Talk:Yalta Conference
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[edit] Solzhenitsyn's Verdict
In their native countries, Roosevelt and Churchill are regarded as examples of wise statesmen. But we, during our jail conversations, were astonished by their constant shortsightedness and even stupidity. How could they, retreating gradually from 1941 to 1945, leave Eastern Europe without any guarantees of independence? How could they abandon the large territories of Saxony and Thuringia in return for such a ridiculous toy as the four-zoned Berlin that, moreover, was later to become their Achille’s heel? And what kind of military or political purpose did they see in giving away hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens (who were unwilling to surrender, whatever the terms) for Stalin to have them killed?
It is said that by doing this, that they secured the imminent participation of Stalin in the war against Japan. Already armed with the Atomic bomb, they did pay for Stalin so that he wouldn’t refuse to occupy Manchuria to help Mao Zedong to gain power in China and Kim Il Sung, to get half of Korea!… Oh, misery of political calculation!
When later Mikolajczyk was expelled, when the end of Beneš and Masaryk came, Berlin was blocked, Budapest was in flames and turned silent, when ruins fumed in Korea and when the conservatives fled from Suez – didn’t really some of those who had a better memory, recall for instance the episode of giving away the Cossacks?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, Part I, ch 6 (‘That Spring’)
[edit] Mountbatten?
is it Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma turning his face on the picture? Agathoclea 13:54, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
another picture credits him as Sir Charles Portal Agathoclea 14:23, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Forced labor
John Dietrich, The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (2002) ISBN 1-892941-90-2 States that the protocol contained provisions for reparations in the form of forced labor. Yalta protocol: "2. Reparations in kind is to be extracted from Germany in three following forms:...(c) Use of German Labor"
This is confirmed by Winston Churchill in his War Cabines minutes. War cabinet Minutes
In the meeting on May 18th 1945, the U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill discusses the amount of German labour they will request for use in the British agriculture. In the meeting on June 11th 1945 they discuss the provisions made for Slave Labour in the Yalta protocol, and how many slaves the Russians should get.
- Ch. a) Only reparations worth havg = G. export markets.
Directive takes a/c of that, but shd. state it specifically. b) Also wd. like to omit last sentence in para 15. If we count against R. claim the labour they take, we cd. get the total figure up to $20 billion. $16.000 m. value cd. be assigned for 4 m. slave labour.
- P.M.
At Yalta R. made it clear tht. their claim was exclusive of labour.
-
- In the winter of 1946/47 former U.S. president Herbert Hoover had been sent on a fact finding mission to Germany by President Harry S. Truman. In February 28, 1947 he published a situation report on Germany, where it was estimated that 4,160,000 German former prisoners of war, by General Eisenhower relabeled as Disarmed Enemy Forces in order to negate the Geneva convention, were used as forced labor in work camps outside Germany: 3,000,000 in Russia, 750,000 in France, 400,000 in Britain and 10,000 in Belgium. [1]
- Dietrich states that more than 1,000,000 German Prisoners of War were after the war ended forced to work in French coal-mines and Brittish agriculture, as well as 500,000 in U.S. run Military Labor Service Units in occupied Germany itself. Dietrich also states that roughly 3,000,000 former prisoners of war suffered terribly in work camps in the Soviet Union in the following years, as well as a number of German civilians (for the fate of the civilians, se Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union)
In view of this I think that the forced labor part of the Yalta protocol deserves to be listed, along with all the other things the Allies agreed upon. Stor stark7 15:54, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Stalin's intentions?
Seems to me the comment about Stalin's intentions re: Poland are a rather strong accusation without being backed by a reference. Stalin was no democrat, but did he actually renege on the elections before Truman, Churchill, and later Attlee started trying to break the Yalta agreements? I don't know that this would have changed anything, but it at least deserves mention in the interests of NPOV.--Eric 12:46, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] vandals
potentially imperialist paws You da man conference Again long and tiring trips...
This article is vandalised in my opinion, and I don't know where to start. Could anyone with sincere intentions and experience with this topic please step in?
[edit] to the vandals
These men, positivly imperial pieces, bent the world to war and back again. And now we look back with 20/20 vision, through looking glasses that are less then perfect, giving us a vision of the past that must be tainted by our hearts and by those hands that made those hearts participate in those deeds. So surely those same hands and hearts would have did what they could to make us think they weren't so evil. But we must see the deeds reactions and events in what we live today. Their greed and haterd can be seen still revirberating through our world. Surely the wars in the Middle East today are the symptoms of the sickness that was those wars in our past. And so every conflict that each hand carries on, must be an echo of the past.--12.218.98.165 03:50, 28 June 2006 (UTC)--12.218.98.165 03:50, 28 June 2006 (UTC)david saylor
[edit] Regarding "Greed and Hatred" comment of Mr. Saylor
To say that the men who fought and defeated Nazism and Facism in WWII were acting out of "greed and hatred" is to ignore the history that followed the end of WWII. Save the Soviet Union, all nations who fought and conquered the tyrannical regimes of the Axis Powers held no territory for themselves at the end of the war. If they were so greedy and filled with hate, why didn't they keep the territories they had conquered? In fact, they did the opposite. Do you not remember the Marshall Plan? The civilized nations of the world that had fought for the freedom of citizens not their own used their resources and money to rebuild all of Europe, including Germany, the enemy they had defeated. And in the Pacific, the United States rebuilt the civilization of our most hated enemy of the time, Japan, which is now one of the most democratic and most powerful nations on the planet. And what did these powers do once they had rebuilt these war-torn nations? They left and let those societies determine their own destinys. To say that these actions were the work of men filled with hate and greed is to look blindly at history and to ignore the good-will and self-sacrifice of the Allies before and after WWII.
The one glaring mistake that the Allies did make at the end of the war was allowing the Soviet Union to expand its empire by keeping the territories it had conquered during the war. The West failed the nations of eastern Europe by not standing up to the Soviets and forcing them to return to their pre-war borders. I do believe that this inaction of the West was do mostly to war-weariness, but they should have stood up nonetheless. Bulloba 17:31, 21 July 2006 (UTC)Bailey Bullock 7-21-2006
[edit] Far East Implications
The current article is very much in need of major revisions. It does not touch in itself on epochal decisions affecting China and Korea. Stalin received concessions for the Soviet Union which Russia lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, presumably under the rubric of 'rectifying Japanese aggression' historically, but in fact these were conceded to him by Roosevelt and Churchill out of Chinese sovereignty, territory, and independence: without so much as a "by-your-leave" to the National Government of the Republic of China.
The occupation of the Chinese Northeast (so-called Manchuria), and the division of Korea, is well-recognized (as the cite from Solzhenitsyn's work shows) to have set up the renewal of the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalist and Communist Parties, and to have provided the latter with signal advantages never before available to it, as well as to set the stage for the Korean War of 1950-53. The subsequent military conquest of mainland China has obviously had worldwide implications and is of course outside the scope of an article on Yalta, but such a piece in an 'encyclopedia' must be further edited and expanded if a true picture of the seeds of disaster sown at this session is to emerge clearly, both in Europe and in Asia.
It probably also needs to be pointed out that not only was President Roosevelt within weeks of his death, but that his own intense preoccupation with gaining Stalin's assistance in the Pacific War may well have been poisonously influenced by Soviet agent Alger Hiss's role in the underlying staff activities. Yes, FDR was duly concerned about the potential costs in US casualties for an invasion of Japan given the experience during island hopping; and yes, it now seems it was the Soviet entry into the war 3 months after the German surrender on May 8th which provided more of a psychological blow to the Japanese militarists (and apparently decisively so to Hirohito himself) than even the atom bombing of Nagasaki after Hiroshima (!!) -- but much of Asia has paid a heavy price indeed for Yalta, the most recent lineal descendant event having been the Cambodian holocaust, and now we face the potential prospect of nuclear war in Korea...
And, yes, the initial mistakes at Yalta might not have persisted if the Truman Administration and Secretary of State Dean Acheson were clearer about the stakes: but the odds had to be stacked against blatant policy reversals in either Europe or Asia for a woefully untried and uninformed President, inheriting a perspective seeing the Georgian as "Uncle Joe"
Twcy80201 18:08, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Photography of the "big three"
There are currently two similar pictures on the top of the article (one colour, the other B&W). Is there any reason for that? I was about to remove one of them, but I don't know which one to keep (the B&W seems better to me, because Stalin is looking away on the colour shot). What do you think?CyrilB 22:21, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Images
I think the images used for this article are too similar. And the video, as cool as it is, doesn't bring much new to the table. Brutannica 07:32, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
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