This week in 1946: Winston Churchill delivers his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech | Abroad

Winston Churchill, son of an English Lord and an American millionaire’s daughter, delivered a speech that would become historic on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill spoke of an ‘iron curtain’ to indicate the division – again much discussed today – between the then expanding communist Eastern bloc and the capitalist West. He was not the first to use the metaphor, but he was the one that made it widely accepted in the European context.

Churchill was British Prime Minister during World War II, from 1940 to 1945. He later became Prime Minister of England again, from 1951 to 1955. So in 1946 he was not the British Prime Minister when he spoke in Fulton during a tour of the US. Churchill, in his speech, warned of the rise of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.

“From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has been lowered across the European continent. Behind that line are all the capitals of the old states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia. All these famous cities, and the populations around them, lie within the Russian sphere and are all, in one form or another, subject not only to Soviet Russian influence, but to a great and increasing degree to the direct control of Moscow.” Churchill.

“Only Athens – Greece with its glorious past – can freely decide its future with elections under British, American and French supervision. The Russian-dominated government of Poland has been encouraged to make massive and intolerable encroachments on Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a horrific and unprecedented scale are now taking place. The communist parties, very small in these eastern states of Europe, are exalted in prestige and power out of proportion to their number, and are trying to gain totalitarian power everywhere. Police governments prevail almost everywhere, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.”

The term ‘iron curtain’ in the European context of communism versus capitalism was previously used on February 18, 1945 in an article by the German daily newspaper Das Reich. According to that newspaper, Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels also spoke of an “iron curtain” during a speech a week later on February 25. “An iron curtain will fall over the vast territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations will be slaughtered,” Goebbels said. In his published diaries (Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, 1978), Goebbels wrote the following on March 13, 1945: “These are the old Kremlin tactics: Once the Soviets have occupied a country, they drop an Iron Curtain so that they can continue their horrible bloody work behind them.” Almost two years earlier, Goebbels also used the term Iron Curtain (in German: ‘Eiserner Vorhang’) in the article ‘Hinter dem eisernen Vorhang’ in the Volkischer Beobachter in May 1943.

But the third Belgian queen, Elisabeth in Bavaria (1876-1965), was even earlier than Goebbels. In March 1915, after the German invasion of Belgium during the First World War, she described the separation that arose between herself and Germany, where she originally came from, as an ‘iron curtain’.

Churchill himself had also used the term before. That was in a telegram to US President Harry S. Truman on May 12, 1945. He wrote at the time that the Soviets “hang an iron curtain on their front” to hide their doings. Six months later, he applied the term to Europe after World War II, followed by his speech at Westminster College in Fulton on March 5, 1946. That speech is still referred to today as the term ‘iron curtain’. That image was characteristic of the decades of the Cold War, today it is completely back.