I am very doubtful that the Allies of r the soviets would have accepted anything less than unconditional surrender from Germany, with or without Hitler after the casablanca conference. There is a disturbing tendency to underestimate the importance of these international agreements, yet they were critical to Allied victory, and were a tangible and fundamental difference to the way the Axis conducted their international relations. he Russians showed some inclination to negotiated settlement only whilst there was slight doubt as to whether they could win. The last time any sort of suggestion of peace occurred was in November 1943, from memory, but if the Stalin cummunique in raltion to that feeler is read i detail, it would still have required unconditional surrender of Germany. Afte Kursk, the Russians were convinced that they could not be stopped, and Russian war aims solidified to controlling all of eastern Europe. Moreover the division of Germany had been agreed to quite early between the allies and the soviets. Unless the germans accepted unconditional surrender, their country was headed for the scrap heap.
The glue that held the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance together during the war was the determination to defeat Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Japan's military government reaching for control of east Asia. The Axis powers had provoked a conflict that would eventually take upward of 50 million lives and change the face of Europe and Asia for decades. At the same time, however, as Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt , and Joseph Stalin pulled together to win the war, they held discreet aims for their respective countries that were in conflict with each other, but the hitler phenomenon had virtually no relevance to those aims and the level of allied co-operation. Their skillful military and political leadership allowed the alliance to survive by temporarily muting their differences.
For Churchill and Great Britain, the goal was not only to defeat the Nazis but also to assure arrangements in postwar Europe that prevented Germany from attacking its neighbors again and provoking continental havoc as had occurred twice in the previous forty years and 3 times in the last 70 years. Churchill also believed it essential to reestablish Britain's worldwide empire, which had allowed the United Kingdom to prosper and stand as one of the world's handful of great powers.
For Stalin, the principal objective of the war was to eliminate German dominance of the continent and its capacity to invade Russia, as it had twice since 1914. This was a goal incompatible with an independant germany, and the presence or absence of Hitler or the nazis was irrelevant to the equation. German defeat promised to end the greatest threat to the Russians. To achieve his goals, Stalin aimed to establish socialist satellite governments across eastern Europe, especially in Poland, which had been a corridor through which German armies had invaded the Soviet Union. For Stalin, domination of the European continent was a possible prelude to creating Communist governments around the globe–across the Middle East and throughout Asia beginning with a socialist revolution and regime in China.
For the United States, the highest possible good that could result from the second Great War of the twentieth century was the destruction of totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan and the rise of democracy everywhere, as President Woodrow Wilson had promised during World War I. To Roosevelt, the United States' conversion from traditional isolationism to internationalism assured that American power and dominance of the world stage could be assured.