What was agreed at Yalta?

  • Germany was to be defeated and then disarmed

  • It would need to surrender unconditionally and there would be no separate peace

  • It was also agreed to hunt down and punish war criminals

  • Germany would have to pay reparations, and the Soviet Union would receive half of them

  • Germany was to be divided into four zones of occupation

  • Though Berlin was to be in the Soviet zone, it too was to be divided into four zones

  • In each case, the zones were to be controlled by the Soviet Union, America, Britain and France

  • Austria (and Vienna) would be divided into four zones of occupation too

  • A ‘Declaration on Liberated Europe’ was agreed – as east European countries were liberated, they would be able to hold free elections to set up democratic governments

  • A provisional government was to be established in Poland – the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity – comprising the Lublin Poles and the exiled London Poles followed by free elections

  • But Poland’s borders would be shifted westwards (the Soviet Union taking land in the east, Poland taking land from Germany in the west)

  • Though Eastern Europe would become a ‘sphere of influence’ for the Soviet Union

  • Once Germany was defeated, the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan

  • Russia would receive land in Manchuria and territory lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5

  • A United Nations Organisation would be set up to keep the peace

 

What was agreed at Potsdam?

  • The details of the occupation zones were agreed; also that there would be an Allied Control Council in Berlin, and that the country would be treated as a single economic unit

  • The details of German reparations were agreed

  • Industrial equipment could be taken from the Soviet zone as reparations

  • The Nazi Party was banned and its leaders were to be tried as war criminals, and Germany would be denazified

  • It was agreed that German nationals living in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia would be forcibly repatriated (but not Sudetan Germans)

  • The new Poland borders were agreed too – the Polish-German border would be settled at the Oder-Neisse Line and the Eastern frontier would to return to its pre-1921 position

  • And it was agreed that a Council of Foreign Ministers would be set up to deal with the other defeated powers