On 10 March 1952, the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin took the world by surprise with an offer that seemed too good to resist. A peace treaty was to restore Germany's unity on the basis of neutrality. Ever since then, politicians, diplomats, and, most notably, historians have been trying to figure out whether Stalin really meant to pursue the goal he had announced in what has become known as the “Stalin Note.”
In the “Battle of Notes” that dragged on well into the autumn of 1952, Western governments refused to take Stalin's “offer” at face value and demanded concrete assurances from him to give his consent to free elections in all of Germany. After several years in which the USSR had consistently rejected demands for the reunification of Germany on the basis of free elections, the West saw in Stalin's “offer” above all a propaganda coup and a proposal they considered...