Stalin Note

The 1952 Stalin Note, a.k.a. the March Note, proposed German reunification almost four decades before it actually occurred. The Stalin Note was a Soviet diplomatic note dated March 10, 1952 and delivered to representatives of Britain, France, and the United States, the other Great Powers with occupation zones in Germany as a legacy of the Allied victory in World War II. The offer significantly included Superpower disengagement from Germany if the West agreed to the new, unified Germany as also neutral and disarmed. This led to "The Battle of the Notes" between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union at a time when the West was developing the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, initiated in 1949) and was negotiating the 1952 Bonn Agreement with the embryonic West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG) as part of Western Cold War strategy. The West's rejection, including the U.S. rejection, of the 1952 Soviet offer to unify Germany created a controversial political and academic debate and established a post-WWII "stab-in-the-back" theory to parallel the post-WWI "stab-in-the-back" theory of German political history and international relations.

References

• Steninger, Rolf (1990). The German Question: The Stalin Note of 1952 and the Problem of Reunification, New York: Columbia University. ISBN 0231072163.
• Walko, John W. (2002). The Balance of Empires: United States’ Rejection of German Reunification and Stalin’s March Note of 1952, Parkland. ISBN 1581125925.

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