New Stalin Pact

An official call brought the diplomatic representatives of the U.S., Britain and France hurrying down to the big sprawling Foreign Ministry on Moscow's Kuznetsky Most one day last week. Deadpan Andrei Gromyko, deputizing for Foreign Minister Vishinsky, handed the allied diplomats identical notes demanding a four-power peace conference on Germany at the earliest possible moment. Like so many diplomatic notes these days, it was designed to ruffle and embarrass the countries it was submitted to.

But it had been artfully constructed to attract the onlooking Germans. By Russian proposal, all foreign troops would be withdrawn from Germany, and a united Germany would be recreated. Germany would be left free to develop her own economy, including armaments, free to build up her own air-sea-land defense forces, free to pursue her own political life, with "organizations inimical to democracy" outlawed, but with all former Nazis and Wehrmacht officers (except those in jail) enjoying full citizenship. The new Germany would undertake not to enter into any kind of coalition or military alliance, e.g., NATO, against her former enemies. There were other catches: Germany's eastern border would be at the rivers Oder and Neisse, from 50 to 100 miles west of Germany's prewar frontier, thus finally legalizing the Communists' grab at Potsdam. And nothing was said of the 100,000 German soldiers still imprisoned in Russia.

Russia's proposal fell flat. West Germany's reaction was to hurry its plans to rearm in concert with the West, in return for the West's promise of almost complete sovereignty for the Bonn government. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told allied negotiators that he regarded Moscow's new offer as leading from weakness instead of strength.

Formerly Moscow talked of a united, disarmed Germany; now for the first time Moscow itself proposed rearmament, not of 50 million West Germans, but of 70 million East and West Germans. Allied negotiators regarded this as a propaganda godsend in France. There Russia's reversal of its former hostility to German rearmament brought forth cries of "another Hitler-Stalin pact." Now it was Moscow, not the West, that laid before the French the awful picture of grey-green Wehrmacht armies on the march again. Western diplomats hoped that this would make Frenchmen more willing to accept carefully controlled West German rearmament within NATO's European Army.

But though Westerners think in such fashion, they do not say so in diplomatic replies. This week the allied diplomats got together to respond to the Russian proposals. Their expected reply: Russia has made no mention of how she proposed to form a treaty-worthy "general German government." If Russia is really in earnest, let her admit a U.N. commission into East Germany to see whether democratic elections are possible there.

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