On 4 – 11 February 1945 leaders from the United States , the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union held the Yalta Conference where future arrangements as regards post-war Europe and strategy against Japan in the Pacific were negotiated . Throughout the 1930s , Nazi Germany had followed a policy of reclaiming German lands lost in the Versailles Treaty , and of reuniting other territories occupied by German peoples within the German Reich , so the Allies agreed that the boundaries of Germany as at 31 December 1937 would be chosen as demarcating German national territory from German occupied territory ; all German annexations after 1937 were automatically null . Subsequently , and into the 1970s , the West German state was to maintain that these 1937 boundaries continued to be ' valid in international law ' ; although the Allies had already agreed amongst themselves that East Prussia and Silesia must be transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union in any Peace agreement . The conference agreed that post-war Germany , minus these transfers , would be divided into four occupation zones : a French Zone in the far west ; a British Zone in the northwest ; an American Zone in the south ; and a Soviet Zone in the East . Berlin was separately divided into four zones . These divisions were not intended to dismember Germany , only to designate zones of administration
Yalta Conference
Yalta Conference
West Germany