ABSTRACT
Peter Ruggenthaler's use of reports from Soviet spies in the West, especially in France, is also problematic. The year 1952 is the most famous alleged "missed opportunity" for German unification in the early Cold War. It came on 10 March of that year when the Soviet Union proposed to the three Western powers in Germany that together they unify Germany and make peace. Certainly by 1951/52 the Soviet government and bureaucracy had been so thoroughly subjected to Stalin's will that virtually everyone anxiously tried to do his work in the spirit of the boss, so to speak. Scholars began to get this access after 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc when the archives both of the GDR's ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, and of the former Soviet Union opened their doors to researchers.
