From the Atlantic Charter to the Basic Law: Documents of the Second World War and Its Aftermath

The Atlantic Charter was issued on 14 August 1941, months before the United States officially entered the war, and set out American and British goals for the postwar world, among them no territorial gains against the wishes of the people affected and freedom of the seas. Its adherents signed the Declaration by United Nations on 1 January 1942, which became the basis for the modern United Nations.

The Cairo Declaration of 27 November 1943 came from Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek and stated that the Allies sought the unconditional surrender of Japan. It promised that Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores would be restored to China and that Korea would become free in due course, a promise whose meaning historians still dispute.

This legal document effected the unconditional surrender of the remaining German armed forces to the Allies and ended the war in Europe. It was signed at 22:43 Central European Time on 8 May 1945 and took effect at 23:01 the same day. It is displayed today at the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst.

Signed on 1 August 1945 by the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union, the Potsdam Agreement dealt with the occupation and reconstruction of Germany, its borders, demilitarization, reparations and the prosecution of war criminals. France was not invited to the conference but remained one of the occupying powers.

Annexed to the London Agreement signed on 8 August 1945, this charter founded the Nuremberg trials and defined crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It barred defendants from claiming sovereign immunity or superior orders as a defense, and trials under it ran from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946.

Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945, and it was formally signed on 2 September 1945 in Tokyo Bay, bringing the war to an end. The United States, the United Kingdom and China had called for unconditional surrender in the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July 1945.

President Harry Truman announced this policy to Congress on 12 March 1947, pledging American support for nations aligned with the United States against authoritarian threats, with Greece and Turkey in view. Historians often date the start of the Cold War to this speech, and it led to the formation of NATO in 1949.

Drafted by a United Nations committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, the declaration was adopted as General Assembly Resolution 217 on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. Of the 58 member states then in the United Nations, 48 voted in favor, none against, eight abstained and two did not vote.

Adopted in Bonn on 8 May 1949 and in force from 23 May after approval by the Western Allies, West Germany's Basic Law was named to signal that it was provisional pending reunification. When reunification came in 1990 it was kept as the constitution of the whole country, with human dignity as its first article.