The Potsdam Conference Protocols were issued on August 1, 1945, near the end of the Potsdam Conference, held in the Berlin, Germany, suburb of Potsdam from July 17 to August 2, 1945. The chief participants in the conference were U.S. president Harry Truman, Communist Party general secretary Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, and the British prime minister; when the conference opened, Winston Churchill was prime minister, but elections in Great Britain had just been held, and Churchill was replaced mid-conference by his successor, Clement Attlee.