• In addition, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration which outlined the terms of surrender for Japan.

• All other issues were to be answered by the final peace conference to be called in soonest possible time.

While the border between Poland and Germany was practically determined and made irreversible by forced population transfers agreed in Potsdam, the West wanted to see the final peace conference to confirm the Oder-Neisse line as a permanent arrangement. Since WW2 has never been settled by peace conference, Polish-German border was gradually recognized by mutual agreements: 1950 by East Germany, 1970 by West Germany and 1990 by united Germany. This state of uncertainty lead to greater influence of the Soviet Union over Poland and Germany.

The western allies, and especially Churchill, were suspicious of the motives of Stalin, who had already installed communist governments in the central European countries under his influence; the Potsdam conference turned out to be the last conference among the allies.

During the conference, Truman told Stalin about an unspecified "powerful new weapon"; Stalin of course knew already about the atomic bomb through his spies in the Manhattan project, and urged Truman to use it. Toward the end of the conference, Japan was given an ultimatum (threatening "prompt and utter destruction" without mentioning the new bomb), and after Japan had rejected it, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman made the decision to use atomic weapons to end the war while at the conference.

The Potsdam Conference was preceded by the Casablanca Conference, January 14 to 24 1943, the Yalta Conference, February 4 to 11, 1945 the Teheran Conference, the Cairo Conference

The Atlantic Charter

Atlantic Charter a declaration of eight common principles in international relations drawn up by Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941, which provided the ideological basis for the United Nations organization

Atlantic Charter Атлантическая хартия Декларация правительств США и Великобритании, в которой излагались цели войны против фашистской Германии и ее союзников и послевоенное устройство мира. Принята в ходе встречи президента Ф. Д. Рузвельта [Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR)] и премьер-министра Англии У. Черчилля 9 августа 1941 на борту авианосца "Огаста" [Augusta, U.S.S.] около берегов Ньюфаундленда. В сентябре 1941 к Хартии присоединился Советский Союз

The Atlantic Charter Roosevelt and Churchill during their secret August 9-12, 1941 meeting in the North Atlantic that resulted in the Atlantic Charter, which the U.S. and Britain officially announced two days later.

The Bretton Woods system of international economic management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the major industrial states. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order in world history intended to govern monetary relations among independent nation-states.

The Atlantic Charter, drafted during President Roosevelt's August 1941 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a ship in the North Atlantic was the most notable precursor to the Bretton Woods Conference. Like Woodrow Wilson before him, whose "Fourteen Points" had outlined U.S. aims in the aftermath of the First World War, Roosevelt set forth a range of ambitious goals for the postwar world even before the U.S. had entered the Second World War. The Atlantic Charter affirmed the right of all nations to equal access to trade and raw materials. Moreover, the charter called for freedom of the seas (a principal U.S. foreign policy aim since France and Britain had first threatened U.S. shipping in the 1790s), the disarmament of aggressors, and the "establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security."

As the war drew to a close, the Bretton Woods Conference was the culmination of some two and a half years of planning for postwar reconstruction by the Treasuries of the U.S. and the UK. U.S. representatives studied with their British counterparts the reconstitution of what had been lacking between the two world wars: a system of international payments that would allow trade to be conducted without fear of sudden currency depreciation or wild fluctuations in exchange rates—ailments that had nearly paralyzed world capitalism during the Great Depression.

Blitzkrieg, from the German for "lightning war", was an operational-level military doctrine which employed mobile forces attacking with speed and surprise to prevent an enemy from organizing a coherent defense. Originally conceived in the years after the First World War, it was a new tactic developing from existing techniques of maneuver warfare and combined arms warfare. It was first used by the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War.

Methods of blitzkrieg operations centered on using maneuver rather than attrition to defeat an opponent. The blizkrieg thus first and foremost required a concentration of armored assets at a focal point, closely supported by mobile infantry, artillery and close air support assets. This required the development of specialised support vehicles, new methods of communication, new tactics, and the presence of a decentralized command structure. Broadly speaking, blitzkrieg operations required the development of mechanised infantry, artillery and engineering assets that could maintain the rate of advance of the tanks.

German forces avoided direct combat in favour of interrupting an enemy's communications, decision making, logistics, and morale. In combat, blitzkrieg forced slower defending forces into defensive pockets that were encircled and then destroyed by following German infantry.

Operations early in the war--the invasions of Poland, France, and the Soviet Union--were highly effective, owing to surprise, enemy unpreparedness and drastically superior German military doctrines. The Germans faced numerically superior forces and technically superior vehicles in the invasion of France-proving the early effectiveness of their tactics and strategies. From this peak, the Wehrmacht's strength deteriorated, Allied forces learned to counter such tactics, and blitzkrieg operations could no longer be conducted as before. From 1943 on, German blitzkrieg operations were generally defensive counterattacks and a handful of mostly failed offensives.

The term blitzkrieg was coined by Western journalists during the 1939 German invasion of Poland and refered to a distinct form of warfare used primarily by Germany during the Second World War. In this narrow sense it us used by majority of military theorists and writers. However over the past decades its meaning has expanded in popular rhetoric to a more broad, popular definition refering to any quick, massive, and decisive military action.

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