Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference
by Herbert Feis
Summary
Herbert Feis, who had served as the State Department's ranking economic adviser through the Hoover and Roosevelt years before turning to history, reconstructs the Potsdam Conference of July and August 1945, when Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill met at Cecilienhof Palace outside Berlin to settle the shape of the postwar world. Feis follows the conference through Churchill's sudden replacement partway through by Clement Attlee, after Britain's general election turned the wartime leader out of office even while talks were underway, a change that left Truman and Stalin as the two figures who actually carried the conference to its conclusions.
The book traces the decisions that followed: dividing Germany into four occupation zones, committing the Allies to demilitarize, denazify and decentralize the country, and stripping away German territory east of the Oder Neisse line, a loss of roughly a quarter of German land handed to a newly recognized, Soviet backed Polish government in place of the London based government in exile the West had recognized throughout the war. Feis gives close attention to the moment Truman told Stalin the United States possessed a new weapon of unusual destructive force, without naming the atomic bomb outright, and to Stalin's calm reply, since Soviet espionage had already told him what Truman was describing.
Feis writes from an unusual vantage, a former insider turning archival research on colleagues and decisions he had once been close to into formal history, and reading the book means following a diplomat's eye for how alliance politics actually worked in the room rather than a distant academic account. It suits a reader who wants the mechanics of the conference that set the stage for the Cold War, not just its outcomes.
Historical Context & Significance
Between War and Peace, published by Princeton University Press in 1960, won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for History. It was one of eleven books Feis wrote across twenty five years documenting American diplomacy in the Second World War and the opening of the Cold War, drawing on both declassified government records and his own firsthand experience inside the State Department.
Reception split along a familiar line for insider history: one English critic dismissed the book as a State Department brief dressed up as scholarship, while most reviewers credited Feis with genuine objectivity despite his closeness to the events. The book remains valued for showing, from someone who had actually sat near the decisions, how the wartime alliance's confidence at Potsdam gave way within two years to the open rivalry of the Cold War.