thumb countries to the east of the Iron Curtain in red. NATO members to the west of it shaded blue. Militarily neutral countries colored grey. Yugoslavia (shaded green), although communist-run, was independent of the Eastern Bloc. Similarly, communist Albania broke with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, aligning itself with the People's Republic of China after the Sino-Soviet split.
thumb
The Iron Curtain
symbolized the ideological and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. On either side of the Iron Curtain, states developed their own international economic and military alliances:
- the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and Warsaw Pact on the east side, with the Soviet Union as most important member of each
- the European Community and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the west and south, with the United States of America as the area's military powerhouse
The Iron Curtain took the shape of border defenses between the countries of Western and Eastern Europe, most notably the Berlin Wall, which served as a longtime symbol of the Curtain as a whole. [1]
Demolition of the Iron Curtain started in Hungary during the summer of 1989 (e.g., Removal of Hungary's border fence and the Pan-European Picnic), when thousands of Eastern Germans began to emigrate to West Germany via Hungary on September 11, foreshadowing the fall of the Berlin Wall.
|
IRON CURTAIN TICKETS
|
Building antagonism between Soviet Union and West
The antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West that led to Churchill's coining of the term 'iron curtain' had various origins.
The
United Kingdom,
France,
Japan,
Canada, the United States and many other countries had backed the
White Russians against the
Bolsheviks during the 1918–1920
Russian Civil War, and the Soviets had not forgotten the fact.
During the summer of 1939, after conducting negotiations with both a British-French group and Germany regarding potential military and political agreements,
[2] the Soviet Union and Germany signed a
Commercial Agreement providing for the trade of certain German military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet raw materials
[3] [4] and the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, commonly named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries (
Vyacheslav Molotov and
Joachim von Ribbentrop), which included a secret agreement to split Poland and Eastern Europe between the two states.
[5] [6] The Soviets thereafter invaded Eastern
Poland,
Latvia,
Lithuania, northern
Romania,
Estonia and eastern
Finland. From August 1939, relations between the West and the Soviets deteriorated further when the Soviet Union and Germany engaged in an extensive
economic relationship by which the Soviet Union sent Germany vital oil, rubber, manganese and other material in exchange for German weapons, manufacturing machinery and technology.
[7] [8] This ended in June 1941 when Germany broke the Pact and
invaded the Soviet Union.
Following the war, Stalin determined to acquire a similar buffer against Germany with pro-Soviet states on its border in an
Eastern bloc, leading to strained relations at the
Yalta Conference (February 1945) and the subsequent
Potsdam Conference (August 1945).
[9] In the West, there was opposition to Soviet domination over the buffer states, and the fear grew that the Soviets were building an empire that might be a threat to them and their interests.
Nonetheless, at the
Potsdam Conference the Allies ceded parts of Poland, Finland, Romania, Germany, and the Balkans to Soviet control. In return, Stalin promised the Western Allies that he would allow those territories the right to
National Self-Determination. Despite the Soviet cooperation during the war, these concessions left many in the West uneasy. In particular, Churchill feared that the United States might return to its pre-war
isolationism, leaving the exhausted European states unable to resist Soviet demands. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt had announced at Yalta that after the defeat of Germany, U.S. forces would be withdrawn from Europe within two years.
[10]
| “
| Stalin is not that kind of man. . . He doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can, and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.
| ”
|
| “
| This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system on it. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.
| ”
|
The Iron Curtain Speech
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Iron Curtain Speech}}
Winston Churchill's :s:Sinews of Peace|"Sinews of Peace" address
[11] of March 5, 1946, at Westminster College, Missouri|Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, used the term "iron curtain" in the context of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe:
Reactions
At first, many countries in the West widely condemned the speech. Much of the Western public still regarded the Soviet Union as a close ally in context of the recent defeat of
Nazi Germany and
Japan. Many saw Churchill's speech as warmongering and unnecessary. In light of the now public Soviet archives, some historians have revised their opinions.
[12]
Although the phrase was not well received at the time, it gained popularity as a short-hand reference to the division of Europe, as the
Cold War strengthened. The Iron Curtain served to keep people in and information out, and the metaphor eventually was widely accepted throughout the West.
[13]
Political, economic and military realities
The Eastern Bloc
right
While the Iron Curtain was in place, certain countries of
Eastern Europe and many in
Central Europe (except
West Germany,
Liechtenstein,
Switzerland and
Austria) were under the control of the
Soviet Union. The Soviet Union annexed several countries as
Soviet Socialist Republics within the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Many of these were originally countries effectively ceded to it by
Nazi Germany in the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, before Germany
invaded the Soviet Union. These later annexed territories include Eastern
Poland (incorporated into
Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs),
[14] Latvia (became
Latvia SSR),
[15] (became
Estonian SSR),
(became
Lithuania SSR),
part of eastern
Finland (became part of the
Karelo-Finnish SSR)
[17] and northern
Romania (part of which became the
Moldavian SSR).
[18] [19]
Other states were converted into
Soviet Satellite states, such as
East Germany,
[20] the
People's Republic of Poland, the
People's Republic of Hungary,
[21] the
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic,
[22] the
People's Republic of Romania and the
People's Republic of Albania,
[23] which aligned itself in the 1960s away from the Soviet Union and towards the
People's Republic of China.
Eastern Bloc countries were ruled by Soviet-installed governments, with the exception of the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which retained its full independence.
To the east of the Iron Curtain, many such states developed their own international economic and military alliances, such as
COMECON and the
Warsaw Pact.
West of the Iron Curtain
thumb
To the west of the Iron Curtain, the countries of
Western Europe,
Northern Europe and
Southern Europe—along with
Austria,
West Germany,
Liechtenstein and
Switzerland—operated
market economies. With the exception of a period of
fascism in
Spain and
Portugal and
military dictatorship in
Greece, these countries were ruled by
democratic governments.
Most states to the west of the Iron Curtain— with the exception of
neutral Switzerland,
Liechtenstein,
Austria,
Sweden,
Finland and
Ireland—were allied with the
United States and
Canada within
NATO. Economically, the
European Community and the
European Free Trade Association were the Western counterparts to
COMECON, though even the nominally
neutral states were economically closer to the United States than they were to the
Warsaw Pact.
Further division in the late 1940s
In January 1947, Truman appointed General
George Marshall as Secretary of State, scrapped Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) directive 1067, which embodied the
Morgenthau Plan and supplanted it with JCS 1779, which decreed that an orderly and prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany."
[24] Administration officials met with Soviet Foreign Minister
Vyacheslav Molotov and others to press for an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets.
[25] After six weeks of negotiations, Molotov refused the demands and the talks were adjourned.
Marshall was particularly discouraged after personally meeting with Stalin, who expressed little interest in a solution to German economic problems.
The United States concluded that a solution could not wait any longer.
In a June 5, 1947 speech,
[26] Marshall announced a comprehensive program of American assistance to all European countries wanting to participate, including the Soviet Union and those of Eastern Europe, called the
Marshall Plan.
Stalin opposed the Marshall Plan. He had built up the
Eastern Bloc protective belt of Soviet controlled nations on his Western border,
[27] and wanted to maintain this buffer zone of states combined with a weakened Germany under Soviet control.
[28] Fearing American political, cultural and economic penetration, Stalin eventually forbade Soviet
Eastern bloc countries of the newly formed
Cominform from accepting
Marshall Plan aid.
In
Czechoslovakia, that required a Soviet-backed
Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948,
[29] the brutality of which shocked Western powers more than any event so far and set in a motion a brief scare that war would occur and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.
[30]
Relations further deteriorated when, in January 1948, the
U.S. State Department also published a collection of documents titled
Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of The German Foreign Office
, which contained documents recovered from the Foreign Office of
Nazi Germany revealing Soviet conversations with Germany regarding the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, including its secret protocol dividing eastern Europe,
[32] [33] the
1939 German-Soviet Commercial Agreement,
and
discussions of the Soviet Union potentially becoming the fourth Axis Power.
[35] In response, one month later, the Soviet Union published
Falsifiers of History
, a Stalin edited and partially re-written book attacking the West.
[36] [37]
After the
Marshall Plan, the introduction of a new currency to Western Germany to replace the debased
Reichsmark and massive electoral losses for communist parties, in June 1948, the Soviet Union cut off surface road access to
Berlin, initiating the
Berlin Blockade, which cut off all non-Soviet food, water and other supplies for the citizens of the non-Soviet sectors of Berlin.
[38] Because Berlin was located within the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, the only available methods of supplying the city were three limited air corridors.
[39] A massive aerial supply campaign was initiated by the United States, Britain, France and other countries, the success of which caused the Soviets to lift their blockade in May 1949.
Emigration restrictions
Migration from east to west of the Iron Curtain, except under limited circumstances, was effectively halted after 1950. Before 1950, over 15 million people emigrated from Soviet-occupied eastern European countries to the west in the five years immediately following
World War II.
[40] However, restrictions implemented during the Cold War stopped most East-West migration, with only 13.3 million migrations westward between 1950 and 1990.
[41] More than 75% of those emigrating from Eastern Bloc countries between 1950 and 1990 did so under bilateral agreements for "ethnic migration."
About 10% were refugees permitted to emigrate under the Geneva Convention of 1951.
Most Soviets allowed to leave during this time period were ethnic Jews permitted to emigrate to Israel after a series of embarrassing defections in 1970 caused the Soviets to open very limited ethnic emigrations.
[42] The fall of the Iron Curtain was accompanied by a massive rise in European East-West migration.
As a physical entity
left and
West Germany called the "Little Berlin Wall" at
Mödlareuth
The Iron Curtain took physical shape in the form of border defences between the countries of the western and eastern Europe. These were some of the most heavily militarized areas in the world, particularly the so-called "
inner German border"—commonly known as
die Grenze
in German—between East and West Germany. The inner German border was marked in rural areas by double fences made of steel mesh (expanded metal) with sharp edges, while near urban areas a high concrete barrier similar to the
Berlin Wall was built. The barrier was always a short distance inside East German territory to avoid any intrusion into Western territory. The actual borderline was marked by posts and signs and was overlooked by numerous watchtowers set behind the barrier. The strip of land on the West German side of the barrier—between the actual borderline and the barrier—was readily accessible but only at considerable personal risk, because it was patrolled by both East and West German border guards. Shooting incidents were not uncommon, and a total of 28 East German border guards and several hundred civilians were killed between 1948–1981 (some may have been victims of "
friendly fire" by their own side).
Elsewhere (i.e. at the Western borders of Czechoslovakia and Hungary), the border defences between West and East were similar to the German version. During the Cold War, in Hungary the border zone started 15 kilometers from the border inside the country and citizens could only enter it if they lived in the zone or had a passport valid for traveling out. Traffic control points and patrols enforced this regulation.
Even living inside the border zone, people needed special permissions to enter the next strip (5 kilometers from the border). The border was very difficult to approach but nevertheless it was heavily fortified. In the 1950s and 60's, there was a double barbed-wire fence installed some 50 meters from the border and between them there was a strip full of landmines. Later the minefield was replaced with an electric signal fence (about 1 kilometer from the border) and a barbed wire fence, complete with guard towers and sand strip for border violation tracking. Regular patrols (even cars and mounted units), guards and K-9 units were watching the border 24/7 and were ready to prevent any escape attempt, even using their weapons to stop escapees. The outer wire fence was carefully and irregularly (i.e not parallel) placed far from the actual border (which was marked by border stones only), thus an escapee sometimes had to run 400 meters or more in the right direction to reach and cross the actual border. Not knowing this, several attempts failed as being stopped after crossing the outer fence.
The outer fence became the first part of the Iron Curtain to be dismantled in 1989. On
June 27,
1989, the
foreign ministers of Austria and Hungary,
Alois Mock and
Gyula Horn, ceremonially cut through the border defences separating their countries. (The border fortifications actually were dismantled earlier already at the ceremonial place so the border authorities had to reinstall a section of the fence to be cut through.)
In parts of Czechoslovakia the border strip became hundreds of meters wide, and an area of increasing restrictions was defined as the border was approached. Only people with the appropriate government permissions were allowed to get close to the border.
The creation of these highly militarized no-man's lands led to
de facto
nature reserves and created a
wildlife corridor across Europe; this helped the spread of several species to new territories. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain several initiatives are pursuing the creation of a
European Green Belt nature preserve area along the Iron Curtain's former route.
The term "Iron Curtain" was only used for the fortified borders in central Europe; it was not used for similar borders in Asia between communist and capitalist states (these were, for a time, dubbed the
Bamboo Curtain). The
border between North Korea and South Korea is very comparable to the former inner German border, particularly in its degree of militarization, but it has never conventionally been considered part of the Iron Curtain.
Fall of the Iron Curtain
thumb
Following a period of
economic and political stagnation, the Soviet Union decreased intervention in
Eastern Bloc politics.
Mikhail Gorbachev decreased adherence to the
Brezhnev Doctrine,
[43] which held that if socialism were threatened in any state then other socialist governments had an obligation to intervene to preserve it, in favor of the "
Sinatra Doctrine." He also initiated the policies of
glasnost
(openness) and
perestroika
(economic restructuring). A wave of
Revolutions occurred throughout the Eastern Bloc.
[44]
Major reforms occurred in the
People's Republic of Hungary in 1988.
[45] In April 1989, the
Solidarity organization was legalized in the
People's Republic of Poland and captured 99% of available parliamentary seats.
[46] In November 1989, following mass protests in
East Germany and the relaxing of border restrictions in Czechoslovakia, tens of thousands of
East Berliners flooded checkpoints along the
Berlin Wall, crossing into
West Berlin.
[47] In the
People's Republic of Bulgaria, the day after the mass crossings across the Berlin Wall, leader
Todor Zhivkov was ousted.
[48] In the
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, following protests of an estimated half-million Czechs, the government permitted travel to the west and abolished provisions guaranteeing the ruling Communist party its leading role, preceding the
Velvet Revolution.
[49] In the
Socialist Republic of Romania, the Romanian military sided with protesters and turned on Communist ruler
Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed after a brief trial three days later.
[50] In the
People's Socialist Republic of Albania, a new package of regulations went into effect on July 3, 1990 entitling all Albanians over the age of 16 to own a passport for foreign travel. Meanwhile, hundreds of Albanian citizens gathered around foreign embassies to seek political assylum and flee the country.
The Berlin Wall officially remained guarded after November 9, 1989, although the inter-German border had become effectively meaningless. The official dismantling of the Wall by the East German military did not begin until June 1990. In July 1990, the day East Germany adopted the West German currency, all border controls ceased and
West German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl convinced Gorbachev to drop Soviet objections to a reunited Germany within NATO in return for substantial German economic aid to the Soviet Union.
Earlier uses of the term
thumb
There are various earlier usages of the term "iron curtain" (
Russian:
???????? ??????? Zheleznyj zanaves
;
German:
Eiserner Vorhang
;
Czech:
Železná opona
;
Hungarian:
Vasfüggöny
;
Italian:
Cortina di ferro
,
Serbian:
???????? ?????? Gvozdena zavesa
) pre-dating Churchill. The usage of the term goes back to the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sota 38b, which refers to a "mechitza shel barzel," an iron barrier or divider: "????? ????? ?? ???? ???? ????? ??? ????? ?????? ??????" (Even an iron barrier cannot separate [the people of] Israel from their heavenly father).
Some suggest the term may have first been coined by
Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians after World War I to describe the political situation between
Belgium and
Germany, in 1914.
[51] The first recorded use of the term
iron curtain
was derived from the safety curtain used in theatres and first applied to the border of communist Russia as "an impenetrable barrier" in 1920 by
Ethel Snowden, in her book
Through Bolshevik Russia
.
[52]
An iron curtain, or
eiserner Vorhang
, was an obligatory precaution in all German theatres to prevent the possibility of fire from spreading from the stage to the rest of the theater. Such fires were rather common because the decor often was very flammable. In case of fire, a metal wall would separate the stage from the theater, secluding the flames to be extinguished by firefighters.
Douglas Reed used this metaphor in his book
Disgrace Abounding
(
Jonathan Cape, 1939, page 129): "The bitter strife [in Yugoslavia between Serb unionists and Croat federalists] had only been hidden by the iron safety-curtain of the King's dictatorship." The German
Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in his weekly newspaper
Das Reich
of a Soviet-formed "iron curtain" that would arise because of agreements made by
Stalin,
Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill at the
Yalta Conference: "An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered."
[53] [54] It was later used by Count
Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk in the last days of the war.
The first oral intentional mention of an Iron Curtain in the Soviet context was in a broadcast by Schwerin von Krosigk to the German people on May 2, 1945:"In the East the iron curtain behind which, unseen by the eyes of the world, the work of destruction goes on, is moving steadily forward."
The first recorded occasion on which Churchill used the term "iron curtain" was in a 12 May 1945 telegram he sent to U.S. President
Harry S. Truman regarding his concern about Soviet actions, stating "[a]n iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind."
He was further concerned about "another immense flight of the German population westward as this enormous Muscovite advance towards the center of Europe."
Churchill concluded "then the curtain will descend again to a very large extent, if not entirely. Thus a broad land of many hundreds of miles of Russian-occupied territory will isolate us from Poland."
[55] [56]
Churchill repeated the words in a further telegram to President Truman on June 4, 1945, in which he protested against such a U.S. retreat to what was earlier designated as, and ultimately became, the U.S. occupation zone, saying the military withdrawal would bring "Soviet power into the heart of Western Europe and the descent of an iron curtain between us and everything to the eastward."
[57]
At the
Potsdam Conference, Churchill complained to Stalin about an "iron fence" coming down upon the British Mission in Bucharest.
The first American print reference to the "Iron Curtain" occurred when C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times first used it in a dispatch published on July 23, 1945. He had heard the term used by Vladimir Macek, a Yugoslav opposition leader who had fled his homeland for Paris in May, 1945. Macek told Sulzberger, "During the four years while I was interned by the Germans in Croatia I saw how the Partisans were lowering an iron curtain over Jugoslavia so that nobody could know what went on behind it."
[58]
The term was first used in the British House of Commons by Churchill on August 16, 1945 when he stated "it is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain."
[59]
Allen Dulles used the term in a speech on December 3, 1945, referring to only
Germany, following his conclusion that "in general the Russians are acting little better than thugs", had "wiped out all the liquid assets", and refused to issue food cards to emigrating Germans, leaving them "often more dead than alive." Dulles concluded that "[a]n iron curtain has descended over the fate of these people and very likely conditions are truly terrible. The promises at Yalta to the contrary, probably 8 to 10 million people are being enslaved."
Monuments
There is an Iron Curtain monument in the southern part of the Czech Republic at approximately NE. A few hundred meters of the original fence, and one of the guard towers, has remained installed. There are interpretive signs in Czech and English that explain the history and significance of the Iron Curtain. This is the only surviving part of the fence in the Czech Republic, though several guard towers and bunkers can still be seen. Some of these are part of the Communist Era defences, some are from the never-used
Czechoslovak border fortifications in defence against Hitler, and some towers were, or have become, hunting platforms.
Another monument is located in the village of
Devín, now part of
Bratislava,
Slovakia, at the confluence of the
Danube and
Morava rivers.
There are several open air museums in parts of the former inner German border, as for example in Berlin and in
Mödlareuth, a village that has been divided for several hundred years. The memory of the division is being kept alive in many other places along the
Grenze
.
Analogous terms
Throughout the Cold War the term "curtain" would become a common euphemism for boundaries, physical or ideological, between communist and capitalist states.
- A variant of the Iron Curtain, the Bamboo Curtain, was coined in reference to the People's Republic of China. As the standoff between the West and the countries of the Iron and Bamboo curtains eased with the end of the Cold War, the term fell out of any but historical usage.
- The short distance between Russia and the U.S state of Alaska in the Bering Sea became known as the "Ice Curtain" during the Cold War.
- A field of cacti surrounding the U.S. Naval station at Guantanamo Bay planted by Cuba was occasionally termed the "cactus curtain". [60] [61]
See also
- Berlin Wall
- Eastern Bloc
- Green Belt Europe, a body of conservationists preserving the former Iron Curtain security zone which has become a wildlife preserve
- Removal of Hungary's border fence
- Revolutions of 1989
- Telephone tapping in the Eastern Bloc
- Western betrayal
Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing BRD/DDR
Notes
- Freedom! - TIME
- {{Harvnb|Shirer|1990|pp=515–40}}
- {{Harvnb|Shirer|1990|p=668}}
- {{Harvnb|Ericson|1999|p=57}}
- Day, Alan J.; East, Roger; Thomas, Richard. ''A Political and Economic Dictionary of Eastern Europe'', p. 405.
- Stalin offered troops to stop Hitler
- Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933–1941
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
- Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power
- Antony Beevor ''Berlin: The building of the Berlin Wall'', p. 80
- http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain_Speech Sinews of Peace
- John Lewis Gaddis ''We Now Know 1997''
- Authors such as Lewkowicz have underlined the importance played by the treatment of the German Question in the division of the continent into two ideological camps. The German Question and the Origins of the Cold War
- {{Harvnb|Roberts|2006|p=43}}
- {{Harvnb|Wettig|2008|p=21}}
- Senn, Alfred Erich, ''Lithuania 1940 : revolution from above'', Amsterdam, New York, Rodopi, 2007 ISBN 978-90-420-2225-6
- Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline, ''Stalin's Cold War'', New York : Manchester University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-7190-4201-1
- {{Harvnb|Roberts|2006|p=55}}
- {{Harvnb|Shirer|1990|p=794}}
- {{Harvnb|Wettig|2008|pp=96-100}}
- Granville, Johanna, ''The First Domino: International Decision Making during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956'', Texas A&M University Press, 2004. ISBN 1-58544-298-4
- {{Harvnb|Grenville|2005|pp=370-71}}
- {{Harvnb|Cook|2001|p=17}}
- {{Harvnb|Beschloss|2003|p=277}}
- {{Harvnb|Miller|2000|p=16}}
- Marshall, George C, ''The Marshal Plan Speech'', June 5, 1947
- {{Harvnb|Miller|2000|p=10}}
- {{Harvnb|Miller|2000|p=11}}
- ''Airbridge to Berlin'', "Eye of the Storm" chapter
- {{Harvnb|Miller|2000|p=19}}
- {{Harvnb|Department of State|1948|p=preface}}
- {{Harvnb|Roberts|2002|p=97}}
- {{Harvnb|Department of State|1948|p=78}}
- {{Harvnb|Department of State|1948|pp=32-77}}
- {{Harvnb|Churchill|1953|pp=512-524}}
- {{Harvnb|Henig|2005|p=67}}
- {{Harvnb|Roberts|2002|p=96}}
- {{Harvnb|Miller|2000|pp=25-31}}
- {{Harvnb|Miller|2000|pp=6-7}}
- {{Harvnb|Böcker|1998|p=207}}
- {{Harvnb|Böcker|1998|p=209}}
- {{Harvnb|Krasnov|1985|pp=1&126}}
- {{Harvnb|Crampton|1997|p=338}}
- E. Szafarz, "The Legal Framework for Political Cooperation in Europe" in ''The Changing Political Structure of Europe: Aspects of International Law'', Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ISBN 0-7923-1379-8. p.221.
- {{Harvnb|Crampton|1997|p=381}}
- {{Harvnb|Crampton|1997|p=392}}
- {{Harvnb|Crampton|1997|p=394-5}}
- {{Harvnb|Crampton|1997|p=395-6}}
- {{Harvnb|Crampton|1997|p=398}}
- {{Harvnb|Crampton|1997|p=400}}
- L'Album de la Guerre - Ed. L'Illustration - Paris - 1923 - p. 33 - Queen Elisabeth to author Pierre Loti in 1915
- New Penguin Dictionary of Quotations
- Goebbels, Joseph, "''"Das Jahr 2000", Das Reich, 25 February 1945, pp. 1-2.
- ''A New Look at the Iron Curtain'', Ignace Feuerlicht, ''American Speech,'' Vol. 30, No. 3 (Oct., 1955), pp. 186–189.
- US Dept of State, Foreign Relations of the US, The Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, vol. 1, p. 9
- The Second World War, Triumph and Tragedy,
- The Second World War, Triumph and Tragedy,
- Weintraub, Stanley, ''"The Last Great Victory"'', Truman Talley Books, New York, 1995, p. 184
- Hansard House of Commons, c84, 16 August 1945 vol 413
- The History of Guantanamo Bay 1494 -1964: Chapter 18, "Introduction of Part II, 1953 - 1964"
- Yankees Besieged - TIME
References
- Freedom! - TIME
- {{Harvnb|Shirer|1990|pp=515–40}}
- {{Harvnb|Shirer|1990|p=668}}
- {{Harvnb|Ericson|1999|p=57}}
- Day, Alan J.; East, Roger; Thomas, Richard. ''A Political and Economic Dictionary of Eastern Europe'', p. 405.
- Stalin offered troops to stop Hitler
- Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933–1941
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
- Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power
- Antony Beevor ''Berlin: The building of the Berlin Wall'', p. 80
- http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain_Speech Sinews of Peace
- John Lewis Gaddis ''We Now Know 1997''
- Authors such as Lewkowicz have underlined the importance played by the treatment of the German Question in the division of the continent into two ideological camps. The German Question and the Origins of the Cold War
- {{Harvnb|Roberts|2006|p=43}}
- {{Harvnb|Wettig|2008|p=21}}
- Senn, Alfred Erich, ''Lithuania 1940 : revolution from above'', Amsterdam, New York, Rodopi, 2007 ISBN 978-90-420-2225-6
- Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline, ''Stalin's Cold War'', New York : Manchester University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-7190-4201-1
- {{Harvnb|Roberts|2006|p=55}}
- {{Harvnb|Shirer|1990|p=794}}
- {{Harvnb|Wettig|2008|pp=96-100}}
- Granville, Johanna, ''The First Domino: International Decision Making during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956'', Texas A&M University Press, 2004. ISBN 1-58544-298-4
- {{Harvnb|Grenville|2005|pp=370-71}}
- {{Harvnb|Cook|2001|p=17}}
- {{Harvnb|Beschloss|2003|p=277}}
- {{Harvnb|Miller|2000|p=16}}
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