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When World War II ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, Soviet and Western (U.S., British, and French) troops were located in particular places, essentially, along a line in the center of Europe. From July 17 to August 2, 1945, the victorious Allied Powers reached the Potsdam AgreementThe Potsdam Agreement was an agreement on policy for the occupation and reconstruction of Germany and other nations after fighting in the European Theatre of World War II had ended with the German surrender of May 8, 1945. It was drafted and adopted by th on the fate of postwar Europe, calling for the division of a defeated GermanyThe Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland is one of the world's leading industrialized countries, located in the middle of the European Union. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic Sea, to the east into four occupation zones (thus reaffirming principles laid out earlier by the Yalta ConferenceThe Yalta Conference sometimes called the Crimea conference was the wartime meeting from February 4 to 11, 1945 between the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The delegations were head), and the similar division of BerlinBerlin [ bɛrˈliːn ] is the national capital of Germany and its largest city, with 3,387,404 inhabitants (as of September 2004); down from 4. 5 million before World War II. Berlin is located on the rivers Spree and Havel in the northea into four zones. The French, U.S., and British sectors of Berlin were deep within the Soviet occupation zones, and thus a focal point of tensions corresponding to the breakdown of the U.S.-Soviet wartime alliance. (See Origins of the Cold WarCold War Tsarist Russia and the West Some scholars have traced the origins of the East-West conflict well before the Bolshevik Revolution. World System theorists have argued that Russia was late to be absorbed by the capitalist world-system, and only in i)
The Berlin blockade had its roots in 1945 and 1946Events January January 4 Theodore Schurch becomes the last person to be executed for offences committed under the Treachery Act of 1940 January 7 Allied recognize Austrian republic with 1937 borders the country is divided into four occupation zones Januar when the breakdown of the Four Power Allied Control Council rendered the reunification of postwar Germany impossible.
The Soviets sought to create a unified but demilitarized Germany under their tutelage, or as Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov told U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes in 1946, a united Germany that could be neutralized after Russia received industrial reparations from Germany. This strategy was a response to a 150-year history of repeated Western assaults on Russia, including World War I and Napoleon's 1812 invasion. Stalin considered it essential to destroy Germany's capacity for another war, which conflicted with the U.S. desire to rebuild Germany as the economic center of a stable Europe. (Stalin assumed that Japan and Germany could menace the Soviet Union once again by the 1960s.)
The United States, however, stressed that postwar reconstruction in Western Europe depended on German economic and industrial recovery. The U.S. stance was that if it could not reunify Germany with Soviet cooperation, the West could develop the western, industrial portions of postwar Germany controlled by France, Britain, and the U.S. and integrate the areas into a new European sphere.
Led by the U.S., the three major Western former Allied Powers reached an agreement on this approach during a series of impromptu meetings in London from February to June 1948. As outlined in an announcement on March 6, 1948, the London Conference declared support for fusing the three Western zones of Germany into an independent, federal form of government, and bring the fusion of the three Western zones into the U.S.-led economic reconstruction efforts (See Marshall Plan). These plans created a crisis in Soviet foreign policy, which was predicated on a weakened Germany and ensuring reparations payments.
In addition, the dispute over Germany escalated after U.S. President Harry S. Truman refused to give the Soviet Union reparations from West Germany's industrial plants; Stalin responded by splitting off the Soviet sector of Germany as a Communist state.