Europe: The End of World War II

AS the blue-and-gold Lufthansa jetliner rolled to a stop at Cologne airport late last week, the waiting crowd broke into a cheer. Out stepped Foreign Minister Walter Scheel. He brought home from Moscow two red-bound leather volumes containing a renunciation-of-force treaty between West Germany and the Soviet Union that he and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had initialed only a few hours earlier. Perhaps unconsciously, Scheel spoke of accord in a phrase reminiscent of Bismarck's famed injunction to keep the line open to St. Petersburg, then Imperial Russia's capital. Said Scheel: "We have opened a gate to the East."

Actually, the West Germans have done far more than that. Despite disclaimers by Bonn, the Treaty of Moscow in effect represents nothing less than a peace treaty between West Germany and Russia. In the aftermath of defeat in World War II, the conquering powers sundered Germany, drawing the demarcation of the cold war's battle line through the heart of the beaten country. While West Germany became a part of the Western defense and economic system and made, in effect, a separate peace with the Western Allies, Bonn's relations with the East bloc remained in a state of suspended hostilities. Bonn was the Soviet Union's chief whipping boy in Europe; the fear of renascent Germany was the most persuasive Russian rationale for the continued presence of Soviet forces throughout Eastern Europe. West Germany's diplomatic claims, which included the right to represent East Germany in international affairs and demands for lands taken over by Poland, only buttressed Soviet propaganda charges that Bonn was a peril to peace.

The Treaty of Moscow changes all that. It recognizes existing postwar boundaries, including the Oder-Neisse Line, which forms Poland's western frontier, and brings an end to German claims on territory lost in the war.

Brandt's Grand Design. For West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who flies to Moscow this week for the formal signing, the treaty marks the first crucial success of his Ostpolitik. That is his grand design, which envisions a united Western Europe living in peace with its neighbors to the east.

Brandt's first concepts of the possibility of European conciliation were formed during his years as the hard-headed young mayor of West Berlin. Later, as Foreign Minister in the Grand Coalition from 1967-69, he made his first serious approaches to the East. After the Social Democrats formed a ruling coalition with Walter Scheel's Free Democrats following the September 1969 elections, Brandt dispatched his most trusted foreign policy adviser, State Secretary Egon Bahr, to Moscow for exhaustive preliminary discussions.

In 36 hours of talks over a four-month period, Bahr and Gromyko drafted a treaty for a mutual renunciation of force. But in West Germany, the opposition Christian Democrats attacked the plan as a sellout, because Bahr's draft, among other things, failed to affirm Germany's right to eventual reunification. In an effort to arouse popular opposition to the talks, somebody, apparently a Brandt enemy high in the government, leaked excerpts from the Bahr-Gromyko paper to Hamburg's sex-and-scandal newspaper Bild-Zeitung.