The Potsdam Conference was held at Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan the postwar peace, while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They were represented respectively by General Secretary Joseph Stalin, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, and President Harry S. Truman. They gathered to decide how to administer Germany, which had agreed to an unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier. The goals of the conference also included establishing the postwar order, solving issues on the peace treaty, and countering the effects of the war.
The Potsdam Agreement was the agreement among three of the Allies of World War II: the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union after the war ended in Europe on 1 August 1945 and it was published the next day. A product of the Potsdam Conference, it concerned the military occupation and reconstruction of Germany, its border, and the entire European Theatre of War territory. It also addressed Germany's demilitarisation, reparations, the prosecution of war criminals and the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from various parts of Europe. France was not invited to the conference but formally remained one of the powers occupying Germany.
The Tripartite Pact, also known as the Berlin Pact, was an agreement between Germany, Italy, and Japan signed in Berlin on 27 September 1940 by, respectively, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Galeazzo Ciano, and Saburō Kurusu and in the presence of Adolf Hitler. It was a defensive military alliance that was eventually joined by Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia as well as by the German client state of Slovakia. Yugoslavia's accession provoked a coup d'état in Belgrade two days later. Germany, Italy, and Hungary responded by invading Yugoslavia. The resulting Italo-German client state, known as the Independent State of Croatia, joined the pact on 15 June 1941.
The Tehran Conference was a strategy meeting of Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill from 28 November to 1 December 1943. It was held at the Soviet Union's embassy at Tehran in Iran. It was the first of the World War II conferences of the "Big Three" Allied leaders and closely followed the Cairo Conference, which had taken place on 22–26 November 1943, and preceded the 1945 Yalta and Potsdam conferences. Although the three leaders arrived with differing objectives, the main outcome of the Tehran Conference was the Western Allies' commitment to open a second front against Nazi Germany. The conference also addressed the 'Big Three' Allies' relations with Turkey and Iran, operations in Yugoslavia and against Japan, and the envisaged postwar settlement. A separate contract signed at the conference pledged the Big Three to recognize Iranian independence.
The Yalta Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe. The three states were represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin. The conference was held near Yalta in Crimea, Soviet Union, within the Livadia, Yusupov, and Vorontsov palaces.
The Bizone or Bizonia was the combination of the American and the British occupation zones on 1 January 1947 during the occupation of Germany after World War II. With the addition of the French occupation zone on 1 August 1948 the entity became the Trizone. Later, on 23 May 1949, the Trizone became the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly known as West Germany.
Following the termination of hostilities in World War II, the Allies were in control of the defeated Axis countries. Anticipating the defeat of Germany and Japan, they had already set up the European Advisory Commission and a proposed Far Eastern Advisory Commission to make recommendations for the post-war period. Accordingly, they managed their control of the defeated countries through Allied Commissions, often referred to as Allied Control Commissions (ACC), consisting of representatives of the major Allies.
The Tripartite Convention of 1899 concluded the Second Samoan Civil War, resulting in the formal partition of the Samoan archipelago into a German colony and a United States territory.
Germany–Japan relations were officially established in 1861 with the first ambassadorial visit to Japan from Prussia. Japan modernized rapidly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, often using German models through intense intellectual and cultural exchange. After Japan aligned itself with Britain in 1900, Germany and Japan became enemies in World War I. Japan declared war on the German Empire in 1914 and seized key German possessions in China and the Pacific.
The entirety of Germany was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II from the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945 to the establishment of West Germany on 23 May 1949. Unlike occupied Japan, Germany was stripped of its sovereignty and former state: after Nazi Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, four countries representing the Allies asserted joint authority and sovereignty through the Allied Control Council (ACC). At first, Allied-occupied Germany was defined as all territories of Germany before the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria; the Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945 defined the new eastern German border by giving Poland and the Soviet Union all regions of Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line and divided the remaining "Germany as a whole" into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the Allies.
The formation of the European Advisory Commission (EAC) was agreed on at the Moscow Conference on 30 October 1943 between the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, Anthony Eden, the United States, Cordell Hull, and the Soviet Union, Vyacheslav Molotov, and confirmed at the Tehran Conference in November. In anticipation of the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies this commission was to study the postwar political problems in Europe and make recommendation to the three governments, including the surrender of the European enemy states and the machinery of its fulfillment. After the EAC completed its task it was dissolved at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945.
The German Democratic Republic (GDR), German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), often known in English as East Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990. It covered the area of the present-day German states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Berlin, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, and Thüringen. This area was occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II excluding the former eastern lands annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union, with the remaining German territory to the west occupied by the British, American, and French armies. Following the economic and political unification of the three western occupation zones under a single administration and the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1949, the German Democratic Republic was founded on 7 October 1949 as a sovereign nation.
HMS Tremadoc Bay was a Bay-class anti-aircraft frigate of the British Royal Navy, named for Tremadoc Bay in north Wales.
The Far Eastern Commission (FEC) was a Soviet commission which succeeded the Far Eastern Advisory Commission (FEAC), and oversaw the Allied Council for Japan following the end of World War II. Based in Washington, D.C., it was first agreed on at the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers, and made public in communique issued at the end of the conference on December 27, 1945. The 8 members that comprised the commission were the United States, United Kingdom, Republic of China, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, India and the Philippines. As agreed in the communique, the FEC and the Council were dismantled following the Japanese Peace Treaty of September 8, 1951.
The Berlin Declaration of 5 June 1945 or the Declaration regarding the defeat of Germany, had the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France, acting on behalf of the Allies of World War II, jointly assume de jure "supreme authority" over Germany after its military defeat and asserted the legitimacy of their joint determination of issues regarding its administration and boundaries prior to the forthcoming Potsdam Conference.
This is a timeline of the events that stretched over the period of late World War II, its conclusion and legal aftermath, from January 1945 to 1991.
The Allied Control Council (ACC) or Allied Control Authority, and also referred to as the Four Powers, was the governing body of the Allied occupation zones in Germany (1945–1949/1991) and Austria (1945–1955) after the end of World War II in Europe. After the defeat of the Nazis, Germany and Austria were occupied as two different areas, both by the same four Allies. Both were later divided into four zones by the 1 August 1945 Potsdam Agreement. Its members were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. The organisation was based in Schöneberg, Berlin.
Operation Osoaviakhim was a secret Soviet operation under which more than 2,500 former Nazi German specialists from companies and institutions relevant to military and economic policy in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (SBZ) and Berlin, as well as around 4,000 more family members, totalling more than 6,000 people, were transported from former Nazi Germany as war reparations to the Soviet Union. It took place in the early morning hours of October 22, 1946 when MVD and Soviet Army units under the direction of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD), headed by Ivan Serov, rounded up German scientists and transported them by rail to the USSR.
Arthur Harrison "Speedy" Graubart was a United States Navy captain, and the last commander of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen after the ship's transfer as a war prize from Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine to the US Navy.
The following events occurred in March 1941:
