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According to official policy, however, the Western Allies were not liberators, but conquerors. Their troops were ordered not to fraternize with the natives, nor even to shake their hands. Many soldiers were happy enough to act like grand seigneurs and to treat the erstwhile Herrenvolk like Untermenschen. General Robert McClure, chief of the American Office of Information Control, used a Nazi flag to cover his sofa and a deluxe edition of Mein Kampf as his guest book. The Allies commandeered villas in the wealthy western suburbs, expelling the former owners without compensation. According to the New York Times, the American military government rendered 1,000 Berliners homeless by requisitioning 125 homes in the Grunewald district. Flouting their wealth, the occupiers threw parties awash in “unbelievable amounts of Manhattans and Martinis, Creme de Menthe and old French Cognac, Scotch whiskey and the best French champagne.” With dollars in their pockets, recalled one officer, occupation soldiers could live in Berlin “as if it were not a pile of ruins but a paradise.”

A “sexual paradise,” he might have added. The prohibition on fraternization proved unworkable and was soon dropped, leaving the troops free to do what victorious troops traditionally do in vanquished cities. Unlike the impoverished Russians, the Westerners could use material enticements to conquer the women of Berlin. Grateful for this arrangement, the women were often anxious to show their appreciation. As one British officer boasted, the Berlin girls “will take any treatment and they treat you like a king—don’t matter if you keep them waiting for half an hour—and they are thankful for the little things, a bar of chocolate or a few fags! It’s like giving these girls the moon!” Sometimes the trade of sex for nylons and candy developed into something deeper. As George Clare, another British occupation officer, explained:

The young, healthy, and well-fed boys from Leeds or Cincinnati were attractive, and the aura of victory gave them added glamour, particularly for German women brought up to believe that winning was the highest military virtue. And to the boys from Leeds or Cincinnati, Northumberland or Wyoming, it was a revelation how German women then looked up to their men, made them the focus of their existence, cosseted them, deferred to them, embraced them often and with an eagerness and warmth for which Anglo-Saxon femininity was not exactly famous. Exposed to such emotional incandescence many a dishonorable intention melted into love, leading to heartbreak or—more rarely—marriage.

Despite the tensions within the conquerors’ camp, all the leaders continued to profess qualified confidence that they could cooperate effectively in managing the postwar world. To underscore this determination, and to address various practical problems connected with shaping the new order, the “Big Three”—Truman, Stalin, and Churchill—came together at Potsdam for what turned out to be the last meeting of the Grand Alliance. (Churchill did not stay for the entire conference because he was defeated in the British general election by the Labor candidate Clement Attlee, who replaced him in Potsdam on July 25.) The choice of venue for the meeting was itself significant: by hosting the event in the Soviet zone Stalin could play lord of the manor and suggest ownership of neighboring Berlin as well.

For Truman, who had never been to Germany before, flying to the meeting over the wrecked cities of the Reich in his presidential plane, The Sacred Cow, was a sobering experience, and driving through Berlin was even more so. As he recorded later, drawing on his extensive historical reading: “I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis, Peking . . . of Scipio, Ramses II, Sherman, Jenghis Khan.” Truman’s headquarters at the conference, an imposing villa in Babelsberg, had a horrible recent history of which the president was not then aware. It had belonged to a noted publisher, Gustav Müller-Grote, who two months earlier had been forced to watch Russian soldiers gang-rape his daughters in his living room. The soldiers had then looted and destroyed everything in the house. When they decided to make the place available to Truman for his “Little White House,” the Soviets expelled Müller-Grote and his family and brought in new furniture that they had confiscated from other villas. Truman learned of all this later through a letter from one of Müller-Grote’s sons. Had he known it at the time, one wonders if he would have “seen no reason,” as he said upon his departure for Potsdam, “why we should not welcome [the Soviets’] friendship and give ours to them.”

Clement Attlee, Harry Truman, and Josef Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, August 1945