In July of 1945, the “Big Three” met again at the Potsdam Conference. President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill standing together before starting sessions at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. With the German economy and government in shambles, the Allies concluded that Germany needed to be occupied after the war to assure a peaceful transition to a post-Nazi state. And millions more Germans living in Poland and East Prussia became refugees when the Soviet Union expelled them. Millions of Germans were homeless from Allied bombing campaigns that razed entire cities. The situation in Germany after World War II was dire. They all wanted to avoid a repeat of what had happened after World War I, when a postwar economic collapse in Germany fueled nationalist resentment and the rise of the Nazi Party. Months before Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II, the “Big Three” Allied powers-the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union-met at the Yalta Conference to discuss Germany’s future. When the Allies celebrated Victory in Europe (VE) Day on May 8, 1945, the British military commander Bernard Law Montgomery cautioned his troops, “We have won the German war.
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