Leseprobe

85 For more than a fortnight in the second half of July 1945, hundreds of journalists had endured at the gates of the “forbidden Big Three city” 1 before they could finally put out to the world the results of the Potsdam Conference on 3 August. The only written statement published eight days previously was the Potsdam Declaration. Worded by US President Harry S. Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and telegraphically signed by Chiang Kai-shek, Chairman of the National Government of the Republic of China, it laid down the conditions for Japan’s surrender. 2 Otherwise, the gagging order imposed at the start of the conference had held. It was against this background that Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express on 3 August made the sensational announcement: “What a tremendous, forward-looking programme has been hammered out in the Cecilienhof near Potsdam in the last fortnight and two days! Make no mistake, the Big Three Powers have done a good job of work. There has been give and take—wisely. Europe has made the first step forward to lasting peace. And it is the first step that counts. Germans get a chance to become civilised again—when they have paid the price of their barbarity. This great historical triumph of col- laboration is important for its positive achievements, under condi- tions of maximum difficulty.” 3 Britain’s highest-circulation mass newspaper—it was selling more than 3 million copies every day—by no means stood alone in its verdict. Both quality and popular press hailed the “Work of Peace” wrought at Potsdam, celebrating the supposed closing of ranks between the Second World War’s three major victorious powers. 4 Little had been left of the sceptical assessments which prior to the conference had cautioned against the consequences of a division of Germany and Europe. 5 Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Britain’s chief negotiator for the last five days of the conference, expressed his satisfaction to his cabinet, his predecessor as well as Commonwealth leaders. 6 Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Alexander Cadogan wrote to his wife Theodosia: “We have not done too badly, I think.” 7 (At Potsdam, as so often before, he had pulled the strings of the British delegation, even beyond the change of government.) Only Churchill himself, now a retired war hero, immediately slipped back into the prime role he had already played in the 1930s. Cassandra-like, he warned the Commons in mid-August 1945 of a “tragedy on a prodigious scale ... unfolding itself behind the iron curtain”. 8 He thus created the tenaciously-upheld legend that, had he still been in office at the end of the conference, he would have engaged in a trial of strength with the Soviets. Little wonder he consistently distanced himself from the Big Three’s final commu- niqué in front of anyone who would listen: “I am not responsible for Potsdam after I left.” 9 The key decisions, even if only temporary in some cases, were in fact not taken until the end of July, when follow- ing the most devastating Conservative defeat since 1906, Churchill Victor Mauer ← Churchill arriving at Gatow Airfield