The Potsdam Conference: July 16th 1945 – Waiting For Stalin

July 16th 1945 was intended to be the first day of the Potsdam Conference – but with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin delayed for a day, the Anglo-American delegations took the opportunity to situate themselves.

US President Harry Truman would arrive to take up residence in Babelsberg, near Potsdam in one of three historic houses that made up this quaint lake shore community. His British counterpart, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, was staying nearby and a meeting between the two would be the first major item on the daily agendas of both leaders.

Eager to get the lay of the land, each would venture separately to the ruined capital of the ‘Thousand Year Reich’. To assess the damage wrought upon the city in the defeat of Nazi Germany and prepare.

The Potsdam Conference was to provide the foundations of a lasting peace in Europe. But nothing could formally begin until Soviet leader Stalin arrived.

Before WWII, 20 year old Marie Louise Gericke and her family had been living an upper-class life in an austere, yet striking early 20th century neoclassical villa on the shore of lake Griebnitzsee in Babelsberg, Potsdam.

Located at Ringstraße 23, it was called ‘Villa Urbig’, named after its builder, banker Franz Ubrig whose daughter married Marie Louise’s father years after her mother had passed away. She enjoyed a pleasant teenage life there, taking strolls through the charming neighborhood and refreshing swims behind her backyard on hot summer days.

But in the spring of 1945, her living situation could not have been more different from the cheerful and welcoming days of her youth. After her father and step-mother had moved to Bavaria with her younger siblings to escape the Allied air raids on the area, she was now living in the large empty villa with just her aunt when the Soviets entered her street and came banging on the door. “The usual,” replied Marie Lousie when asked in an interview years later about what happened when the Soviets had arrived. “But enough has been written about that.”