviet “sphere of influence” in Central and
Eastern Europe, starting with Poland, in order to provide the Soviet Union with a
geopolitical buffer zone between it and the western capitalist world. Clearly there were some
key conflicting interests that needed to be addressed.

After much negotiation, the following outcomes of the Yalta Conference emerged:

● Unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, the division of Germany and Berlin into
four occupational zones controlled by the United States, Great Britain, France and
the Soviet Union.
● Germans, civilians and prisoners of wars, would be punished for the war
(reparations) partially through forced labor to repair the damage they caused to their
country and to others.
● Poland was reorganized under the communist Provisional Government of the
Republic of Poland, and Stalin promised to allow free elections there (but failed to
ever follow through on it).
● The Soviet Union agreed to participate in the United Nations with a guaranteed
position as a permanent member of the Security Council.
● Stalin agreed to enter the Pacific War against Japan three months after the defeat of
Germany.

The Potsdam Conference

Soon after the conference it became clear that Stalin had no intension of holding up his end
of negotiations. He eventually allowed for elections in Poland, but not before sending in
Soviet troops to eliminate any and all opposition to the communist party in control of the
provisional government. The 1947 “elections” solidified communist rule in Poland and its
place as one of the first Soviet satellite states.

A second conference was held from July 17 to August 2, 1945, in Potsdam, Germany.
Roosevelt had died in April, so his successor, President Harry Truman, represented the
United States. Churchill returned to represent Great Britain, but his government was
defeated midway through the conference and newly elected Prime Minister Clement Attlee
took over. Stalin returned as well. Stalin’s actions in Poland, and other parts of Eastern
Europe were well known by this time, and it was clear that he was not to be trusted to hold
his end of the bargain. In light of this, the new representatives from the United States and
Great Britain were much more careful with their negotiations with Stalin. Truman in
particular believed Roosevelt had been too trusting of Stalin, and became extremely
suspicious of Soviet actions and Stalin’s true intensions. The final agreements at Potsdam
concerned:

● The decentralization, demilitarization, denazification and democratization of

Germany
● The division of Germany and Berlin, and Austria and Vienna into the four
occupations zones outlined at Yalta
● Prosecution of Nazi war criminals
● Return of all Nazi annexations to their pre-war borders

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 ● Shifting Germany’s eastern border west to reduce its size, and expulsion of German
populations living outside this new border in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary
● Transformation Germany’s pre-war heavy-industry economy (which had been
extremely important for the Nazi military build-up) into a combination of agriculture
and light domestic industry
● Recognition of the Soviet-controlled Polish government
● Announcement of the Potsdam Declaration by Truman, Churchill and Chinese leader
Chiang Kai-sheck outlining the terms of surrender for Japan: to surrender or face
“prompt and utter destruction”

As per its Yalta agreement, the Soviet Union was set to invade Japan on August 15. While
the Potsdam declaration did not specifically mention the newly developed atomic bomb,
Truman had mentioned a new powerful weapon to Stalin during the conference. The timing
of the bombings, on August 6 and 9 suggest that Truman preferred to keep the Soviet Union
out of the Pacific War and out of post-war dealings with Japan. Moreover, this show of
nuclear prowess on the part of the United States was also a warning to the Soviet Union, and
effectively ended either side’s desire to continue working together, and marked the start of
the nuclear arms race that underscored geopolitical considerations of both the United States
and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.

The Soviets annexed their first territories in eastern Poland on September 17, 1939, under
the terms of the Non-Aggression Pact made with Nazi Germany. Soon after, the Red Army
went to war with Finland in order to secure a buffer zone of protection for Leningrad (St.
Petersburg). When the war was over, Finland ceded the territories demanded by the Soviets
plus Karelia. The Soviet Union subsequently annexed the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania, as well as Moldova in 1940. Several other territories (modern-day Ukraine,
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Turkmenistan and Armenia) had been annexed prior to 1939.

In addition to the Republics, several countries in Eastern Europe operated as Soviet satellite
states. These countries were not officially part of the USSR, but their governments were
loyal Stalinists, and therefore looked to and aligned themselves

A Devided Germany

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 After the Potsdam conference, Germany was divided into four occupied zones: Great
Britain in the northwest, France in the southwest, the United States in the south and the
Soviet Union in the east. Berlin, the capital city situated in Soviet territory, was also divided
into four occupied zones. Germany also lost territory east of the Oder and Neisse rivers,
which fell under Polish control. About 15 million ethnic Germans living in this territory
were forced to leave, suffering terrible conditions during their expulsion. Many froze or
starved to death on over-crowded trains, while others were subject to forced labor camps
under Polish and Czechoslovakian governments.

West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany, was officially established in May
1949. East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic, was established in October 1949.
Under their occupying governments, the two Germanys followed very different paths. West
Germany was allied with the U.S., the U.K. and France and became a western capitalist
country with a market economy. In contrast, East Germany was allied by the Soviet Union
and fell under highly centralized communist rule. More information about the
socioeconomic paths of the two Germanys, as well as those of Western and Eastern
European countries can be found in later sections.

Sources of information used:

1) https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/nuremberg
2) https://www.britannica.com/place/Germany/The-era-of-partition
3) https://www.history.com/news/germany-divided-world-war-ii

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4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_World_War_II
5) https://europe.unc.edu/the-end-of-wwii-and-the-division-of-europe/
6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_World_War_II_in_Europe
7) Stragart, Nicholas (2015). The German War; a nation under arms, 1939–45. Bodley
Head. p. 549.
8) Newman, William W. (1993). "History Accelerates: The Diplomacy of Co-operation
and Fragmentation"
9) Davidson, Eugene (1999). The Death and Life of Germany. University of Missouri
Press. pp. 84–85.

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