From April 1945 to July, the president was incredibly busy. The war in Europe came slowly to an end. Adolf Hitler, the leader of Germany, committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin on April 30, and on May 8, his forces arranged to surrender; those in the West surrendered to a deputy of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of Allied forces, at Rheims on May 7, and forces on the Eastern front surrendered to the Soviet high command in Moscow the next day.

The president then supervised the transfer of some of the U.S. troops in Europe to the Far East, while others began the long passage by ship back to the United States for demobilization. At the same time Truman prepared to meet the leader of the Soviet Union, Marshal Joseph V. Stalin, and the prime minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, at a conference scheduled for mid July in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam. Truman reached Berlin after a voyage aboard a heavy cruiser to Antwerp and a plane flight from Brussels.

The Potsdam Conference opened the day after the president learned about an extraordinary event, the successful explosion of a nuclear device in a remote area of Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico.

At the outset of his presidency, President Truman had begun to keep a diary, making occasional notations of what he was doing and why and what he thought of visitors or events of the moment. He jotted down notes between conversations or duties of one sort or another, or perhaps early in mornings when alone in his office. Taken together, these usually dated annotations constituted a presidential diary. Under date of July 16 he wrote of what he was doing in Berlin.

Read the official diary entry:

July 16: Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Source; "Ross, Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. (handwritten)," box 322, president's secretary's files.

Notes:

1. Fleet Admiral William D Leahy was the president's personal chief of staff.