Bahr's Bad Bargain

Departing for Moscow in late January 1970, Bahr was not—technically—negotiating on behalf of the West German government. His object was to introduce movement into the official German-Soviet talks over “renunciation of force,” which had begun in earnest in December 1969 after two and a half years of lackluster exchanges. Bahr complained that Bonn's diplomats were too rigid—and that it was, in any event, fruitless to conduct foreign relations with Moscow on an official level.Footnote ¹⁴ A mysterious visit from a Soviet emissary on Christmas Eve 1969 reinforced Bahr's conviction that he must open up a back channel with the Kremlin. Driven by an urgent sense that only swift action could thwart bureaucratic obstacles and East German resistance, Bahr persuaded the chancellor that he alone could salvage the government's Ostpolitik.Footnote ¹⁵ Foreign Minister Walter Scheel of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) reluctantly gave his blessing to Bahr's trip, which he characterized as an “intermission” from the formal talks.Footnote ¹⁶

Before long, however, Bahr's presence in Moscow had completely eclipsed the formal proceedings. This was no back channel; he walked in through the front door and, as Brandt's envoy, enjoyed unprecedented access to Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. Unlike a diplomat, Bahr was not tightly bound to instructions from Bonn's own Foreign Office, so he could improvise. The two met a few times a week for lengthy sessions; by mid-March Bahr had clocked more than thirty hours in conversation with Gromyko.Footnote ¹⁷ The two actually built up something of a collegial rapport, which was hardly the norm for the notoriously humorless Soviet minister.Footnote ¹⁸

As weeks passed, it became clear that Bahr's unscripted approach was staggeringly inefficient. Top-level international negotiations are typically conducted in brief spurts after careful preparation. Bahr preferred to act quickly, almost spontaneously—but then needed four months, until late May, to wrap up an understanding with Gromyko. What was taking so long? The essential problem was that Bahr did not have a negotiating strategy. For him, as for Brandt, the goal of Ostpolitik was to gain maneuvering room for West Germany by throwing ballast overboard.Footnote ¹⁹ He had a very clear idea of what the Bonn government would have to give up in order to quell fears in Eastern Europe, but he had no specific set of counterdemands for the Soviet side. From the very outset, then, Bahr's approach guaranteed that the Moscow Treaty would be strangely one-sided.

Bahr laid out the essence of his position in his first official meeting with Gromyko on January 29, 1970. He opened with a clever response to standard Soviet complaints that the West Germans were Europe's foremost revanchists, perpetually seeking to transform the status quo. Bahr acknowledged that Bonn did want to change the status quo—in the sense that “we are against a status quo of misunderstandings, of enmity, of mistrust, of a lack of connections and a propaganda war.” Otherwise, Bahr asserted, the status quo in Europe formed the basis of West German security. Bonn could not compromise the rights of the four World War II victors, or treat the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as just another country. Aside from these provisos, “the borders are where they are.”Footnote ²⁰ Bahr stood by this position throughout the spring. When Gromyko pushed for an explicit acknowledgment that the Bonn government would respect all the existing borders in Europe, including the frontier between East and West Germany, Bahr saw no reason to object.Footnote ²¹

As originally intended, the “exchange of views” between Bahr and Gromyko was only supposed to sketch out general parameters for an eventual treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet Union. By early March, however, the Soviet side was ready to move toward concrete formulations. Gromyko proposed that he and Bahr exchange unformatted documents (“non-papers”) containing what they believed had been—or still should be—the substance of their discussions.Footnote ²² On March 5, Bahr passed along Bonn's draft. According to this document, the two sides should commit to “respect the territorial integrity of all states in Europe.” However, both parties should also acknowledge that the agreement “did not stand in the way of peaceful efforts directed toward the creation of a unified, democratic Germany.” The German paper sought to embed the Soviet-German treaty within a larger program of détente, including treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia; the “regulation” of East and West German relations; and efforts to achieve “détente and a stabilization of the situation in and around Berlin.”Footnote ²³

The Soviet “non-paper,” submitted by Gromyko on March 6, contained a series of ten items: five points intended to serve as the basis of a treaty, and five more points designed as declarations of intent. These declarations would commit Brandt's government to a series of very specific steps. Bonn was to conclude a treaty with the GDR based on the principles of “complete equality, nondiscrimination, and noninterference in internal affairs.” Bonn's future treaty with Czechoslovakia must disavow the 1938 Munich Agreement from the moment of its inception. West Germany and the Soviet Union would commit to working together to seek the admission of both German states to the United Nations. They would also cooperate in summoning a pan-European security conference, as the Soviets had been demanding for several years.Footnote ²⁴

For all the detailed demands put forth by Gromyko, two items were conspicuously absent: there was no mention whatsoever of Berlin or the problem of German unity. Bahr was not concerned. To him, the exact content of the Moscow agreement was secondary to its functional significance. His goal was to exert pressure on the GDR so that the East German leadership would finally consent to unfolding a cordial and cooperative relationship with West Germany. There were signs of motion in East Berlin: the prime minister, Willi Stoph, agreed to meet with Willy Brandt in the East German city of Erfurt on March 19. Bahr believed that this sudden and unprecedented top-level summit was a by-product of his own talks in Moscow.Footnote ²⁵ He calculated that if the Kremlin felt positive about the prospects of a deal with Bonn, the Soviets might push the East Germans into making more concessions. To Bahr, this was another reason to act quickly in Moscow. As he saw it, “we would now have the basis of a German-Soviet renunciation of force agreement” if some sort of arrangement with the East Germans could be pushed through.Footnote ²⁶

Back in Bonn, Brandt and Scheel were less sanguine. They urged Bahr to seek an agreement on the basis of the German paper while accepting some adjustments from the other side as needed.Footnote ²⁷ Bahr did just the opposite, allowing Gromyko's ten-point paper to serve as the basis of discussion when an “editing committee” met on March 10 to reconcile the two sides’ positions. The resulting text scarcely deviated from Gromyko's original “non-paper.”Footnote ²⁸ Henceforth Bahr would operate at a serious tactical disadvantage. Having accepted a working document that was replete with phrases favoring Soviet positions, he had to expend considerable effort pushing for subtle alterations. As for Bonn's vital interests concerning German unity and Berlin, Bahr abandoned any further effort to include them in the renunciation of force agreement.

Why did Bahr show so little concern for West Berlin? Of all people, Bahr himself served as the new government's plenipotentiary for Berlin affairs. Passage between the Federal Republic and West Berlin remained extremely precarious in the late 1960s; East German border guards cynically slowed down and harassed drivers on the autobahn whenever it suited them—especially when West German political events were scheduled in the former Reich capital. As far as Moscow was concerned, West Berlin was an independent entity in world affairs under the sovereignty of Britain, France, and the United States. In the Soviet view, it was illegal for West Berliners to travel under West German passports—making it risky for Berliners to travel around the Soviet bloc. Even so, Gromyko had shown some hints of flexibility early on in his talks with Bahr: “the Soviet side was not opposed to taking this question seriously,” he indicated. Bahr brushed this overture aside, acknowledging that the Berlin problem was “controversial” and that there was “no reason to come to an agreement here and now.”Footnote ²⁹

Bahr reasoned that since most Berlin issues, including access to the city, fell within the purview of the four World War II victors, there was no point in clogging up the bilateral West German–Soviet talks with them. After all, the four Allied powers were scheduled to begin their own exploratory talks on Berlin in late March. French officials had asked their German counterparts to tread carefully on Berlin, lest precipitate West German actions undermine long-standing four-power rights.Footnote ³⁰ Yet Bahr and Gromyko were in the process of striking a deal on other four-power issues, such as the entry of both German states into the United Nations. Was it unreasonable to demand that the Soviets acknowledge the existing ties between West Germany and West Berlin? From Bonn, Brandt and Scheel warned Bahr against dropping all mention of Berlin. At a minimum, the Soviets should acknowledge on paper that the former capital was a crucial component of détente and that a four-power agreement on Berlin would form a “unitary whole” together with the envisioned treaties with Moscow, Warsaw, and East Berlin. Otherwise, they insisted, “the Soviet side might gain the mistaken impression that we would potentially conclude a renunciation of force agreement without there being satisfactory arrangements about the stabilization of the situation in and around Berlin.”Footnote ³¹

Sensing Bahr's ambivalence, Gromyko hardened his stance: any official West German business in Berlin was unacceptable. The Soviet government “condemns this activity and there is no consensus to be reached on this question,” he snapped.Footnote ³² Rather than trying to wear down Gromyko's resistance, Bahr fell back on what seemed like an expedient solution: Bonn could reach its own bilateral agreement with Moscow but make ratification dependent upon the achievement of a four-power Berlin deal down the road. As he had already indicated to Gromyko, in the absence of progress on Berlin, the Bundestag might well vote to reject any pact with Moscow. The Soviet foreign minister responded with a sinister rhetorical question: had the West Germans “really taken into account what could happen if the Federal Republic did not ratify the treaty?”Footnote ³³ Bahr ignored the warning and continued to make “linkage” between the Berlin and Moscow (and, later, Warsaw) treaties the centerpiece of his Ostpolitik strategy.Footnote ³⁴

Meanwhile, Bahr's hopes with respect to the GDR hit a major roadblock. The chancellor's visit to Erfurt on March 19, 1970, provoked a stirring display of national feeling; a crowd of two thousand East Germans gathered outside Brandt's hotel, chanting “Willy, Willy.” It was a significant embarrassment to the local authorities, above all to the Ministry for State Security.Footnote ³⁵ For the East German leadership, this intense display of admiration for Brandt was a powerful reminder that personal interactions with West Germans could have unpredictable and destabilizing effects within the GDR. Unsurprisingly, then, Stoph took a very hard line during his summit meeting with the chancellor, demanding that Bonn grant full recognition to the GDR as a separate, sovereign state; abandon its question for unification; and pay 100 million deutschmarks as “reparations” for the millions of East Germans who had fled to the West.Footnote ³⁶ A second summit was arranged with Brandt in two months’ time—this time in the West German city of Kassel. Late May did not necessarily represent a deadline for achieving some visible breakthrough in Moscow—but Bahr certainly acted as if it did.Footnote ³⁷

Unfortunately, Bahr's talks with Gromyko did not resume until May 12. In theory, the two sides had not even firmly decided whether to pursue formal treaty negotiations.Footnote ³⁸ In practice, the ten-point document was taking shape as a fixed articulation of agreed standpoints. Over the next week and a half, Bahr pushed for a small number of edits—with some success. Gromyko had long insisted that Bonn must “recognize” [anerkennen] all existing borders in Europe; the West Germans objected that they had no legal authority to take this step, since the 1945 Potsdam Agreement had indicated that the final borders would be determined in a future peace treaty. A German-Soviet working party settled on a milder formulation, indicating that the borders were “inviolable”; further, the two governments would “commit unreservedly to respect the territorial integrity of all states in Europe in their present borders.”Footnote ³⁹

Bahr now felt personally committed to the ten-point text. When Gromyko appeared to waver during their conversation on May 20, indicating that he would have to speak with his East German and Polish counterparts about the change in language, Bahr panicked. He advised Bonn that he would be coming home without an agreed text and that the delay would play into the hands of “negative forces” within the Warsaw Pact.Footnote ⁴⁰ The next morning he dashed off a letter to the Soviet foreign minister pulsing with wounded pride: “I am firmly convinced that the text worked out as of yesterday afternoon corresponds with the objective goal and the interests of both our governments. After my experiences in hours of long discussions, I cannot and will not take a different standpoint.”Footnote ⁴¹ Gromyko relented and abandoned the word “recognize,” leaving Bahr with a distinct feeling of accomplishment. He cabled a single word home: geschafft (did it).Footnote ⁴²

But what exactly had Bahr accomplished? The envoy flew back to Bonn on May 22 convinced that the pieces of a historic treaty with the Soviet Union were now in place. Yet he had only come to an understanding with Gromyko by dropping the most controversial—and, for West Germany, the most significant—points of contention. In effect, the previous four months had seen Bahr aligning ever more closely with wording proposed by the Soviets. To be sure, he managed to ward off some of the most unfavorable Soviet formulations. But he had made no serious demands for changes in Moscow's behavior. The text he brought home—soon to be dubbed the “Bahr Paper”—remained completely silent on the core issues of Berlin and German unity. For Brandt's thin governing majority, this was a tremendous risk.

From the “Bahr Paper” to the Moscow Treaty

By the time Bahr returned in late May, Brandt's cabinet was desperate for some tangible foreign-policy success. Among the broader public, polls revealed large majorities in favor of Ostpolitik; some 80 percent approved of the chancellor's meetings with Willi Stoph.Footnote ⁴³ Within the Bundestag, however, the CDU/CSU was ratcheting up its oppositional rhetoric using two main lines of attack. First, CSU chair Franz Josef Strauss complained that “the government was making more and more concessions to the Russians, giving them whatever they wanted.” To Strauss, this was a form of appeasement; it would pave the way for greater Soviet sway over the entire continent of Europe.Footnote ⁴⁴ Second, apart from this Cold War posturing, the CDU/CSU played the nationalist card, harping on Brandt's apparent willingness to acquiesce in the loss of Germany's former eastern territories. On May 30, 1970, Strauss addressed a crowd of fifty thousand at the Bonn city hall—a protest demonstration called by the League of Expellees. Underneath the podium, a shrill banner proclaimed that “the recognition of the Oder-Neisse Line is a crime against Germany.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Soon the expellees were wielding more inflammatory rhetoric still, recalling popular mobilizations against war reparations half a century earlier. Two terms in particular—Verzicht (abandonment) and Verrat (treachery)—formed the basis of a raw new assault on Brandt's Ostpolitik.Footnote ⁴⁶

Brandt's coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party, began to crack under the strain of adverse publicity. Walter Scheel, an exponent of the left-liberal tradition in the FDP, did not enjoy the full respect of various “national liberal” deputies representing the party in parliament. These national liberals alleged that Scheel had not taken proper command of the foreign ministry; his own state secretary, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, was off in Poland conducting negotiations on Brandt's orders and not Scheel's.Footnote ⁴⁷ Given that the FDP had scarcely cleared the threshold to enter the Bundestag in 1969, amassing a mere 5.8 percent of the national vote, there was ample cause for concern about what might happen during three state elections scheduled for June 14, 1970. If the Free Democrats failed to enter the state parliaments in the Saarland, Lower Saxony, and North Rhine-Westphalia, the hardliners within the party were poised to stage a revolt and withdraw their support for the ruling coalition. Rainer Barzel, head of the CDU/CSU's parliamentary group, was aiming for precisely this outcome. A test of strength came on June 4, 1970, when the Bundestag voted on the annual budget for the Chancellor's Office. Brandt's coalition won—but only by a margin of 247 to 241. Seven deputies from the SPD and FDP had failed to vote in support of the government.Footnote ⁴⁸

Bahr's seeming breakthrough in Moscow created an opening for a swift foreign-policy coup. All that was needed was a quick round of formal negotiations in Moscow to finalize what Bahr had already worked out with Gromyko. This time, to bolster his prestige, Scheel volunteered to lead the German delegation himself. He set the date for June 9, just days ahead of the state elections. Ideally, he would bring home a final treaty by June 14 and prove to skeptical FDP voters that the coalition's Ostpolitik was working.Footnote ⁴⁹ As it happened, though, Scheel's own colleagues in the cabinet refused to back the plan for accelerated negotiations. Addressing the cabinet on May 27, Brandt hoped to win a negotiating mandate on the strength of an oral report from Bahr, but he failed to reach consensus. Ministers from both parties insisted on seeing the actual text of Bahr's ten-point document. Brandt agreed to defer the issue for a week and make the text available on a limited basis, “with due consideration for the need for secrecy.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Reading the Bahr Paper only stiffened cabinet resistance. The official minutes do not record which ministers raised what objections—though US diplomats learned from background conversations that Free Democrats Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Josef Ertl, and Ralf Dahrendorf had expressed serious reservations.Footnote ⁵¹ Among the SPD ministers, Helmut Schmidt, Georg Leber, and Egon Franke were reportedly quite skeptical.Footnote ⁵² Meeting on June 4, the cabinet again refused to issue a mandate for negotiations in Moscow. Instead the ministers reached three general conclusions: (a) the coalition intended to reach an agreement with the Soviets on the renunciation of force; (b) to reach this goal, government-to-government negotiations would be initiated; and (c) guidelines for these negotiations would be worked out during the course of June.Footnote ⁵³ This was anything but a ringing endorsement of Bahr's handiwork. At a further meeting on June 7, Brandt offered the ministers a compelling explanation for why détente with the Soviet Union was essential—yet here again the question remained as to whether the results of Bahr's talks were an adequate basis for negotiations. Participants in the meeting stressed that Germany's “right to self-determination,” the right to unify in peace, “must be underscored explicitly in connection with the renunciation-of-force agreement.”Footnote ⁵⁴

If the cabinet ever intended to disavow the Bahr Paper completely, that prospect evaporated when the Bild-Zeitung published the first four points of the secret document on June 12, 1970.Footnote ⁵⁵ (Three weeks later, Quick magazine printed the remaining six points.) Who leaked the text? Four and a half decades later, it is still not clear. Members of the Bundestag were not given hard copies of the document, though they were informed of its contents.Footnote ⁵⁶ Some evidence points to Brandt's own press chief, Conrad Ahlers, as the source. In private, Ahlers castigated Bahr as an “all-out appeaser” and “stated that he… was determined to stop the dangerous drift in the Brandt government's Eastern policy.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Moreover, he confirmed to the press right away that the text was authentic (with minor variations), despite a previous internal understanding that he would not comment.Footnote ⁵⁸ Speaking with US diplomats, Ahlers asserted that “the recent leaks… come from people at higher levels within the government,” which suggests that Ahlers either supplied the text or knew who had.Footnote ⁵⁹ That said, Ahlers had feuded openly with Axel Springer in the spring of 1970, so he could scarcely have counted on the Bild publisher to protect his identity.Footnote ⁶⁰

Whatever the leaker's motives, the timing worked mainly to the advantage of the CDU/CSU opposition. The Bild revelations came just two days before the long-anticipated June 14 elections in three states. Voters deserted the FDP in droves. The party failed to clear the five-percent hurdle in Saarland and Lower Saxony, so it vanished from the legislatures in Saarbrücken and Hannover. In North Rhine-Westphalia, far and away the largest West German state, the Free Democrats scarcely held on to their seats. Only the SPD's respectable performance at the polls enabled the survival of a “social-liberal” coalition in Düsseldorf, the state capital.Footnote ⁶¹

The jolt of the summer elections helped to clarify the foreign-policy stance of the FDP. Ralf Dahrendorf anticipated a period of stagnation for Ostpolitik: “The leaders of the FDP are very badly shaken in a personal sense, notably Genscher.”Footnote ⁶² At a party convention in late June, Erich Mende, the FDP's former chair, led an all-out assault against Scheel—yet he and the other national liberals came up short. Instead of retreating, the Free Democratic leadership reaffirmed its general support for Ostpolitik and reelected Scheel as party chair with a convincing vote of 298 to 64. It was Genscher who emerged as the true power broker within the party, however, and he urged Scheel to use the negotiations in Moscow to roll back some of Bahr's errors.Footnote ⁶³

Despite Genscher's expectations, the odds of movement in the Soviet position were smaller than ever now that the Bahr Paper had appeared in print. The Soviets stood to lose face if the final treaty varied substantially from the published draft. Speaking with Bahr, Ambassador Semyon Zarapkin characterized the May results as “so well balanced that adding or taking away from them would destroy the equilibrium of the whole.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Naturally, Bahr was inclined to agree. More surprisingly, Ambassador Helmut Allardt—no friend of Bahr's—cabled from Moscow to warn against any repudiation of the exploratory talks. Efforts to modify the substance of the Bahr Paper would surely be seen by Gromyko as a betrayal.Footnote ⁶⁵

Caught between FDP pressures for change and Soviet reluctance to make concessions, Scheel's Foreign Office opted to proceed on the basis of the Bahr Paper while introducing cosmetic changes to make the treaty easier to sell in the Bundestag. A new preamble was drafted that called attention to the absence of a peace treaty in Europe; it also referred back to the German-Soviet agreement of September 13, 1955, when the Soviets had implicitly acknowledged Bonn's right to pursue the goal of German unity.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Foreign Office balked at any mention of the four-power responsibilities in Germany, arguing that this might indirectly give the Soviets a continuing basis for intervening in West German affairs—which was precisely what the Brandt government was trying to avert by signing the Moscow Treaty.Footnote ⁶⁷

Over the course of July, Scheel spoke with the French, British, and US foreign ministers in search of support for the upcoming negotiations. All expressed sympathy for the goals of Bonn's Ostpolitik, but Maurice Schumann (France) and Alec Douglas-Home (Britain) asked for an explicit mention of four-power rights in the German-Soviet treaty.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Washington, Secretary of State William Rogers raised questions about the form of the treaty, which bracketed out many problems and left them to be addressed in peripheral supporting letters: “Points that one wants covered in a contractual relationship should be placed inside a treaty,” he observed.Footnote ⁶⁹ Rogers also wondered whether it might be better to hold off on finalizing, let alone signing, the treaty until after the Soviets had made concessions in the four-power Berlin negotiations. Scheel promised to give the matter some thought and indicated that time might elapse between initialing and signing the treaty; perhaps a Berlin solution might become apparent during the interval. He was most assuredly not in a hurry. In fact, “he planned to rent a dacha.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Scheel arrived in Moscow on July 26, 1970, with a suitcase full of proposed changes to the Bahr text. Most were minor. Even so, he found a stern Gromyko ill-disposed to honor the German wishes. As the Soviet minister complained, the Kremlin had already shown tremendous understanding by allowing Bonn to describe the borders in Europe as “inviolable” rather than fixed in perpetuity. He reminded Scheel that the Germans, too, would derive great advantages from the Moscow Treaty: “both countries expect great things in Europe, and not only in Europe, on the path toward peaceful mutual relations. … The Soviet Union has great economic, technical and trade potential, it has colossal possibilities for the development of its country.” This was more comfortable terrain for Scheel, who recalled the “positive older traditions of cooperation between the Soviet Union and Germany in the industrial realm.” He proposed expanding the treaty's preamble to build in “additional concepts with respect to future cooperation in all kinds of areas.”Footnote ⁷¹

Scheel's attempt to sugarcoat his negotiating agenda produced little effect on Gromyko. The Soviet delegates brusquely turned aside German efforts to include a reference to the absence of a final peace treaty in Europe. They were even more dismissive of Scheel's request to deal with the question of four-power rights. To Gromyko and his colleagues, it was patently obvious that a bilateral German-Soviet treaty bore no relationship to the larger, overarching rights enjoyed by the World War II victors. The Germans did not even have the standing to discuss these rights, so how could the present treaty make any mention of them?Footnote ⁷² In two different sessions, a flustered Scheel found himself calling upon Bahr to present the official West German position. Bahr sent Brandt a withering assessment of Scheel's performance: “Unfortunately, our minister has not developed any rapport with his partner.” The real bargaining would have to take place at the working level.Footnote ⁷³

Bahr's conclusion—as usual—was that the West Germans should stop fussing over minor points and bring the Moscow talks to a swift conclusion. In his view, Scheel and the Foreign Office gave the appearance of “delaying the negotiations for the sake of questions that are hardly proportional to the significance of the treaty.” All that Bonn could hope for, in Bahr's view, was a linguistic “bridge” connecting points two and three of the final treaty.Footnote ⁷⁴ This would have the effect of creating a direct relationship between the statements on nonaggression and territorial integrity—thereby leaving some scope in the treaty for peaceful, nonthreatening, mutually agreed changes to Europe's borders in the future. To Bahr, it was essential that Scheel and his delegation should return to Bonn with a completed, initialed treaty in hand; otherwise the minister would be seen as incapable of decisive action.Footnote ⁷⁵

As Bahr's usual impatience began to reassert itself, even Brandt felt it necessary to rein in his top advisor. Writing from Bonn on August 3, the chancellor expressed dismay at Bahr's reluctance to make an issue out of Berlin: “This is a decisive point, both substantively and in terms of domestic politics,” he observed.Footnote ⁷⁶ In parallel instructions to the foreign minister, Brandt urged Scheel to present a unilateral German statement on Berlin at the time of the treaty's conclusion—something in writing that could be cited during parliamentary consideration of the Moscow Treaty. Given the relatively lengthy to-do list he was conveying, Brandt doubted that the Soviets could be brought around in just a few days; thus, he suggested, Scheel and the delegation should expect to return home without initialing a final treaty.Footnote ⁷⁷

In Moscow, Scheel's staff raced to defy the chancellor's predictions and come up with a workable arrangement. Paul Frank emerged as the real guiding light of the talks: in a series of lengthy encounters, the short, pragmatic, quick-witted Swabian—who had served as state secretary in Bonn's Foreign Office only since June—found that he could communicate with verve and clarity with his Soviet counterpart, Valentin Falin. In one conversation laced with lighthearted references to Ludwig van Beethoven and Gioachino Rossini, Falin and Frank hammered out a preamble for the treaty. The following day, they worked to harmonize the German and Russian translations of the treaty text.Footnote ⁷⁸ Falin also offered a detailed commentary on the contents of Bonn's unilateral “option letter,” which proclaimed the Federal Republic's right to pursue national unification. Falin was, in effect, providing guidance with regard to wording that would let the Soviet side tacitly acknowledge the contents of the West German letter (and thereby accept the Federal Republic's intention to uphold the goal of national unity) rather than curtly returning it.Footnote ⁷⁹ A similar procedure would be used to convey West German views on four-power rights and the status of Berlin. The Soviet side agreed not to contradict a unilateral West German letter—addressed to the three Western Allies—indicating that the Moscow Treaty would not affect existing rights. Convinced that there was no longer any point in “striving for new improvements in these texts,” and fearing that the Soviets would be displeased by any further delays, Scheel won the chancellor's permission to initial the treaty and lead his delegation home.Footnote ⁸⁰

Scheel's final substantive encounter with Gromyko on August 6, 1970, revealed just how much distance still divided the German and Soviet perspectives on Berlin. The foreign minister read out a statement prepared by the cabinet in Bonn insisting that “progress on détente in Europe is inseparable from a satisfactory arrangement in and around Berlin. Only when this has been achieved can a renunciation-of-force treaty be put into effect.”Footnote ⁸¹ Recognizing that the West Germans were, in fact, threatening to withhold ratification of the Moscow Treaty until after a Berlin solution had been reached by the four powers, Gromyko responded dismissively: “that has nothing to do with the treaty.”Footnote ⁸² He asked to change the subject in exasperation. The two spoke amicably enough about scientific, technical, economic, and cultural cooperation; trips by cabinet ministers Karl Schiller and Hans Leussink had already been scheduled for September. Scheel's closing remark was typically upbeat: “we are hoping for a positive dynamic from this treaty.”Footnote ⁸³ The following morning, August 7, the two ministers initialed the final text of the Moscow Treaty, and Scheel flew back to Bonn to report to the cabinet.

What the delegation brought back was a patchwork: one formal treaty, two unilateral German letters, and a backroom understanding on the future course of Ostpolitik—points five through ten of the Bahr Paper, which agents of the two sides initialed as an unpublished declaration of intent. The negotiations had been packed into eleven chaotic days with little opportunity to keep the ministries in Bonn current on the details. Brandt's chain of information was compromised by his reliance on an SPD operative, Karl Wienand, as a messenger. Wienand was hardly trained to convey the nuances of diplomacy to the chancellor—and he may have already been working for the Stasi.Footnote ⁸⁴ Allied diplomats in Moscow were just as hard pressed to keep up with shifting Soviet and West German positions on four-power rights. Either Scheel or Bahr met with the British, French, and American ambassadors every few days, but by the time the three Western Allies managed to coordinate their responses, their common standpoints had often been overtaken by events. Word that the treaty would be finalized on August 7 caught all three Western Allies off guard.Footnote ⁸⁵

Predictably, the CDU/CSU also complained about the limited flow of information out of Moscow. Barzel wrote to Brandt on August 7 insisting that if the government were truly interested in a “constructive conversation” with the opposition, it would allow ample time for consultation about the treaty.Footnote ⁸⁶ His request evoked little sympathy. As early as June 20, Scheel had asked Barzel to name CDU/CSU observers to accompany the delegation to Moscow, yet the opposition leader balked, maintaining that the Bahr Paper was unacceptable as a basis for negotiations with the Soviets.Footnote ⁸⁷ While anticipating correctly that Scheel would bring back only minor changes to the Bahr formulas—“arabesques,” as he called them—Barzel planned to focus his critique less on the treaty text than on the government's poor tactics. Why, he wondered, was it so imperative to sign the Moscow document right away, before the status of Berlin had been secured?Footnote ⁸⁸

Scheel's own answer to this question, articulated to the cabinet on August 8, was to emphasize the larger meaning of the Moscow Treaty. He described the complicated arrangements as a sensible trade-off: “Germany's readiness to respect the territorial status quo stands against the Soviet agreement not to keep viewing Germany as a foe, as well as their readiness for broad-based cooperation in the future. Through this, the Federal Republic will win back a significant bit of foreign policy freedom of maneuver, and also greater weight in general geopolitical questions.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In other words, all that really mattered about the Moscow Treaty was the mere fact of its existence. It signaled that the long decades of intense Soviet hostility against West Germany were drawing to a close. The Kremlin reinforced this interpretation by unexpectedly ratcheting up the treaty's standing. Rather than having Gromyko sign the final document in Bonn, as Scheel had proposed, the Soviet leadership invited Brandt himself to put his name on the document—in Moscow.

Brandt and Brezhnev

The cabinet had just enough time to endorse this arrangement, and to undertake a brief review of the treaty's provisions, before the chancellor was on a plane to the Soviet capital. Recognizing that his hastily arranged visit was an international sensation—it was, after all, the first time since 1955 that a German chancellor had visited the Kremlin—Brandt kept the journey brief and businesslike. In letters to Nixon, Georges Pompidou, and Edward Heath, he proposed that the four of them meet for a summit later that year. Brandt was clearly trying to dispel fears about a German-Soviet cabal, long associated with memories of the Rapallo Treaty of 1922, by underscoring his pro-Western orientation.Footnote ⁹⁰ The initiative backfired. The French president bridled at the notion that Brandt could summon a meeting of some newly emergent “Big Four” club.Footnote ⁹¹ In Washington, the Nixon administration took umbrage at Brandt's lack of discretion; by speaking openly with reporters about his conference idea, the chancellor appeared to be placing undue pressure on his Western partners.Footnote ⁹² In other ways, too, the Bonn government confirmed its penchant for leaks. On August 11, at a time when the Moscow Treaty documents were supposed to be a closely guarded secret, the Springer press obtained and published the texts. Rolf Pauls, Bonn's ambassador to Washington, warned of the “devastating impression” this conveyed in the United States: “If this lack of responsibility is allowed to continue, respect for us will deteriorate considerably, and soon we will no longer be in a position to conduct our foreign policy in trusting cooperation with our allies.”Footnote ⁹³

Fortunately for Brandt, one conversation partner in Moscow was waiting most eagerly for the chance to build a cooperative relationship. Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Communist Party, had not played an obvious role in the negotiations with West Germany; that was left to state officials such as Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin and Foreign Minister Gromyko. Brezhnev was, all the same, in the course of besting his rivals inside the Kremlin and emerging as the true leader of the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁹⁴ Brandt's visit gave him an opportunity to emerge from the shadows of the Soviet “collective leadership” and give his personal endorsement to German Ostpolitik. Kosygin spent three and a half hours with Brandt on August 12; Brezhnev spent four. The party leader chatted amiably about the operation of the Politburo, the value of personal diplomacy, and the tentacles of American economic influence. “I can imagine that your people and your party are contemplating how you can free yourselves from this yoke,” Brezhnev remarked. “The S[oviet] U[nion] wants the FRG to take a place in the world that corresponds with its economic and technological standing, and to use its influence for security and cooperation in Europe.” Brandt hardly got a word in edgewise, except to clarify that the Federal Republic remained firmly embedded within the European Economic Community (EEC) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Brezhnev's efforts to flatter the West Germans and divide the Western camp were all too transparent.Footnote ⁹⁵

With Kosygin, too, Brandt took pains to downplay the impression of an emerging West German–Soviet axis. There would be no arrangement for routine political consultations, even though the British and French governments had long since institutionalized their talks with the Soviets. Brandt did welcome the prospect of a mixed German-Soviet economic commission, as suggested by Kosygin, but he tried to dampen expectations about strictly bilateral deals. “We are not as self-sufficient as we used to be, when the EEC was not so far advanced,” he explained. “Our trade relations must be embedded within EEC rules.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The Soviets had heard comparable views from Scheel a few days earlier: Britain would soon be joining the Common Market, Scheel noted, and the member states were on track to pool their currencies by 1980.Footnote ⁹⁷ Either the Soviet leaders failed to internalize these predictions or they did not consider them realistic, for Brezhnev and Kosygin spent considerable time rhapsodizing about the prospects for wedding German capital and technology with untapped Siberian resources. Their short-term ambitions focused on the mammoth Kama River truck plant, Europe's largest, which they hoped to outfit with investments and licenses from Daimler-Benz.Footnote ⁹⁸

Brezhnev and Kosygin were overestimating the West German interest in Osthandel (trade with the East). Brandt's government was not drawn to trade with the Soviet Union for its own sake. For Brandt, the Moscow Treaty was a political signpost, a path toward “promoting cooperation and contributing to the stabilization of the situation in Europe and in the world.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The chancellor's eyes were now fixed on future treaties with Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin—along with multilateral projects such as East-West talks on arms reduction and the long-anticipated conference on security in Europe.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Détente could not move forward, however, without first securing the status of West Berlin. Couching the link as delicately as possible, Brandt explained to Brezhnev that the “political and psychological situation in the Federal Republic is such that we can hope for broader support for this [Moscow] treaty if there is progress with respect to Berlin.” The general secretary retorted that Bonn had every reason to ratify the Moscow achievements as soon as possible: “stretching it out could substantially diminish the political significance, the effect, and the purpose of this treaty.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Despite these brief moments of dissonance, a palpable human connection between Brandt and Brezhnev took shape that afternoon—sealed, perhaps, by their unapologetic and continuous smoking. For all the pronounced political, strategic, and economic differences that still divided West Germany and the Soviet Union, the two countries’ leaders did not treat one another as enemies.

Brezhnev looked on as Brandt and Kosygin signed the Moscow Treaty—seated in the same conference room in the Kremlin where Viacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop had signed their infamous nonaggression pact thirty-one years earlier.Footnote ¹⁰² Photos of the signing graced front pages across the Atlantic world; it was registered immediately as a watershed in international politics. Foreign officials were polite and congratulatory in their official comments, but in private they gave vent to anxious speculation about the meaning of German-Soviet rapprochement. Gaston Thorn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, expressed “high personal regard for Brandt” but wondered whether “any German leader can now long resist ‘Drang nach Osten.’”Footnote ¹⁰³ The prospect that the Federal Republic might be enticed to loosen its ties with the West—whether out of a misplaced attempt at federation with the GDR or out of enchantment with the resources of Siberia—registered acutely among Bonn's economic and military partners. It was a line of argumentation routinely invoked by the Christian Democratic opposition as well: Rainer Barzel toured the Western Allied capitals in early September warning that some in Brandt's entourage believed that Germany could serve as a “bridge” seesawing dangerously between East and West.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Sophisticated observers saw the true meaning of the Moscow Treaty less in terms of German-Soviet relations and more in terms of West Germany's overall standing in international politics. One Italian official predicted that the Federal Republic “would have considerably more foreign policy freedom, and he wondered to what purpose this freedom would be put.” Reporting from Paris, the US chargé d'affaires observed that the French “seem to sense that West Germany, which came of age economically and financially during the 1968 Deutschmark revaluation affair, has taken [a] major step in casting aside the status of [a] defeated Nazi nation and has come of age politically.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This was almost exactly what Scheel was saying around Bonn—using a “tone of self-assertiveness” that raised eyebrows inside Nixon's White House. According to a US intelligence report that Henry Kissinger passed along to the president, Scheel had told one group: “After the FRG signs the treaty, the West Germans will regain an important role in worldwide political developments. The Four Powers will not be able to make decisions without consulting West Germany. The United States and the USSR will have to consult the FRG in questions concerning all parts of the world. Consequently, the FRG has a greater responsibility in world politics.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Although Scheel may have been exaggerating to make the Moscow Treaty more palatable to his audience, such remarks correlated with his longstanding ambition to achieve a global role for West Germany that transcended Cold War constraints.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Freed at last from the ominous burden of Soviet enmity, the Federal Republic would finally come into its own.

If that was the long-term promise of Ostpolitik, Scheel was getting ahead of himself. The Moscow Treaty could not in itself deliver all the advantages imagined by the German foreign minister. The great stumbling block of Berlin left the fate of Ostpolitik in the hands of the four powers. Brandt and Bahr hoped that a desire to get the Moscow Treaty ratified might bring the Soviets to the bargaining table, thus speeding along the achievement of a Berlin settlement. Speaking with Kissinger, Bahr urged that “the Four Power negotiations on Berlin should come to a resolution within six months or so if internal problems in the Federal Republic are to be avoided.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Yet Paris would not be rushed, and neither would Washington. Alarmed at the hectic pace of Bonn's diplomacy, Pompidou directed his government to handle the Berlin negotiations slowly and deliberately.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Nixon administration endorsed this approach. As Secretary of State Rogers observed to his French counterpart, Maurice Schumann, “We should not allow pressures for ratification to make us give in to [the] Soviets on new arrangements for Berlin which [are] not satisfactory to us.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The Berlin talks would drag on for another year—which must have seemed an eternity to the restless Bahr. Yet he had only himself to blame. Having pushed in great haste for an incomplete treaty with Moscow, Bahr now faced an excruciating wait as a complicated, interlinked network of treaties took shape.

Pushing the Poles

The Moscow Treaty gave rise to one paradox at the heart of Brandt's Ostpolitik: a poorly negotiated document served to enhance West Germany's political standing in the world while laying the basis for close personal relations between Brandt and Brezhnev. The Warsaw Treaty, signed in December 1970, yielded a second paradox: this time, a hard-fought treaty—negotiated by means of conventional diplomacy—came to symbolize Germany's extraordinary readiness to come to terms with its genocidal past. Brandt's symbolic gesture in the Polish capital, his mournful kneeling at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, impressed an international public with the quality of Germany's moral reckoning. Yet the actual content of Bonn's policy toward Poland aimed at a stronger articulation of West German interests. Though often understood as an instrument of reconciliation, the Warsaw Treaty was a document of limited scope with few consolations for postwar Poland. Even Bonn's acknowledgment of the Oder-Neisse border came with enough formal legal hedges to keep the question from fully subsiding over the next two decades.

As early as April 1970, Polish officials were expressing irritation over the slow progress of their talks with West Germany. They felt that they should be first in line among the Soviet bloc countries, since party leader Władisław Gomułka had proposed bilateral negotiations with Bonn the previous May.Footnote ¹¹¹ Unfortunately for the Poles, Bahr's program for Ostpolitik assigned first priority to Moscow; and the Soviets, too, seemed jealous of their prerogative as alliance leader. The Poles’ tightly circumscribed negotiating agenda also made for long delays. They resisted the West German concept of a “renunciation of force” agreement and called instead for a single-issue border treaty—parallel to the Görlitz Treaty that Poland and East Germany had signed back in 1950.Footnote ¹¹² In the Polish view, steps toward the “normalization” of relations should wait until after the West Germans had committed themselves irrevocably to the status quo. Even the forging of diplomatic relations between Warsaw and Bonn was off the table for the time being; the Poles were unwilling to countenance this level of formal interaction.Footnote ¹¹³

For their part, diplomats in Bonn's Foreign Office were not really tempted to sign a border treaty promising nothing in return, since this would be difficult to sell to the German public. Even Bahr, who was not intimately involved in the Warsaw talks, thought the Poles should have to agree to “family reunification” arrangements on a large scale, on the order of 160,000.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In advance of the third round of German-Polish talks in early April, the Foreign Office worked up an extensive catalog of counterdemands for the German negotiating team. Attention focused on the situation of ethnic Germans remaining in Poland. On the one hand, these Germans should enjoy better prospects for emigration to the Federal Republic, where they still had a claim to citizenship. On the other, the cultural rights of these ethnic Germans should be respected by the Polish government. To couch this agenda in more sensitive language, West German officials spoke of “humanitarian” concerns arising from the postwar situation in Europe.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Polish officials responded frostily to Bonn's “humanitarian” agenda. Why should Poland acknowledge citizenship claims arising from German law? Was the Federal Republic trying to interfere in internal Polish affairs?Footnote ¹¹⁶ Even after the lead negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Józef Winiewicz, acknowledged the presence of “so-called” Germans in Poland, the Polish authorities proceeded from a completely different set of numbers from that of their German counterparts: thirty thousand residents with possible German citizenship, vis-à-vis several hundred thousand names on file with the German Red Cross.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the official Polish rendering, most applicants for emigration were economic opportunists, hoping to switch allegiances for the sake of finding work in the West. In any event, the Poles were reluctant to endorse another wave of emigration, having already lost so many to the United States and Germany over the years—with some 220,000 departing for the Federal Republic during the last major surge of “family reunifications” in 1957–58.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Not surprisingly, the Oder-Neisse border itself remained the most contentious problem. West German officials expressed their readiness to accept the border as it currently existed; but, as in Moscow, they insisted that they could not speak on behalf of a future united Germany. The Polish negotiators were unwilling to accept formulations hinting “that the border question might one day again come up for discussion.” They thus opposed any reference to the absence of a peace treaty in Central Europe, or even a nod to the four powers as the final arbiters of German affairs; this was to be a strictly bilateral understanding between the Federal Republic and Poland.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Operating within these constraints, the West German side began drafting supplementary protocols that would contain all the topics they could not address in the official text of the Warsaw Treaty. Like the Moscow Treaty, this agreement, too, would be accompanied by a patchwork of extra documentation, including an exchange of interpretive letters between the Federal Republic and the three Western Allies.

Even after the ugly partisan clashes over the Bahr Paper, Brandt's government still hoped that the CDU/CSU opposition might support the course of reconciliation with Warsaw. Compared with the Soviet Union, Poland awakened a greater sense of moral responsibility among some Christian Democrats. The widely felt need to address practical humanitarian concerns such as family reunification (or at least family visits back and forth) also spoke in favor of reaching some kind of working arrangement.Footnote ¹²⁰ On October 15, 1970, the CDU/CSU parliamentary group released a statement conveying its best attempt at a constructive position on Poland. The party favored the establishment of diplomatic relations and “an intensified exchange in the realms of culture, arts, and sciences” with Warsaw: “It is necessary and possible for both peoples to see each other in a new light.” As for territorial questions, Poland could “rest assured” that it was “secure … in its present status.” On the day when Germany united in peace and freedom, however, a new situation would prevail: “the entire German people must be able to act in free self-determination.”Footnote ¹²¹

On one level, the CDU/CSU position aligned fairly well with that of the SPD-FDP coalition. West German diplomats insisted over and over that they could not speak on behalf of some future united Germany. The heart of the disagreement between government and opposition lay in how to express this reservation. In the view of the CDU/CSU, the treaty with Poland must plainly state its provisional nature. Bonn's Foreign Office, having engaged in back-and-forth talks with the Poles for almost a year, believed the Poles would never sign an overtly limited-term arrangement. As State Secretary Frank wrote to Barzel: “We have got to proceed from the fact that the Oder-Neisse Line constitutes the western border of Poland.” Even though the German goal was to make borders more porous, not to cement them, there would be no opening of the borders whatsoever until the Federal Republic “declares unequivocally that it does not question them and will not question them.” Frank's tone hinted that he and Scheel considered the reservations about German unity to be something of a formality: territory was not expected to change hands if the Federal Republic and the GDR should unite one day. Still, Frank observed, the treaty with Poland would contain a clause affirming its compatibility with existing arrangements in Germany.Footnote ¹²² Barzel was unmoved. He rejected the Foreign Office's invitation to send along CDU/CSU delegates to observe the Warsaw talks, claiming that there was not a “sufficient degree of commonality.” In any event, he noted, it would be humiliating for Christian Democratic observers to watch the proceedings “without any possibility of involvement.”Footnote ¹²³

Although Brandt might have been loath to admit it, the hostile drumbeat from the CDU/CSU did create pressure for results. Writing to the Polish prime minister, Józef Cyrankiewicz, the German chancellor pointed out that the coming treaty “must be perceived by both sides as balanced.” A way must be found, he continued, “to take account of the hopes and desires of many people living in Poland and leave them free to choose their place of permanent residence.”Footnote ¹²⁴ In late October, the cabinet instructed Scheel to pursue three basic goals in his talks with the Poles: a general statement of intent by the Polish government, an agreement about the dimensions of the family reunification program, and an agreed procedure for resolving cases. As for other components of the treaty, Brandt displayed a striking deference to expellee sensibilities. Somewhere in the negotiating protocol, he suggested, the German side must make plain that the acknowledgment of Poland's Western border did not in itself “legitimate the expulsion.” If the Poles wanted to refer to the violent deeds of the Nazi regime in the treaty preamble, so be it—but then the expulsion would have to be mentioned as well.Footnote ¹²⁵ There was little hint here of moral debt; Brandt was approaching the West German-Polish treaty as a straightforward political transaction.

Embarking for Warsaw in early November, Scheel was determined to bring the talks with Poland to a conclusion and come home with a final treaty. The timing was delicate: with state elections scheduled for Hesse on November 8, 1970, Scheel's mission was to enhance the FDP's foreign-policy profile in advance of election day.Footnote ¹²⁶ During opening meetings with the Polish foreign minister, Stefan Jędrychowski, Scheel explained that German public support for the border treaty could not be expected unless “sensible solutions” were found in the realm of humanitarian questions. Scheel did not make any stipulations about the exact form of the agreement; it would not have to be done in writing, and it would obviously not constitute a formal component of the border treaty.Footnote ¹²⁷ But it was a quid pro quo all the same.

In keeping with his no-nonsense approach, Scheel made plain that the West Germans did not want to have a conversation about Nazi crimes or unroll the painful history of postwar ethnic cleansing. As he remarked during a plenary session of the Warsaw negotiations, “It is not our task to make historical judgments. … On the contrary, the goal of any political leadership is to shape the future.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Even a later visit to Auschwitz did not affect Scheel's underlying presentism. Speaking with Cyrankiewicz—an Auschwitz survivor—Scheel confessed that what he saw and heard in the camp “escapes the ability of a normal human being to understand.” He praised the “unemotional” [unterkühlt] presentation of the surviving artifacts, which left a “deep impression” on him. Scheel expressed his conviction that Germany truly had a duty to “shape a policy of peace in Europe.”Footnote ¹²⁹ To the West German foreign minister and FDP party leader, the point of remembering the past was to draw forward-looking lessons—not to try to atone directly for past crimes.

Scheel's talks did not wrap up in time for the November 8 elections in Hesse after all. For voters favoring the ruling coalition, unfinished business in Warsaw might have supplied one more reason to back the FDP in Hesse. The results were pleasing for the Free Democrats, who won just over 10 percent of the state vote—a significant gain over their performance in the 1969 elections.Footnote ¹³⁰ Buoyed by this domestic success, Scheel passed along to his Polish interlocutors an eleven-point catalog spelling out how he envisioned a resolution of the ethnic German situation in Poland. Key to the fresh German approach was an emphasis on process: instead of sparring with the Poles about the number of ethnic Germans remaining in Poland, the two sides should strive for agreement on how to handle family visits, applications for emigration, and other practical issues. Addressing the cultural rights of ethnic Germans within Poland would, he noted, help to alleviate the pressure to emigrate.Footnote ¹³¹

Confident now that Brandt and Scheel would be able to hold their coalition together a bit longer, the Polish leadership began to shift ground. Having long insisted that only the Polish and German Red Cross chapters should be handling petitions for departure, Warsaw now promised that government authorities would attend to these matters. In an informal “information” statement delivered to Scheel, the Poles acknowledged that “some tens of thousands of people” might be entitled to resettle in East or West Germany.Footnote ¹³² More far-reaching concessions were delivered in a secret addendum. Here the Poles promised to facilitate the departure of “people who describe themselves as German” following a case-by-case examination. The operation would commence from the moment the Warsaw Treaty was signed and reach completion within two years of the treaty's ratification.Footnote ¹³³ In a wrap-up session lasting from midnight until five o'clock a.m. on November 14, 1970, Scheel, Jędrychowski, and their delegations hammered out the final wording of these “information” documents.Footnote ¹³⁴ Scheel was on a plane bound for Bonn within hours, but he returned to Warsaw four days later to put his initials on the formal treaty text. The rest was up to Brandt.

In many respects, the Warsaw Treaty was a cognate of the Moscow Treaty signed in August. It addressed the border question more centrally, providing in the very first article a careful geographic delineation of the Oder-Neisse border as “laid down” by the Potsdam Conference. The two parties pledged to respect the “inviolability” of the existing border, and they indicated further that they harbored no territorial claims against one another and “will not assert such claims in the future.” The second article contained “renunciation of force” language—a promise to refrain from violence or the threat of violence. The third article spoke in general terms about the desire for “full normalization and a comprehensive development of their mutual relations,” with special reference to “economic, scientific, technological, cultural and other relations.”Footnote ¹³⁵ What the treaty did not envision, in the near term, was an exchange of ambassadors between Warsaw and Bonn. Diplomatic relations would have to wait until the treaty was formally ratified—a kind of “reverse linkage” designed to put pressure on Bonn to move the two Eastern Treaties through the Bundestag quickly.Footnote ¹³⁶

Convinced, as always, of his unique talent for bargaining with Communists, Egon Bahr derided Scheel's conduct of the negotiations. In his view, it was folly to treat the Polish foreign ministry as the proper address for delicate diplomatic initiatives. To Bahr, the absence of a back channel to the party leadership in Warsaw was a serious oversight.Footnote ¹³⁷ There was indeed a certain formality and distance between the German and Polish negotiators; the Warsaw functionaries remain almost faceless in the German documentation. Yet the substantive results of the Polish treaty outstripped Bahr's achievement in Moscow, thanks to the Foreign Office's success in wresting significant concessions from their counterparts. Rather than making the question of ethnic Germans in Poland disappear quietly, the Poles had opened up the terrain for an ongoing tug-of-war with West German authorities over the flow of emigrants. The outcome was not necessarily beneficial to the cause of smooth Polish-German relations, but it did reflect precisely the kind of quid pro quo that the Christian Democratic opposition had long demanded.

Members of the CDU/CSU reacted ferociously to the Warsaw Treaty all the same, with just a handful of exceptions. Expellee activists zeroed in on the fate of the Oder-Neisse territory, speaking of a “total capitulation” to the Communists in Warsaw.Footnote ¹³⁸ Other commentators took issue with Brandt's and Scheel's assertion that they could only speak on behalf of the existing Federal Republic. What, they sneered, of the constitutional mandate to work toward unification on behalf of all Germans?Footnote ¹³⁹ The Polish “information” sheet promising the emigration of tens of thousands of ethnic Germans failed to impress embittered foes of the coalition's Ostpolitik. In short, the heated rhetoric reflected a deepening crisis of trust.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Convinced that Bahr and Scheel had given away far more in secret annexes to the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties, Barzel renewed an earlier demand to inspect the protocols of Bahr's negotiations. Otherwise, he asserted, it would be impossible for the CDU/CSU to carry out its constitutional obligation to review and ratify the treaties.Footnote ¹⁴¹

For all their blistering criticism of the government's Ostpolitik, the CDU/CSU adopted an official attitude of “wait and see” with respect to the Moscow and Warsaw treaties (increasingly identified in tandem as the “Eastern Treaties”). If the Soviet Union relented and allowed for an unexpectedly generous resolution to the status of Berlin, the conservative parties might come to see the two treaties in a more favorable light. In the meantime, the opposition continued to work toward a collapse of the governing coalition. The defection of three FDP deputies to the CDU, including former party chair Erich Mende, nourished such hopes by shrinking the government's majority in the Bundestag to just six.Footnote ¹⁴² Hoping to share a constructive impression of its alternative approach to Ostpolitik, the CDU/CSU parliamentary group released its own draft of a future treaty with Poland on December 3, 1970—a meaningless exercise in vicarious diplomacy that attracted little attention.Footnote ¹⁴³ Given an opportunity to join Brandt's official delegation to Warsaw for the signing ceremony on December 7, the CDU/CSU once again declined the offer. Catholic and Protestant bishops, unsure about the import of the Warsaw Treaty for diocese boundaries, also stayed home; representatives from their youth leagues went in their stead.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Although Brandt did still bring along a sizable delegation—featuring industry and union representatives along with novelists Günter Grass and Siegfried Lenz—the tone of his visit to Warsaw was subdued. The absence of diplomatic relations dictated a restrained protocol; there would be no German flags adorning the lampposts of the Polish capital. According to the US ambassador, Walter J. Stoessel, the signing itself was an “austere ceremony lasting only a few minutes,” with television cameras on hand but no fulsome toasts delivered.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ During his first business meeting with Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz, Brandt was careful not to get ahead of the actual state of German-Polish relations. He spoke of “normalization” as an arduous process involving a “great number of extremely complicated questions.” Cyrankiewicz replied that the two peoples needed a kind of “psychoanalytic cure,” with the “therapy” consisting of intensive cooperation and exchanges between Germans and Poles.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Party chief Gomułka was far more gruff, subjecting Brandt to a tedious monologue about the unshakable unity of the socialist camp and the need for West Germany to settle its disputes with Czechoslovakia and the GDR. Turning to Poland's own needs, Gomułka put an enormous sum on the table: ten billion deutsche marks, to be lent by the Germans at an interest rate of 2 percent or less. Since the Polish government had renounced any claim to direct reparations back in 1953, Gomułka grounded his demand in West Germany's presumed obligation to compensate individuals who had suffered under National Socialist rule. Whatever Bonn would otherwise owe to Polish citizens could simply be turned over to the communist government.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Gomułka's mercenary tactic hinted at the desperate economic situation of his regime. It was late in the game to be naming a price for Polish-German reconciliation, however, and Brandt parried by promising—in the vaguest of terms—to take up the matter later with his colleagues in Bonn. The chancellor went on to describe the political challenges that the Warsaw Treaty would face in parliament if it were accompanied by a massive financial price tag: German expellees had, after all, been forced to abandon most of their property in the former eastern territories.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Sensitized by the domestic pressure of the CDU/CSU and the expellee lobbies, Brandt was in no hurry to validate Polish requests for financial support derived from crimes inflicted by the Third Reich.

In public, the chancellor projected a far more penitent image. The relative dearth of pomp in the Polish capital left Brandt considerable space to put his own imprint on the day's events. The chancellor had requested two stops on the morning of December 7 to lay wreaths at the tomb of the unknown soldier and the monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. At the second site, he paused and knelt for around thirty seconds—a highly sober moment of reflection that was captured by swarms of photographers on the scene. The following morning, newspapers around the world ran images of the kneeling German chancellor. Back in the Federal Republic, opinion was sharply divided about the appropriateness of Brandt's gesture: one poll found 48 percent of respondents describing it as “exaggerated.” In Poland, censors did their best to downplay or banish the image.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Outside Central Europe, by contrast, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Here was a chancellor who sensed the burden of history, who had come to Warsaw prepared to acknowledge the enormity of German crimes—despite, or perhaps because of, his strong record of opposition to Nazism. Time magazine chose Brandt as its “Man of the Year” for 1970, and greater accolades still were to follow.

In the near term, the Polish leadership had less to celebrate in the wake of the Warsaw Treaty. Labor unrest and food shortages were rumbling across Poland in the second half of 1970, and the Brandt visit apparently fueled anticipation of a change for the better. When sharp price hikes followed instead, as many as ten thousand people poured into the streets of Gdansk on December 12. Workers torched cars, looted shops, and set the local party headquarters on fire. Dozens were killed as security forces struggled to regain control of the northern port cities of Gdansk, Gdynia, and Szczecin.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Gomułka suffered a stroke and was relieved of his post after fourteen years at the helm of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Cyrankiewicz, too, fell from power. Not two weeks after Brandt's visit to the Polish capital, his conversation partners had vanished from the scene in disgrace. It was little wonder that the German chancellor basked alone in the glow of international approval following the signing of the Warsaw Treaty—culminating in the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Brandt in the fall of 1971.

Had Bonn's Ostpolitik just upended another Communist regime? Was this a repeat of the “Prague Spring” in 1968, when excitement over prospective German economic assistance played a role in destabilizing the political situation in Czechoslovakia?Footnote ¹⁵¹ In Washington, Henry Kissinger took the prospect seriously: “The Germans represent a magnet for the East Europeans,” he remarked during a high-level run-down on the Polish situation. Kissinger speculated that the riots in Poland might lead communist governments to reconsider their conciliatory line toward West Germany.Footnote ¹⁵² Yet the new party boss in Warsaw, Edward Gierek, did not display any fear at the prospect of tighter economic relations with Bonn; he followed through on Gomułka's demands for a sizable loan as a sign of West German goodwill. More than ever, access to Western credits appeared to be the necessary stabilizing ingredient for the Polish economy.

Those credits would be long in coming, however. In retrospect, the Polish decision to separate economic and political questions during the opening year of Brandt's Ostpolitik turned out to be an enormous mistake.Footnote ¹⁵³ Warsaw had, in effect, traded a somewhat hedged West German acknowledgement of the Oder-Neisse border for an agreement to liberalize emigration. Faced with a perilous situation in parliament, Brandt's government pushed in 1971 and 1972 for an “early” release of ethnic Germans, ahead of ratification; this, in turn, made it even harder for the Gierek regime to bargain for the credits it was after, namely, a billion deusche marks. All told, the Warsaw Treaty would prove an enormous disappointment to the Polish Communists in the early 1970s.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Conclusion: Ostpolitik on the Brink

By the end of 1970, the Brandt government could point back to a year of achievements, starting with a “relaunch” of European integration at the Hague summit in December 1969 and continuing with pathbreaking treaties with Moscow and Warsaw. Even so, West Germany's geopolitical situation remained tenuous. The four-power talks on Berlin had hit a wall. Bonn's attempt at “linkage,” tying German ratification of the Eastern Treaties to the conclusion of a satisfactory arrangement over Berlin, had not made any apparent impact on the Kremlin. In late November, Soviet and East German authorities staged yet another calculated slowdown of transit traffic to West Berlin—this time an attempt to intimidate the CDU/CSU, which was holding a routine meeting of the Bundestag parliamentary group. Three weeks later, Social Democrats en route to Berlin faced similar harassment.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Visible cracks in the Atlantic alliance were also starting to appear as 1970 wound down. In Washington, several “German hands” of years past, including Dean Acheson, Lucius Clay, and John McCloy, expressed their misgivings about Ostpolitik to President Nixon—who only seemed to egg them on.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The Nixon administration was playing a double game, issuing lukewarm endorsements of Brandt's Ostpolitik in public while muttering in private that the German chancellor was soft on Communism. Top US officials consoled themselves with the thought that they could instigate Brandt's downfall on short notice: a nudge would suffice to snap the CDU/CSU into action and mobilize ambivalent members of the SPD and FDP against the chancellor. As Secretary of State William Rogers observed to Kissinger, “If we decide that they are moving in a direction we don't like or moving in a way which is wrong, we probably by our actions can have the government thrown out.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

As hints of Nixon's feelings found their way into the press, the West Germans responded with leaks of their own, complaining that the “strain” in the US-German relationship now bordered on a “crisis of confidence.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The tone in the chancellor's office was hurt and self-righteous: evidently the Nixon administration had misunderstood Brandt's fundamental conviction that Ostpolitik was only possible on the basis of a firm Westpolitik. What Brandt and his entourage failed to appreciate was the extent to which their own diplomacy had maneuvered the alliance into an uncomfortable situation: not only the Soviet Union but also the United States, France, and Britain were expected to deliver the quid (Berlin) for the Brandt government's quo (the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties).Footnote ¹⁵⁹ It took months of grueling negotiations before the four powers were finally able to sign a Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin in September 1971. Yet this was hardly the capstone for Ostpolitik. The Soviet leadership inverted Bonn's “link” by refusing to ratify the Berlin agreement until the Eastern Treaties had passed through the Bundestag. In the spring of 1972, the fate of détente lay in the hands of a sharply divided German parliament. Sensing their leverage, Barzel and his colleagues in the CDU/CSU faction dragged out the proceedings and very nearly succeeded in toppling Brandt's government.

In the end, Brandt and Bahr did get what they were after. Following ratification of the Eastern Treaties in June 1972, the Federal Republic was able to move forward with the final steps of Ostpolitik: a treaty with the GDR in November 1972 and one with Czechoslovakia in December 1973. However, as this article has argued, the long-delayed completion of Bahr's agenda is not necessarily evidence of his unique skill and efficacy. On the contrary, Bahr's approach to diplomacy was deeply flawed. The core problem was his refusal to negotiate, to balance demands and counterdemands. He accepted Soviet positions as given and made no attempt to bring about a change in Kremlin policies on major problems such as Berlin. Bahr's time in Moscow revolved around a far lesser goal—winning permission, as it were, for West Germany to continue to advocate the long-term goal of German unity. By stating up front all that he was prepared to concede, Bahr was bargaining from a position of weakness. Meanwhile, he operated under a barrage of self-imposed deadlines; it was this nervousness that led him to sign off on an incomplete and unsatisfactory treaty. In Bahr's case, haste truly did make waste: getting the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties through parliament would siphon off nearly all the coalition's energies. Brandt himself never quite recovered from the exhaustion of defending his record during the early Bundestag campaign of November 1972.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Meanwhile, lingering mistrust fueled by Bahr's secretiveness would bedevil US-German relations to the end of Brandt's chancellorship.

Indeed, the drawbacks of Bahr's methods in Moscow helped to tip the political scales back toward conventional diplomacy as Brandt's cabinet pushed to wrap up an agreement with Poland. Pressure to bring home tangible gains for ethnic Germans—and to avoid taking on massive obligations for restitution payments—shaped policy at the highest level: Scheel and Brandt both took a surprisingly hard line in Warsaw, emphasizing present-day concerns over the politics of the past. The resulting treaty might have found more support among the CDU/CSU opposition—were it not for the intense polarization fueled, in part, by the shock of the “Bahr Paper” in the summer of 1970. As things stood, Brandt's supporters and detractors were both inclined to view the Warsaw Treaty in extreme terms, as a document driven either by lofty moral sentiment or a disastrous willingness to renounce German rights. It was neither. Instead, the Warsaw Treaty represented an effort to reconcile the realities of the Cold War status quo with an articulation of West German interests. Brandt's great act of contrition, his “knee-fall” in Warsaw, captured the moment succinctly for contemporaries. From a distance of nearly half a century later, however, what most stands out is the complexity of Bonn's Ostpolitik. Constrained by national division and the ongoing presence of the four World War II victors, yet buoyed by a dynamic economy and a vibrant civil society, Brandt's government was trying to solve a classic problem: how to manage German power in Europe.