ABSTRACT
In March 1973, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger received a letter from the conservative German-American novelist Hans Habe regarding Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik. Kissinger thought it sufficiently interesting to forward it to President Nixon, who read it with great interest. Habe argued that Brandt’s policies were leading Germany down the road to Sovietization. For every step to the right taken by the German Democratic Republic (GDR), he said, the Federal Republic took nine steps to the left; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was weakened by the policy and the European Community transformed; a free press in Germany was under siege and the country under process of divorce from the United States; and Brandt’s transparent aim was to take the lead of a Socialist Europe with anti-American sentiments. Brandt called himself the ‘Friedenskanzler’ and claimed the confidence of President Nixon, but a word from the American president could have defeated him in the November 1972 elections. If this situation continued, Habe warned, the Western Alliance would soon be a memory of the past and Brandt would head a Socialist and then a Soviet Europe. This obviously hysterical letter would perhaps be of little interest if not for Nixon’s marginal remarks as he sent it back to Kissinger: ‘A very perceptive and disturbing analysis – I think he is too close to the truth . . .one of our greatest mistakes. We must do everything possible to rectify it.’1
