Tehran conference November 1943

• The Tehran Conference


  1943
• The Tehran Conference


  • First meeting of the Big Three (Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill)
  • Discussions focused on the state of the war, Germany, Poland, Eastern Europe, Japan, and the United Nations
• By 1943, the Allies had begun to win the war, following critical turning-point victories in 1942
• The Soviets were pushing the Germans into retreat on the Eastern front


  The Americans and the British had driven the Germans from North Africa and had invaded Mussolini's Italy
• The UK and the USA had not yet launched the kind of second front in Europe that Stalin had been demanding
• Stalin continued to press his allies to invade northwestern Europe

  To take on some of the USSR's burden of confronting the German war machine
• There was also discussion of the war against Japan in the Pacific, which had entered its brutal 'island hopping' phase
• The Soviets had very different views about the future of Germany from those of the USA and Britain
• Many of these differences stemmed from the varied wartime experiences of the Allies, the 'lessons' that seemed to have been learned from the failure of the Treaty of Versailles, and their widely differing ideologies
• There was no agreement on the future of a defeated Germany
• They did confirm that the 'unconditional surrender' of Germany was their objective
• Roosevelt supported 'Operation Overlord' (the Allied invasion of northern France that began with D-Day on 6 June 1944) as a priority
• Stalin's main concern was 'security'
• Stalin wanted to secure his western border by gaining territory from Poland, and by ensuring that Poland had a pro-Soviet government
• It was agreed that the USSR was to keep territory seized in 1939, and Poland in turn would be given territory on its western border with Germany
• This created a situation that no truly independent Poland could agree to, and also ensured future hostility between Germany and Poland
• Tensions between the Poles and Soviets were increased in 1943 with the discovery of a mass grave of 10 000 Polish officers in Katyn Forest
• The Soviets demanded the right to keep the territories that they had seized between 1939 and 1940 which would give them control of the Baltic States, and parts of Finland and Romania in Eastern Europe
• The Americans and the British agreed to the Soviet annexation of these territories, which went against the 1941 'Atlantic Charter' agreement
• The United States and the United Kingdom pressed the USSR to enter the war with Japan, but Stalin could not be convinced to do this until the war with Germany was won
• The Americans, in particular, were very keen to establish a replacement for the League of Nations
• The British and the Soviets gave their general approval to the idea of a new international organization being established
• Roosevelt and Stalin seemed to work reasonably well together, but as the war continued, the next meeting of the Big Three revealed a growing gap between Stalin's post-war aims and those of the Western powers
• Churchill did not trust Stalin, and Roosevelt hoped to play the role of 'mediator' between the British and the Russians
• Roosevelt seemed to believe that the more serious problem for post-war stability was British imperialism rather than Soviet strength
• Roosevelt did not appear overly concerned about the future of Poland, nor was he worried about the Western Allies taking the German capital, Berlin, before the Soviets