The Soviets threatened further measures against the use of the new currency in Berlin. Already in April they had stopped regular passenger trains as they moved to and from the city, and on June 24 all rail traffic was halted “for technical reasons.” By August 4 a blockade of all land routes and waterways was in place.37 For Stalin, none of this was supposed to have happened. He had envisioned more discussions until the Western powers yielded. Instead the “capitalists” began what turned into the heroic Berlin Airlift, usually dated June 24, 1948, to May 12, 1949. The planes of the Royal Air Force and U.S. Air Force, with pilots also from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, flew in everything that a city of two million or so needed.
The Berlin Blockade became one of Stalin’s worst nightmares. According to U.S. ambassador Robert Murphy, who was there, the really surprising effect of the airlift was that “the American people, for the first time in their history, formed a virtual alliance with the German people.” Only a few years before, such an outcome would have been unthinkable.38
On March 9, 1949, Molotov became a scapegoat for this failure and others and was dismissed from his position as minister of foreign affairs.39 He was replaced by his deputy Andrei Vyshinsky, an able diplomat, who was notorious for his role as a prosecutor in the great show trials of the 1930s. Molotov was kept around and also blamed when the three Western zones formed the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) on May 23, 1949. Moscow lamely responded with the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on October 7. Both countries would remain on the front lines of the Cold War until the Berlin Wall (built in 1961) finally collapsed in 1989. Most Germans on both sides adapted with resignation and equanimity to the division of their country.
It was the Berlin Airlift in 1948–49 that brought the Cold War out into the open. The Soviet Union had sent a horrific signal to the world, and overnight the Stalinist regime more than ever was seen as a major threat to freedom. At the same time the United States came to be portrayed as the white knight—at least in the eyes of non-Communists. One observer who lived through the period writes that until the Soviet blockade of Berlin, Western powers had understood their task in Germany to be to prevent it from becoming a danger again. That changed as the Berliners’ willingness to fight for their freedom impressed them.40
The Soviet actions over Berlin shook most Western Europeans’ sense of security. Shortly thereafter the Benelux countries, as well as Denmark, Norway, and Italy, opted to join the North Atlantic alliance, which was being negotiated precisely during the Berlin Airlift. The treaty, signed on April 4, 1949, amounted to a commitment by the United States to defend Western Europe. In June 1950, when the Communists invaded South Korea, the picture emerged of the Soviet Union as the enemy of freedom. This entire turn of events was exactly what the Soviet leaders had hoped to avoid.
In order to recover and to throw the West onto the defensive, Stalin and his comrades redoubled their efforts to present the Soviet Union as leading a great struggle for peace. Ever alert to possibilities for extending the world Communist base, they found it especially opportune to reach out to the Germans in the new GDR and to welcome them as allies and comrades. Stalin proclaimed that together they would make it impossible for the “world imperialists” to enslave Europe or to bring about another war there.41
An extension of this tactic involved a complex double game by which the Soviets would make it look as though their steps in Germany were reactions to Western aggression. The ploy apparently began in February 1951, when Walter Ulbricht, the general secretary of the SED, mentioned to Soviet officials that it would be politically useful for Moscow to propose Germany’s reunification and its conversion into a neutral zone. The Anglo-Americans and French would reject that suggestion, it was believed, because it would involve moving Western defenses out of Germany.
The Kremlin saw promise in Ulbricht’s proposal, then refined it extensively. The scenario began to unfold when on September 15 the prime minister of the GDR, Otto Grotewohl, sent a proposal to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of the FRG to hold all-German “free elections” to a new institution empowered to negotiate a peace settlement with the four occupation powers. Although Adenauer asked him repeatedly for clarification on the electoral procedures, Grotewohl was evasive and rejected the counterproposal to have the United Nations supervise any balloting.
Then on February 13, 1952, after close consultations with Stalin, the East German leaders wrote to the four occupation powers to ask that they expedite the conclusion of a peace treaty and withdraw all troops. As expected, only Moscow responded. On March 10 a note in Stalin’s name was sent to the three other powers to ask that they hold a peace conference. In addition, the countries that had participated in the war against Germany would be invited. To guide the discussions, Stalin included his own “Principles for a German Peace Treaty.” As we now know, these principles had been formulated like a series of chess moves to ensure that the West would inevitably reject them.42
Behind the apparent simplicity of the note lay a mountain of complications—not least, the history of Western frustrations since 1945 in trying to negotiate peace with the USSR. Although Stalin said that a united Germany would eventually be created, he gave no hint of how it would happen. Clearly the already existing Federal Republic of Germany would have to be dissolved. The then-reunited country would, however, not participate in the peace conference and would have to accept what the victors decided. The note said that the new Germany would also have to renounce all coalitions or military alliances that might be directed at any of its former enemy states. As a consequence of that stipulation, Germany would not be able to join NATO. It was precisely that prospect that bothered Stalin most.
His note was published to add political pressure on the West and to make the expected negative response by the three occupation powers look unreasonable. The rejection would have all the more traction in that the proposal was designed to appeal to a wide audience, especially in Germany.
The Western Allies consulted among themselves and came up with a counterproposal. Britain’s Anthony Eden suggested that the foreign ministers try to find out if the Kremlin was serious, and they agreed to focus on the elections to the all-German parliament. The reply, crafted by U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson, said that the Western Allies accepted the desirability of a peace treaty and that its conclusion would require the formation of a government that expressed the will of the people. In order to be certain that the elections to an all-German parliament were proper, a UN commission would be asked to investigate all of Germany to ensure that the necessary facilities existed. Would the Soviet Union permit the UN to undertake this mission in its zone? There were other issues, but the most important one was that the Soviet note had not indicated the international status of the new Germany. The Western Allies maintained that the country should determine its own foreign policy, including entering into associations “compatible with the principles and purposes of the UN”
On March 25, 1952, this carefully worded reply was handed to Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky in Moscow. By prior agreement, the Americans, British, and French decided their notes would be identical, to avoid any unnecessary complications.43