February 1945

Yalta Conference

The "Big Three" leaders of the Allied Powers, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin, met at Yalta on the Black Sea in 1945. At this point in the war, the Soviet army was within 100 miles of Berlin and already occupied Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and parts of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The agreements the three leaders reached shaped the postwar settlement and the scope of the Cold War. They debated the future of Poland, agreed to divide Germany into zones of occupation when the war was over, and the Soviet Union pledged to join the war in the Pacific once Hitler was defeated. FDR died on April 12, 1945, and the European war ended on May 8, 1945.

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