No. 1
Editorial Note

The documentation that follows presents the major lines of United States policy regarding the negotiations which led to the signature of the contractual agreements at Bonn on May 26, 1952. Because of the extensive amount of materials in Department of State files on contractual relations, the editors have been constrained to limit their presentation to the most important documents reflecting the interest of the United States in these negotiations. At the same time that the talks on contractual relations were proceeding in Bonn, negotiations were also taking place at Paris on the treaty for a European Defense Community, and the compilation on these negotiations in volume V should be read in this connection since the two issues were considered as parts of a whole European security arrangement.

The largest collection of materials on contractual relations in Department of State files for 1952 is in CFM files, lot M–88, boxes 161–162 and 184–195. The first two boxes contain extensive records dealing with the signing ceremonies and the meetings of the Foreign Ministers at Bonn in May 1952. The remaining twelve boxes present papers and documents arranged topically on the various conventions comprising the contractuals, subtopics within the several conventions, and telegrams related to the negotiations on the contractuals. These records include collections of the drafts of various proposals, summaries of meetings during the negotiations, and ancillary correspondence pertaining to the negotiations. Supplementing the CFM files are files 662A.00 and 762A.0221, which have [Page 2] extensive records dealing with contractual relations, but which are not arranged according to topic or convention as are the files in lot M–88.

In 1953 the Historical Division of the Executive Secretariat of the Office of the United States High Commissioner for Germany prepared a “History of the Negotiations of the Contractual Agreements with the Federal Republic of Germany”. A copy of this 451-page study, which considered the contractuals both chronologically and topically, is in file 662A.00/12–3153.