Friday, Jul. 28, 1961

The Note

The week's most visible action on Berlin was a blunt and forceful U.S. memorandum, seconded by Britain and France, that answered the June 4 Soviet note demanding a German peace treaty by year's end.

Much thought, second thought, revision* and consultation with allies went into the note. Still, the finished version came as no surprise either to the U.S. public, which has been well-briefed on the dangers of the Berlin crisis, or to the Kremlin, which has been well aware of the day-to-day spine stiffening in Washington. The U.S. note agreed with the Soviet contention that "a peace settlement is long overdue," but wasted no words putting the blame for delay where it properly belonged: on continuing "Soviet efforts to obtain special advantages for itself and the Soviet bloc at the expense of a lasting peace."

Legal Stand. In reviewing the history and language of wartime and postwar agreements for the occupation of Nazi Germany, the U.S. memo made two main points:

P: The West has a perfect legal right to maintain troops in Berlin, and the Soviet Union cannot abrogate that right by any unilateral action. Such privileges as the West claims in Berlin "derive absolutely from the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, and were not granted by, nor negotiated with, the Soviet Union." Nor can the Soviet Union or its East German allies affect the allied rights of access to Berlin, which are "inherent in the rights of the Western powers to be in Berlin." If those rights of access are interfered with, warned the U.S. note, then the Western Big Three have "the responsibility to make such dispositions with respect to the exercise of their access rights as they deem appropriate."

P: By setting up a puppet East German government that is "no more than an extension of its own authority," the Soviet Union effectively contradicts the one principle that must underlie any peace treaty: German self-determination. "The United States Government continues to believe that there will be no real solution of the German problem . . . until the German people are reunified on the basis of the universally recognized principle of self-determination." But the Soviet Union, "by denying freedom of choice to 17 million East Germans" has not permitted "freedom or choice to the German people as a whole. It is now proposing to perpetuate that denial by concluding a final settlement with a regime which is not representative of these people." Such a peace treaty, read the U.S. note, "could have no validity in international law, nor could it affect in any way whatever the rights of the Western powers."

No Threat. In its one gesture of conciliation, the U.S. coolly offered to begin negotiations on the future of Germany --if the Soviet Union agrees to the principle of German reunification. Yet even if such negotiations were further delayed, the U.S. continued, the "abnormal" situation of a divided Germany presents no particular threat to peace--unless the Soviet Union decides to "destroy that arrangement in pursuit of its political goals." Summing up, the U.S. memorandum argued that "there is no reason for a crisis over Berlin." If trouble starts through Soviet actions, then "all the world will plainly see that the misuse of such words as 'peace' and 'freedom' cannot conceal a threat to raise tension to the point of danger and suppress the freedom of those who now enjoy it."

*In its final form, the memorandum was written by a task force of State Department and White House experts, with finishing touches penned in by the President. State Department officers submitted a first draft that was "awful," according to one of the Administration's many Harvardmen. Said he: "I wouldn't have come up with it in Government 1-A."

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