45-2-4 Yalta Conference 45-2-11

45-2-4 Big Three at Yalta (Crimea) Conference - FDR, Churchill, Stalin - HiPo > .

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On 4 February 1945 the Yalta Conference began, attended by the ‘Big Three’.

The conference saw Allied leaders United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin meet to discuss the government of post-war Europe.

The three leaders had previously met at the Tehran Conference in 1943 where they set out a unified military strategy for fighting the war. At Yalta the focus was exclusively on the end of the war and its aftermath. It was clear that the conflict in Europe was in its final stages, so they agreed to demand Germany’s unconditional surrender after which the country, and Berlin, would be split into four zones of occupation. Germany was to undergo a process of demilitarization and denazification, and Nazi war criminals were to be hunted down and brought to justice.

The three leaders also considered the fate of Eastern European countries that had been under Nazi occupation. Poland was the focus of much of the discussion, but they intended for the agreement they reached to apply to every country that was liberated. The Protocol of Proceedings stated that the Allies would assist these countries to form ‘interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population…and the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people.’

The terms of the agreement, when they were made public, were met with harsh criticism in Britain and the United States. Some of these came to be justified when, at the end of the war, the Soviet Union installed communist governments throughout Eastern Europe in contravention of the agreement for free elections.

The Yalta Conference (codenamed Argonaut), also known as the Crimea Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War 2 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, respectively. The conference was held near Yalta in Crimea, Soviet Union, within the Livadia, Yusupov, and Vorontsov palaces.

The aim of the conference was to shape a postwar peace that represented not only a collective security order but also a plan to give self-determination to the liberated peoples of Europe. Intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe, within a few years, with the Cold War dividing the continent, the conference became a subject of intense controversy.

Yalta was the second of three major wartime conferences among the Big Three. It was preceded by the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and was followed by the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. It was also preceded by a conference in Moscow in October 1944, not attended by Roosevelt, in which Churchill and Stalin had spoken of Western and Soviet spheres of influence in Europe.