The western powers which, in their time, signed the Potsdam Agreement, are today working to worsen the international situation, to encourage the growing militarist tendencies of German revenge-seekers, that is, they support all that the Potsdam Agreement denounced. They have long since been guided by the aggressive North Atlantic Treaty and not by the Potsdam Agreement.
They have violated the Potsdam Agreement repeatedly and with impunity, while we remain loyal to it as if nothing had changed. We have every reason to set ourselves free from obligations under the Potsdam Agreement, obligations which have outlived themselves and which the western powers are clinging to, and to pursue with regard to Berlin a policy that would spring from the interests of the Warsaw Treaty.
The leaders of Western Germany say that good relations between the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany can only be established if the Soviet Union ceases to support the German Democratic Republic and if it brings pressure to bear on it in a direction needed by the West. Bonn does not, apparently, desire good relations with the Soviet Union if it entertains such absurd hopes. If the government of the Federal Republic really wants to have good relations with the Soviet Union, it should abandon, once and for all, the hope that we shall cease to support the German Democratic Republic.
[ . . . ]
Source: Address by Premier Khrushchev at a Soviet-Polish Meeting, on Germany and Berlin (November 10, 1958); reprinted in Documents on Germany, 1944-1959: Background Documents on Germany, 1944-1959, and a Chronology of Political Developments affecting Berlin, 1945-1956. Washington, DC: General Printing Office, 1959, pp. 308-12.
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