world war II

1. World War II Conferences
Why Europe ended up the way it
was from 1945- 1991

2. Tehran, Iran
• Date: November, 1943
• Who: Stalin, FDR, Churchill
• Decisions:
–American-British invasion of
France
–Soviet invasion of eastern Europe

3. Yalta, USSR
• Date: February, 1945
• Who: Stalin, FDR, Churchill
• Decisions:
–Germany divided into occupation zones
–Stalin to declare war on Japan 3 months
after Germany defeated
–Eastern European gov’ts to be freely
elected, but pro-Soviet

4. Churchill, FDR, & Stalin

5. Occupation
zones in
Germany
after WWII

6. Potsdam, Germany
• Date: July, 1945
• Who: Stalin, Truman, Atlee
• Decisions:
–Truman insisted on free elections in
eastern Europe
–Stalin refused, feared hostile countries on
boarder & 3rd German invasion
–Stalin won, Truman angry

7. Predictions
• What do you think some of the
outcomes will be?

8. Outcomes
• Elections in eastern European countries
were overturned by Stalin
• New “free elections” run by Stalin elected
Soviet controlled gov’ts in
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania,
Bulgaria, Poland

9. • Soviet controlled East Germany split from
rest of Germany
• Communist revolts, backed by Stalin, in
Greece & Turkey fail because of US & UK
support
–Start of the Truman Doctrine to
“contain” communism where it was at
that point

10. The Iron Curtain
• The concept of the Iron Curtain
symbolized the ideological fighting and
physical boundary dividing Europe into
separate areas from the end of World War
II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in
1991.

11. Iron Curtain
• Churchill’s speech in March 1946:
–“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the
Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended
across the continent. The populations…
lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject,
in one form or another, not only to Soviet
influence but to a very high and
increasing measure of control from
Moscow.”

12. Europe circa 1946

13. Iron Curtain Quickwrite
• What do you think Churchill meant by
an Iron Curtain?
• What you think might happen with the
Iron Curtain?