The trigger for the Potsdam conference was the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 7, 1945. The Big Three allies; Churchill, Truman and Stalin, decided to meet one last time time to plan the final war strategy. With the surrender of Germany, victory was in the air, and everyone knew that the Japanese would surrender next. However the immediate concern was where to draw the lines of post-war Europe. Stalin had recaptured most of eastern Europe and had installed puppet communist governments in all the eastern European countries. Churchill and Roosevelt wanted assurances that Stalin would eventually hold free democratic elections in those countries, and Stalin agreed to this at the time. However history shows he ignored this promise. Other urgent questions of the conference included an attempt at an agreeent of a unified way of handling German prisoners, the German economy, and where to draw the boundary lines on varous eastern european country borders. The other major agreement of the conference was that only "unconditional surrender" would be acceptable for ending hostilities with Japan.
