section_path: World War II/1945: Victory
section_name: 1945: Victory
paragraph_text: 1945: Victory
  
  In April 1945, the Red Army seized Berlin, Hitler killed himself, and Germany surrendered in May. Stalin had wanted Hitler captured alive; he had his remains brought to Moscow to prevent them becoming a relic for Nazi sympathisers. Many Soviet soldiers engaged in looting, pillaging, and rape, both in Germany and parts of Eastern Europe. Stalin refused to punish the offenders.
  
  With Germany defeated, Stalin switched focus to the war with Japan, transferring half a million troops to the Far East. Stalin was pressed by his allies to enter the war and wanted to cement the Soviet Union's strategic position in Asia. On 8 August, in between the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet army invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria and defeated the Kwantung Army. These events led to the Japanese surrender and the war's end. Soviet forces continued to expand until they occupied all their territorial concessions, but the U.S. rebuffed Stalin's desire for the Red Army to take a role in the Allied occupation of Japan.
  
  At the Potsdam Conference in July–August 1945, Stalin repeated previous promises that he would refrain from a "Sovietization" of Eastern Europe. Stalin pushed for reparations from Germany without regard to the base minimum supply for German citizens' survival, which worried Harry Truman and Churchill who thought that Germany would become a financial burden for Western powers. He also pushed for "war booty", which would permit the Soviet Union to directly seize property from conquered nations without quantitative or qualitative limitation, and a clause was added permitting this to occur with some limitations. Germany was divided into four zones: Soviet, U.S., British, and French, with Berlin itself—located within the Soviet area—also subdivided thusly.