The World at War's End

The smoke had barely cleared over the ruins of Berlin when the question that would define the next half-century was first whispered among the survivors. In the shell of what had once been a proud European capital, where rubble replaced grandeur and silence replaced the roar of artillery, people clutched at each other in disbelief. They had survived. Against all odds, against the bombing raids that had turned their city into a graveyard of broken stone and twisted steel, against the final desperate siege that had pushed them to the brink of starvation, they had survived. But as they emerged from cellars and bunkers into the gray light of a May morning, they found themselves asking not just "What now?" but "Who decides?"

Anna Müller was thirteen years old when the war ended. She remembered her father teaching her to read maps, his weathered finger tracing the borders of a Germany that seemed eternal and unchangeable. She remembered her mother humming as she baked bread—real bread, made with real flour, back when such things were still possible. She remembered her older brother Karl, who had been so proud in his uniform, kissing her forehead before he left for the Eastern Front, promising to come home a hero. Karl never came home. Neither did her father, who had been conscripted in the final months of the war to dig trenches and build barricades against the advancing Red Army. Anna's mother had died in February, during one of the last British bombing raids, when a bomb had fallen through three floors of their apartment building before detonating in the basement where they had taken shelter.

Now Anna stood amid the ruins of her street, a thin girl with ash-colored hair and eyes that had seen too much too quickly. Her grandmother's hand gripped hers so tightly it hurt—a living hand, at least, though her grandmother rarely spoke anymore. They had walked for days to reach Berlin, fleeing the advancing Americans from the west, then changing course when the Russians approached from the east. Now they were trapped in the middle, like everyone else, waiting for something they didn't understand to happen to them.

The something arrived on May 8, 1945, when the announcement came that Germany had surrendered unconditionally. For Anna, this meant nothing. She had no father to mourn, no brother to remember, no future to imagine. The world had ended for her years ago, somewhere between the first bombing raid and the last. What she felt now, as she watched the American soldiers arrive in their strange vehicles with their strange music playing from their strange radios, was not victory or defeat but a vast, aching emptiness. The war was over. And yet, somehow, everything that came next would be worse.

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In Washington, in Moscow, and in London, the leaders who would shape this new world gathered to decide the fate of millions like Anna. They met in grand palaces and modest conference rooms, smoked cigars and cigarettes, and argued through day and night about a Europe they were determined to rebuild according to their own visions. The war had been won, but victory itself had become a contest—not between Germany and the Allies, but between the two powers who had done the most to defeat Hitler, the United States and the Soviet Union.

The tensions that would define the Cold War were already visible in February 1945, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met at Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea coast in Crimea. Roosevelt was dying, though few knew it yet; his face had the hollowed appearance of a man whose body was consuming itself. Churchill was exhausted, his famous bulldog energy dimmed by six years of war that had aged him beyond his seventy years. Stalin, the Georgian tyrant who had already ordered the deaths of millions of his own people, seemed almost youthful by comparison—a man in complete control of himself and his regime.

Yalta was a conference of great hopes and great compromises. The three leaders believed, or at least claimed to believe, that they could construct a lasting peace. The war against Japan continued, and Roosevelt needed Soviet help to defeat it; Stalin agreed to enter the Pacific war three months after Germany's surrender in exchange for territorial concessions in Asia. More importantly for Europe, the Big Three agreed on a framework for the postwar world: free elections in the liberated countries of Eastern Europe, the division of Germany into occupation zones, and the creation of a new international organization to maintain peace—the United Nations.

But Yalta also revealed the first cracks in the Allied alliance. Churchill, ever the realist, had warned before the conference that "the vacuum [in Central Europe] will be filled either by us or by the Russians." The British prime minister understood that Stalin had no intention of allowing free elections in countries his army had liberated. Every Soviet soldier who crossed into Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary was a Soviet soldier who would not leave. Stalin had lost twenty-seven million people in the war; he would not allow the West to deny him a security zone on his western border. Roosevelt, still believing he could charm the Soviet dictator into cooperation, dismissed Churchill's concerns. The American president wanted desperately to believe that cooperation with Stalin was possible—that the man who had starved millions in Ukraine and ordered the Great Terror could somehow be trusted to keep his word.

The answer came less than a year later, when Churchill traveled to Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 and delivered one of the most famous speeches of the twentieth century. Standing beside President Harry Truman, the man who had inherited Roosevelt's presidency upon his death in April 1945, Churchill declared that "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." The phrase was not Churchill's invention—he had heard variations of it from others—but its impact was electric. Churchill was warning that a division had already appeared in Europe, a division between the democratic West and the communist East, and that division was growing deeper by the day.

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The man who had been thrust into the presidency in April 1945 was not the man Roosevelt would have chosen. Harry S. Truman was a plain-spoken Midwesterner, a former farmer and haberdasher, a politician who had risen through the rough-and-tumble politics of Missouri machine politics. He had served as vice president for only a few months before Roosevelt's death, and he knew almost nothing about the most sensitive matters of wartime policy—including the atomic bomb, which he learned about only after taking office. Truman was not brilliant, not charming, not particularly sophisticated. But he had a quality that would prove essential in the years ahead: he did not believe in losing.

Truman's first months in office were dominated by the war's final stages and the question of how to end it. The atomic bomb, successfully tested in New Mexico in July 1945, offered a terrifying new option. Truman authorized its use against Japan in August, and the world glimpsed the terrible future that awaited if the Cold War ever turned hot. But in the spring of 1945, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before the dawn of the nuclear age, Truman faced a more immediate question: how to manage the alliance with the Soviet Union.

The second Big Three conference, held at Potsdam near Berlin in July and August 1945, gave Truman his first opportunity to meet Stalin in person. By this time, Roosevelt was dead, and Churchill was facing an electoral defeat in Britain that would remove him from the conference before it ended. The new British prime minister, Clement Attlee, would take over, but the American and Soviet leaders remained the same. Truman came to Potsdam with a new attitude: he was less willing to make concessions to Stalin, more willing to push back against Sovi