Berlin Conference

Berlin Conference (1945) is a short Soviet documentary you can watch online on iFILM, filmed by Ilya Kopalin and Sergei Gerasimov in the summer the war in Europe ended. Its subject: the meeting of the three victorious powers just outside a shattered Berlin.

Around one table sit Stalin, Truman and Churchill — later replaced mid-talks by Clement Attlee — with Molotov, Vyshinsky, Marshal Zhukov and Field Marshal Montgomery close by. The camera records the men redrawing the postwar map and deciding the fate of a defeated Germany. Twenty-one minutes of unstaged newsreel.

Made by two masters of Soviet nonfiction film, it survives as a firsthand record of what the world remembers as the Potsdam talks. Stream Berlin Conference (1945) online on iFILM.