A product of the Potsdam Conference , it concerned the military occupation and reconstruction of Germany , its border , and the entire European Theatre of War territory. It also addressed Germany's demilitarisation , reparations , the prosecution of war criminals and the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from various parts of Europe. France was not invited to the conference but formally remained one of the powers occupying Germany. As De Gaulle had not been invited to the Conference, the French resisted implementing the Potsdam Agreements within their occupation zone.
In particular, the French refused to resettle any expelled Germans from the east. Moreover, the French did not accept any obligation to abide by the Potsdam Agreement in the proceedings of the Allied Control Council; in particular resisting all proposals to establish common policies and institutions across Germany as a whole for example France separated Saarland from Germany to establish its protectorate on 17 December , and anything that they feared might lead to the emergence of an eventual unified German government.
At the Potsdam Conference the Western Allies were presented with Stalin 's fait accompli awarding Soviet-occupied Poland the river Oder as its western border, [ 2 ] [ 3 ] placing the entire Soviet Occupation Zone east of it with the exception of the Kaliningrad enclave , including Pomerania , most of East Prussia , and Danzig , under Polish administration. The German population who had not fled were expelled and their properties acquisitioned by the state.
The three powers also agreed to invite France and China to participate as members of the Council of Foreign Ministers established to oversee the agreement. The Provisional Government of the French Republic accepted the invitation on August 7, with the key reservation that it would not accept a priori any commitment to the eventual reconstitution of a central government in Germany.
James F. Byrnes wrote "we specifically refrained from promising to support at the German Peace Conference any particular line as the western frontier of Poland. The Three Governments have taken note of the discussions which have been proceeding in recent weeks in London between British, United States, Soviet and French representatives with a view to reaching agreement on the methods of trial of those major war criminals whose crimes under the Moscow Declaration of October have no particular geographical localization.
