Editorial Note
At their meeting in New York in September 1950 the Foreign Ministers of France the United Kingdom, and the United States issued instructions to the Allied High Commission for Germany, inter alia, to obtain assurances from the Federal Republic of Germany that it accepted responsibility for the prewar external debt of the German Reich and for postwar economic assistance and that it would cooperate with the Western powers in the equitable apportionment of materials for the common defense before the Instrument of Revision of the Occupation Statute was promulgated. At the same time the High Commission would continue its work on the revision of the Charter of the Allied High Commission for Germany, with the aim of achieving an Instrument of Revision that could be promulgated at the time that the revised Occupation Statute was issued.
To this end tripartite negotiations commenced in Bonn in the fall of 1950 for the revision of the Charter. The High Commission on October 23 despatched to the Federal Chancellor two letters ( Foreign Relations, 1950, volume IV, pages 767 and 770) asking for the assurances requested by the Foreign Ministers and instructed the Economics Committee of the High Commission to meet with representatives of the Federal Republic to assist in the drafting of the replies. [Page 1411] An agreed assurance on the defense materials was arrived at by December 1950, but the draft debt assurance proved more difficult and the promulgation of the instruments of revisions for the Occupation Statute and the Charter was delayed pending agreement on the second assurance.
The documentation that follows presents materials on the formulation of the assurance on debts and the texts of the several documents concerned. For a study of the revision of the Occupation Statute, see Elmer Plischke, Revision of the Occupation Statute for Germany, Bonn, Office of the United States High Commissioner for Germany, 1952.