Yalta conference what was decided

The outcome of the war was by then, a foregone conclusion. Germany capitulated just three months later on May 7, a week after Hitler killed himself in a Berlin bunker. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Josef Stalin. The leaders also decided that the German military machine would be confiscated or abolished and that major war criminals ought to be tried by an international court.

A commission as also set up to determine reparations. At a previous meeting in Moscow in October , Churchill and Stalin had agreed to carve up Europe into zones of influence but it was decided in Yalta that countries in eastern Europe — including Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania — would be allowed to hold free elections.

Poland, however, would cede some of its territory to the USSR. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin during the Yalta Conference. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Search for:. The Yalta Conference Key Points The meeting was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe, especially focusing on German reparations and post-war occupation as well as Poland. Yalta was the second of three wartime conferences among the Big Three, preceded by the Tehran Conference in and followed by the Potsdam Conference in July Its new borders were not contested, allowing the postwar states to put their energies into reconstruction and cooperation.

It would be seventy years before a European power next seized the territory of another by force—ironically, when Russia annexed Crimea. The record also shows that Stalin was a master manipulator, but not the big strategic diplomat that he thought he was. For example, Stalin had originally demanded the complete dismemberment of Germany into mini-states and for it to pay ruinous reparations, as it had done in Had he got his way, the powerful Germany that has been the engine of postwar Europe would not have materialized.

But in the end, Stalin backed down. The U. In , it is curious and poignant to read how a Francophile British prime minister advanced the interests of Western Europe and France in particular. And to be reminded that in the biggest champion of multilateralism and the United Nations was the president of the United States. Yalta was not just a feast of the big powers. It was a moment for some smaller ones as well.

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