The Kremlin doves, who called themselves realists, used all these facts and all these arguments against the superpower status quo thesis of the nuclear hard-liners. What good would it do to get the United States to recognize a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and Siberia when the Soviet regime was no longer able to exert its influence in those areas? Even if the forces now facing NATO remained immune to reduction by agreement with the West there would still not be enough to hold down the previously subject peoples. Better to accept facts as they were, and to recognize the errors of a gigantism inherited from Tsarist dreams of empire and from the illusions of world revolution of some of the early Bolsheviks. (It was still impermissible to criticize Lenin by name.) Russian greatness had always been less of material things than of the spirit. Moreover, the pure doctrines of communism had been distorted by the needs of empire. Far from withering away, the state had been obliged to intensify its presence and its pervasiveness. Russians might be better off alone, without the lesser breeds whom they were finding it increasingly hard to keep in subordination.
On the Western side another argument raged almost as fiercely, though without the personally lethal outcome common to argument in the Kremlin. To invade or not to invade was the question. US reinforcements were now flooding in, the sea routes were more or less assured, the European Allies had recovered and regrouped. French participation had been an enormous source of strength. Evidence of Soviet disarray was seen at every hand. Why not now go over to the offensive, it was asked, and finish off for ever the threat from Eastern Europe, so that everyone could live happily ever after? There was no need to repeat Hitler’s mistake and go too far. No Lebensraum was now required. East Germany and Poland could be freed and the advance could be pushed forward in the Ukraine as far as the Dnieper. Control of the Ukrainian harvest and of the Dnieper hydro-electric installations would be enough to cripple any further war effort by Soviet Russia. It would be tempting to go on and liberate Georgia and control Baku, but that might be counterproductive in the long run as it would expose too long a line of Western communications, with the need for garrisons to secure them, and repeat in the East the Soviet error in the West.
This line of argument, propounded largely by the more influential US commanders, was supported by those who thought in terms of land masses and geo-politics. But there was one element in it which ran foul of European political instincts and political fears. The first stage in this advance would obviously be to free East Germany from Soviet control and to occupy it with Western forces, among whom West Germans would be preponderant. Could it really be believed, asked the French, the British and the smaller Western Allies, that this would not result in Germany being reunited? In the cold war years of the 1950s the reunification of Germany had been a parrot-cry of Western governments. Many Europeans had gone along with this line only because they were fairly sure that nothing of the sort would happen. It seemed at the time a useful stick with which to beat the Russians and a useful carrot to hold out to the West Germans to bring them more closely into the Western Alliance. But it was not a genuine long-term aim, except to very few. Many of the more thoughtful Germans themselves had misgivings about what a reunited Germany might be like, and what effect it would have on its neighbours. They might be fairly confident that West Germany at least had profoundly changed and would not allow a reunited Germany to become an aggressive force again, but they saw equally clearly that others would not feel the same confidence in their pacific intentions; in contrast to the dawning hopes of reconciliation in Western Europe through the Economic Community a reunited Germany might start the same old dreary cycle of national antagonisms all over again. These views had received little expression in Germany, but there had certainly been an almost audible sigh of relief when Willi Brandt, with an act of supreme statesmanship, entered upon the Ostpolitik in the 1960s, and to all intents and purposes renounced reunification as an aim of German policy for the foreseeable future.
Now, with the road to Berlin more or less open, the temptation was there. So, in even greater measure, was the fear and suspicion. There were some in the West German army who would find it hard to resist an opportunity to support an East German rising against Soviet occupation, and to knock down once and for all the hated Berlin wall and the frontier watch towers. The German command were doubtful as to how far they would be able to hold back all their units if this sort of opportunity presented itself. The French, British, Belgians, Dutch and Norwegians, on the other hand, refused absolutely to agree to a move forward beyond the West German border.
In addition to their fears of a united Germany, even one dominated by West Germany, they argued persuasively that an offensive into Soviet territory would be the one thing which might not only revive the Soviet will and capability to resist, but also spur them on, out of desperation, to make use of their still intact nuclear armoury. America might count on a measure of survival in such an event; the outlook for Western Europe would be far grimmer. Let the Western forces rather stand on the side lines, the argument ran, and watch the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, assisted by such covert stimulus as they could give, in Poland and elsewhere, to national resistance.
There was another actor in this drama which the protagonists were apt to overlook. East German opinion had long been among the most suppressed and distorted in Eastern Europe. The failure of the Soviet offensive with the subsequent ferment in Poland and the eastern republics, at last gave back a voice to those who had perforce been silent for so long. The apparatchiks of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (SED) were brushed aside and a real debate began to make itself heard, among academics, technicians, managers and army officers, in fact among all those professionals who, in spite of Soviet ideological interference, had kept the state running and made its industry a formidable factor in the world. Their opinions were not exactly what might have been expected in the West, or in the East. They did not clamour to join their democratic brothers west of the Elbe; they saw little joy in a united Germany controlled by West German bankers in the sole interest of economic growth. They found the conformism and hierarchies of the West almost as stifling as their own. They saw a better future in a state with some of the old Prussian virtues which they had assimilated into their own system: frugality, a certain puritanism, a feeling of superiority towards their neighbours on each side — a conviction that they were more advanced than the Slavs on the east and morally superior to the mixed economies in the West, already, in East German eyes, showing symptoms of decadence.
The West Germans became aware of these views through the increased contacts they were able to establish across the growing anarchy of the Warsaw Pact’s forward areas. They were shocked and surprised that their fellow Germans in the East should be reluctant to join in the economic miracle and the political freedom of the West. Secretly, perhaps, some of them were also a little relieved to find that they would not after all have to assimilate 17 million more Germans (and probably as many socialist voters), which would have considerably distorted the German political scene. In the light of these assessments West German pressure to invade the East was significantly reduced. There was little joy in the prospect of a West German army entering the East as liberators, only to be shortly told by their liberated brothers to go back home.