Another important provision of the treaty was Germany`s confirmation of the now internationally recognized border with Poland and other territorial changes in Germany that had taken place since 1945 and prevented future claims of lost territory east of the Oder-Neisse Line (see also Former Territories of Eastern Germany). The treaty defined the territory of a „united Germany” as the territory of the GDR, the Federal Republic of Germany and Berlin and prohibited Germany from asserting future territorial claims. Germany has also agreed to sign a separate treaty with Poland reaffirming the current common border, which is binding under international law and effectively cedes these territories to Poland. This happened on 14 November 1990 with the signing of the German-Polish border treaty. [4] In addition, the Treaty obliged the Federal Republic of Germany to amend its Basic Law so that it would be constitutionally prohibited from accepting any application for integration into Germany from regions outside the territories of the GDR, the Federal Republic of Germany and Berlin. The Americans promised that NATO would not go beyond Germany`s borders after the Cold War, but now half of Central and Eastern Europe is a member, so what happened to their promises? It shows that they cannot be trusted. [12] Five long months later, on June 28 – exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo – the leaders of the Allied and Associated Powers, as well as representatives of Germany, gathered in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles to sign the final treaty. By shifting the entire burden of war guilt onto Germany, imposing harsh reparations, and creating an increasingly unstable set of small nations in Europe, the treaty would ultimately fail to resolve the underlying problems that led to the outbreak of war in 1914 and pave the way for another massive world conflict 20 years later. And despite the loss of German territory, „many people understood as early as 1919 that the map actually gives Germany certain advantages,” Neiberg points out. „He brought small states to the borders of Germany, to Central and Eastern Europe.
He eliminated Russia as a direct enemy of Germany, at least in the 1920s, and he eliminated Russia as an ally of the France. While the contract seemed really difficult for some people, it actually opened up opportunities for others. The big three – Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (replaced by Prime Minister Clement Attlee on July 26) and US President Harry Truman met in Potsdam, Germany, from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to negotiate the terms of the end of World War II. After the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin, Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had agreed to meet after Germany`s surrender to define the post-war borders in Europe. Germany capitulated on 8 May 1945 and the Allied leaders agreed to meet in Potsdam this summer to continue the talks begun at Yalta. Although the Allies remained determined to wage a common war in the Pacific, the absence of a common enemy in Europe led to difficulties in reaching a consensus on post-war reconstruction on the European continent. By May 1938, it was known that Hitler and his generals were drawing up a plan for the occupation of Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovaks depended on the military support of the France, with whom they had formed an alliance. The Soviet Union also had a treaty with Czechoslovakia, and this signaled a willingness to cooperate with France and Britain if they decided to come and defend Czechoslovakia, but the Soviet Union and its potential services were ignored throughout the crisis. especially at the time of the Munich Conference in September 1938. In early 1939, the Soviets faced the prospect of opposing German military expansion in Eastern Europe virtually alone, and so they began to seek a change in policy.
The 3. In May 1939, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin fired Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov, a Jew and defender of collective security, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov, who soon began negotiations with Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Soviets also continued to negotiate with Britain and France, but in the end Stalin decided to make a deal with Germany. In this way, he hoped to keep the Soviet Union at peace with Germany and buy time to build the Soviet military establishment, which had been significantly weakened by the purge of the Red Army officer corps in 1937. The reluctance of Western democracies to oppose Adolf Hitler, as well as Stalin`s inexplicable personal preference for the Nazis, also played a role in Stalin`s final decision. Hitler, for his part, wanted a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union so that his armies could invade Poland virtually without resistance from a great power, after which Germany could negotiate with the forces of France and Britain in the West without having to fight the Soviet Union on a second front in the East. The final result of the German-Soviet negotiations was the Non-Aggression Pact, dated August 23 and signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov in Stalin`s presence in Moscow. .
