Churchill argued for free and fair elections leading to democratic regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Clearly there were some key conflicting interests that needed to be addressed.
After much negotiation, the following outcomes of the Yalta Conference emerged :. 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.
A second conference was held from July 17 to August 2, , in Potsdam, Germany. 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. In light of this, the new representatives from the United States and Great Britain were much more careful with their negotiations with Stalin. The final agreements at Potsdam concerned:. Annexation: Soviet Socialist Republics.
Kennedy had earlier said publicly that the United States could only really help West Berliners and West Germans, and that any kind of action on behalf of East Germans would only result in failure. The Berlin Wall was one of the most powerful and iconic symbols of the Cold War. The height of the Wall was raised to 10 feet in in an effort to stop escape attempts, which at that time came almost daily.
From to , a total of 5, East Germans escaped; many more tried and failed. Finally, in the late s, East Germany, fueled by the decline of the Soviet Union , began to implement a number of liberal reforms. On November 9, , masses of East and West Germans alike gathered at the Berlin Wall and began to climb over and dismantle it. As this symbol of Cold War repression was destroyed, East and West Germany became one nation again, signing a formal treaty of unification on October 3, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
During his campaign for the White House in , Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro is born in the Oriente province of eastern Cuba. The son of a Spanish immigrant who had made a fortune building rail systems to transport sugar cane, Fidel attended Roman Catholic boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba.
He became involved in In fact, the story of the song Mantle was born in Spavinaw, As in the case of Jewish survivors, German fears of Displaced Persons extended into the last years of the war when extensive rumors had anticipated an uprising of foreign workers.
In the aftermath of German defeat, former forced workers celebrated their liberation with carnivalesque actions revolving around alcohol, sex, and food. The symbolic significance of the incident was obvious: like the animals in the Nuremberg zoo, frightened Nuremberg citizens faced potential violence and thirst for revenge on the part of former forced laborers while not being able to count on protection by US occupation forces.
Yet, DP violence was not purely imagined or symbolic. In October , 30 Poles broke into the home of Theodor E in Heimbuchtal, murdered him and his war-disabled son, committed violence against his daughter and a farm laborer, and robbed the house. A variety of factors drove DP violence against ordinary Germans. In many cases, escaped or bombed-out slave workers committed lootings and robberies simply to survive.
They mostly stole food and were only violent with those Germans who refused them. Yet in other cases, former slave laborers sought explicit revenge. They were in a better position than Jewish Holocaust victims because they often knew the identity of their tormenters.
DPs took indirect revenge as well. DP criminality remained equal or slightly below general German crime rates in the immediate post-war period and was only slightly higher than German crime rates by Reports of DP violence were inflated in German sources due to a variety of factors.
German farmers occasionally invented alleged DP robberies in order to conceal the selling of their livestock on the black market. Police reports also consistently inflated DP criminality in order to lobby the occupation authorities for the expansion and rearming of German security forces. Still, individual acts of DP violence assumed a disproportionate symbolic significance. Stories of DP violence tended to confirm and intensify preexisting German fears of the consequences of defeat.
And fears of retribution from DPs were at least partly grounded in actual events. While the German imagination of DP violence exceeded its actual reality, these occurrences lent at least some credibility to post-war fears of retribution. Rumors of widespread DP violence were contagious, and fears of retribution thus also affected those individuals who never experienced any violence from DPs.
As such, the threat and the imagination of DP violence intensified the general climate of uncertainty and insecurity of the immediate post-war period. One hope, therefore, that Germans associated with the arrival of the occupation authorities, was the restoration of order and a new sense of personal security.
Yet many were shocked when they realized that, far from mitigating these anxieties, post-war occupation confronted them with new threats and challenges.
Germans had not experienced the complete foreign occupation of their since the Napoleonic wars in the early nineteenth century.
Post-war Germans were now completely dependent on Allied victors and lacked the coveted self-determination that assumed new global significance after with the onset of decolonization.
Out of this fear, German soldiers and civilians alike made desperate efforts to reach British and American lines in order to escape the Red Army. Some Germans also articulated great relief, even joy and happiness to be under American rather than Soviet occupation. We can breathe again. Yet, despite such widespread preference for the Western allies, many Germans perceived occupation in general as a massive threat to their personal lives and imagined futures.
Rumors of Soviet atrocities also enhanced German anxieties about Allied retribution in general. On May 6, , the 20 year old Renate P. Germany has experienced the most dishonorable and miserable defeat in centuries and has been completely defeated and thrown to the ground by the three powerful enemy powers Russia, America, and England — Germany is occupied, eradicated, it is and will be looked down upon in the whole world, the country and its people will be shunned and despised.
American soldiers also did not see themselves as liberators of Germans, but rather as victors and occupiers. These people are not our allies or friends. The discovery and liberation of the concentration camps in the following month most likely intensified these negative feelings. Whatever hopes individual Germans had associated with the arrival of American occupation troops in , these positive feelings were not reciprocal.
It is true that the relationship between Germans and American GIs improved progressively and eventually prepared the ground for the later integration of the Federal Republic into the Western alliance during the Cold War. But Germans living at the time could not anticipate this later development.
They instead experienced US occupation as a massive intervention into their personal, even intimate lives. Three areas, in particular, emerged as sources of popular fear and anxiety: violent transgressions of American occupation soldiers, housing requisitions, and the onset of denazification. One source of post-war fear were American acts of violence toward German civilians.
Such violent transgressions were not surprising in light of the ferocity of the fighting during the final stage of the war. GI violence against German civilians assumed a multiplicity of forms. Some transgressions took place in broad daylight and served the purpose of publicly humiliating individual Germans for their complicity with Nazism. In July , American soldiers invaded the house of ex-soldier Georg W, struck him in the face, and forced him to stand naked at his window in broad daylight.
Other cases, however, occurred at night and lacked such public dimensions. GIs approached and stopped German civilians seemingly at random, asked them for cigarettes, liquor, money, or perhaps a ride, and then beat them up, often leading to severe injuries. In several cases reported from Amberg in the fall of , drunk GIs also invaded German homes, asked for liquor or girls, or asserted their superiority by brandishing their pistols.
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