Soviet general secretary and premier Joseph Stalin put forth a proposal for a German reunification and neutralisation with no conditions on economic policies and with guarantees for "the rights of man and basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, press, religious persuasion, political conviction, and assembly"[1] and free activity of democratic parties and organizations.

[2] There is ongoing debate over the sincerity of the note, though declassified documents from the former Soviet archives indicate that there was an intention to incorporate the German Democratic Republic into the Eastern bloc and to blame the division of Germany on the Western occupying powers.

The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) feared losing power if free elections were held.

Germany had still not signed a peace treaty for the war because of animosity between the three Western Powers and the Soviet Union.

He and his administration pursued a course that allied West Germany with the Western Bloc, particularly in relationship to military policy.

Instead, West Germany wanted a commission of the United Nations to see if free all-German elections were possible.

East Germany refused to let it enter, however, and stated that the possibility of free elections should be investigated by a commission of the four occupying powers.

At a conference in Paris, the SED emphasised the importance of the two German states discussing a potential peace treaty.

The Minister of All-German Affairs, Jakob Kaiser, had a "bridge theory" which suggested that Germany could be the mediator between the East and the West.

He agreed with Adenauer about the importance of free elections and the refusal of the Potsdam borders, but Kaiser took the Soviet offer very seriously.

Similarly, other ministers and also members of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) felt that they should at least seriously test Stalin's proposal so that public opinion would not be that reunification failed because of West Germany.

Finally, Walter Ulbricht, the general secretary of the central committee of the SED, unmistakably spoke of the interpretation of the note.

After the foreign ministers of the Western Occupation had finished their response, they asked Adenauer for his opinion on the matter in case he had any small changes that he wished to make.

Although he mistrusted the note, he asked that it not be outright rejected in the answer since he wanted to avoid creating the impression that the West had brusquely refused it.

On 25 March 1952, the first note from the British, French and American governments was sent to Moscow and included the following points: In the second Stalin Note, sent on 9 April 1952, the Soviet Union stood by its position that negotiations for the groundwork of a peace treaty and for the creation of a unified German government to begin.

The matter of dispute remained: free elections first (West) or peace treaty negotiations first (Soviet Union).

A day before the official signing of the European Defence Community (EDC), the Soviet Union sent a third note, on 24 May 1952.

On 10 July 1952, the West criticised the centralisation, the collectivisation and the changes in the East German justice system that the SED had passed.

The note stated that the conference should not negotiate a peace treaty yet but decide on a commission to oversee the elections first.

The West answered on 23 September 1952 with the repetition of its previous views and the renewal of its suggestion to form a nonpartisan commission of the four powers.

The publicist Paul Sethe and the historians Wilfried Loth, Josef Foschepoth, Karl-Gustav von Schönfels and especially Rolf Steininger belong to the sceptics.

The CDU/CSU were in a government coalition with the small DP, when two former ministers asked to speak, Thomas Dehler (FDP) and Gustav Heinemann (first CDU, now SPD).

Steininger's argument was based on three assumptions: However, the historian Hermann Graml [de] justified the actions of the Western Powers.

Graml interpreted the note itself and the "planned" failure of the negotiations as evidence that the Soviet Union more or less wanted to create an alibi to push on East German integration to the Eastern Bloc.