At a cluster of sunny villas near Casablanca, the Anglo-American Allies gathered in January 1943 to discuss how to end what was beginning to look like a war that might be won, and what should come after it. Roosevelt, about to make an announcement, introduced it with a characteristically jaunty story about the American Civil War general U. S. Grant. For a time, he said, the general had been known as â??Unconditional Surrender Grant,â? and it had occurred to him that this formula might be just the thingâ??the proper way to end the war. In his view, this would placate the absent Stalin, whose armies had been staggering valiantly along a seemingly endless front for well over a year and were now engaged in a grim tooth-and-nail battle at Stalingrad. Russia was hemorrhaging, and Stalin had too many pressing worries to come to Casablanca, but allaying his suspicions and impatience about the anticipated opening of a second front by the western Allies was critical.
When FDR tossed â??unconditional surrenderâ? on the table, Churchill was stunned. He and the president had bandied about various ideas for ending the war, but as far as Churchill knew, nothing had been decided. The prime minister later confessed to Eden that he had no desire to fuse the enemy into a solid, desperate block. In his opinion, any crack in Axis unity â??would be all to the good.â? But he choked back his reservations, and unconditional surrender became the Allied prerequisite for peace.
Stalin recognized unconditional surrender as an opportunity. The war was beginning to wind down, and he was eager to expand his influence over postwar Germany. His means to this end was a group of German communists living in exile in Russia, and German prisoners of war calling themselves the Free Germany Committee. They wanted an overthrow of Hitler, the cessation of military operations, and peace negotiations, preferably with a pro-Soviet slant. An offshoot of the Free Germany Committee in the USSR was the Bund Deutscher Offiziereâ??German Officersâ?? League, many of whom had been captured at Stalingrad. Headed by General Walther von der Seydlitz-Kurzbach, they were driven by a conviction of a strong Russian and German community of interest and an enormous respect for the power and resilience of the Red Army that went back to the 1922 program of cooperation and reciprocal training agreed on at Rapallo.
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