The Potsdam Conference: July 22nd 1945 – Poland Betrayed

The United States Secretary of War Henry Stimson paid a call on Churchill yesterday afternoon with the intent of sharing Groves’ latest report with him.

Unfortunately, his visit abruptly ended not long after he arrived when the British delegation suddenly realized that they were going to be late for the fifth plenary session. They may have met sooner, but Churchill and other members of the delegation had just spent most of the day in Berlin for a British victory parade on the same street where Adolf Hitler’s troops had held their own victory parade almost five years earlier – on 27 July 1940 – following the defeat of Poland and the surrender of France.

To demonstrate who was now jointly in charge of the former capital of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’, some 10,000 men along with tanks, armored cars, searchlight batteries and artillery formations marched along Berlin’s monumental Charlottenburger Chaussee as Churchill proudly gazed on with Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, and Field Marshals Montgomery, Wilson, Alexander, and Allan-Brooke.

The street had been one of Berlin’s finest, a tree-lined boulevard running through the city’s central park toward the Brandenburg Gate. Now most trees were suspiciously absent and the street strewn with rubble after years of Allied aerial bombardment and the final Soviet ground assault on the city during the Battle of Berlin.

This British Victory parade was the largest and most significant of its kind, but it was not the first time in 1945 that the British had organized a parade in Berlin.

By 11:15am the parade had finished and Churchill left to officially open the armed services “Winston Club” – formerly the Kabarett der Komiker – on the Kurfürstendamm at its junction with Lehniner Platz. Here he addressed the 7th Armoured Division and, in particular, the 11th Hussars:

“Now I have only a word more to say about the Desert Rats, They were the first to begin. The 11th Hussars were in action in the desert in 1940 and ever since you have kept marching steadily forward on the long road to victory. Through so many countries and changing scenes, you have fought your way. It is not without emotion that I can express to you what I feel about the Desert Rats.