There was something about walking where Truman, Churchill and Stalin did, knowing I was sent to Germany as a soldier a generation later because of decisions they made.
Across town from Sanssouci is manor-style Cecilienhof, where the three finalized the division of Germany in July-August 1945, after the end of WWII in Europe.
Officials said the Tudor-like country estate was chosen as the conference site because it was still standing amid severe bombing damage and was suitable for a meeting of heads of state, probably in that order.
I searched in vain around the palace for the three wicker chairs. I’d read they were still there. Cecilienhof, finished in 1917, has been closed for restoration since November 2024. The SPSG (Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg) just says it’s closed “until further notice”.
During the closure, the official website sends you to Google Arts & Culture for photos: https://artsandculture.google.com/explore/collections/schloss-cecilienhof?c=assets&f=location:/m/0d331. The interior photos that follow are largely from that website. On my next trip to Berlin, I’ll spend a day in Potsdam and get my own.
Cecilienhof lies in the 250-acre Neuer Garten (New Garden) in northeast Potsdam, its long wide lawns leading to the Jungfernsee, a wide spot in the Havel River. In this area, the middle of the Havel served as the dividing line between East Germany and West Germany during the Cold War.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, German emperor until he abdicated, built Cecilienhof for his son, crown prince Wilhelm, and the prince’s wife, Cecilie. The palace, essentially brick and half-timbering around five inner courtyards, was the last palace constructed by the Hohenzollern dynasty. Its steep gables, half-timbered facades and decorative brickwork make it stand out from Baroque and Rococo royal residences in Potsdam and beyond.
Cecilienhof’s interiors combine English style with German craftsmanship, reflecting the royal family line. Kaiser Wilhelm II was Queen Victoria’s grandson, and the German and British royal bloodlines mixed over centuries.
Cecilienhof was finished a year before Wilhelm abdicated the monarchy in the German revolution of 1918. The palace became state property in 1926, but the crown prince’s wife lived there until nearly the end of the war.
[Left: The 75-foot-long main meeting room with vaulted wooden-beam ceiling shot from gallery above. 2024 Antoine Bonin, Google.com via Prussian Palaces & Gardens (spsg.de). Right: Opening meeting of the conference. I see Truman (back to camera), Churchill left and Stalin right. Truman Library]
The conference used 20 of Cecilienhof’s 176 rooms for the meeting. The most prominent room was the Great Hall with its stone fireplace. That became the conference hall, and participants met around a large round table from Moscow. Before restoration, tourists could walk through right next to it.
Delegation rooms were filled out with furnishings from other palaces. Wood paneling gave the feel of a British club — and a sharp contrast with other Potsdam palaces.
Cecilienhof still features the ocean-liner style breakfast room that Cecilie requested. It was designed by an architect who did interiors for ocean-going ships, and the room incorporates ship fittings taken from an ocean liner of the time.
Truman, Churchill and Stalin houses
The mansions where Truman, Churchill and Stalin stayed during the 16 days of the conference were in the southern suburb of Babelsberg, about three miles from Cecilienhof. The mansions look out on the Havel River, called the Griebnitzsee (Griebnitz Lake) at this point.
You can’t just take a tour. The houses are among expensive local properties sometimes owned by media stars or other celebrities. One of them, villa of the former Siemens electronics czar, was going for $27 million recently, despite “years of neglect”.
Many of the area houses are big enough that they were used as schools, day-care centers or government offices when this was East Germany.
The houses in the area, sometimes modest-looking from the street, can be hard to see. Some of today’s owners have gone to large expense to shield the front of their homes from curious tourists like me.
The Truman villa was called “the little White House”. Today it houses the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung, a foundation associated with the liberal, free-market Free Democratic (political) Party.
About 10 minutes away on foot is the Churchill house, “Villa Urbig” to the Germans. Its design is by architect Mies van der Rohe, last director of the Bauhaus and father of the glass office tower. Last time I checked, the house was owned by Hasso Plattner, a co-founder of the giant international business software company SAP.
Stalin stayed in a villa on the same street as Truman — but slightly above his house (Churchill was around the corner). That’s partly because Potsdam was in the Soviet Zone and the Soviets controlled the preparation and partly because, some historians say, the location was a Soviet power play.
In back, long lawns extend from grand houses to the water, and owners have gone to court to try to block onlookers from treading on their property and invading their privacy.
To protect their privacy, some owners block the walking path along the river at the end of their back lawns.
The lake was part of the East Germany-West Berlin border for years, and a piece of the Berlin Wall or memorials can be found along the shore.
Potsdam Conference
During the Potsdam Conference, Truman, Churchill (Attlee, after an election) and Stalin approved plans to carve Germany up into four occupation zones, one each for the United States (yellow), Soviet Union (red), Britain (green)and France (blue). Berlin was split the same way. The Allies were still in the western part of what’s now Germany when I lived there during parts of the 1960s, ’70s and ‘80s. Allied rights in Berlin didn’t end until the early 1990s after eastern and western Germany were reunited.
As in the aftermath of many wars, borders were adjusted after the WWII fighting stopped. Prussia, direct ancestor of the German empire, was abolished, part going to what’s Russia today and part to Poland and East and West Germany.
About 13 million ethnic Germans from the lost eastern territories — the Heimatvertriebenen (Expelled from home) — were forced out of their homes in the largest compulsory relocation in European history. According to the German Historical Museum, some 600,000 died in the trek from 1944 to 1950.
The closest thing to a memorial to the Heimatvertriebenen is the politically controversial Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung (Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation) in Berlin. The center walks a line — memorializing the enormous suffering but keeping in mind that the expulsion resulted from Germany’s own aggression. Today’s Germany has tried to thread its way through controversy by focusing on reconciliation.
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