Korean invasion - sovereignty to Germany

Chapter Three Transition Into A Tactical Force: 1950-1952
On a larger stage, with the Korean invasion in mind, the Council of Foreign Ministers declared on 19 September 1950 that the Allied governments would treat any attack upon the German Federal Republic or West Berlin as an attack upon themselves. It also announced that the Allied forces in Germany would be augmented. The build-up of American forces in Germany - combined with a general increase in international tensions in Europe, which the Korean war greatly exacerbated - led to an increased impetus to restore complete sovereignty to Germany and to formally end the occupation. Although the United States was a strong proponent for picking up the pace of this process, it could not act unilaterally and had to consider all aspects of this change in Germany's status on the Soviet Bloc as well as its Allied partners. One step it debated in 1951, was the abolition of zonal boundaries in the western part of Germany. It was reasoned that a country soon to be accepted on an equal footing in the proposed European Defense Community should not be divided into "occupation zones." The HICOG proposed that as soon as the contractual relationships (or Contractual Agreements, as they subsequently came to be called) on ending the occupation were entered into with the Federal Republic, all zonal boundaries would be eliminated. From a political standpoint they had ceased to exist for some time, but as EUCOM headquarters pointed out, there would be military disadvantages if it were unclear which power was responsible for the defense of which sector. In addition, the Soviets would not be a party to the Contractual Agreements and would continue to approach the "German question" from a zonal point of view. The State Department implemented a compromise policy whereby the zones would continue to exist nominally, but would be disregarded in practice. By this time all pretense of border operations on the British and French zonal boundaries had long since ceased, and US security and surveillance border operations were directed solely against the Soviet zonal boundary and the Czechoslovak border. On 10 January 1952 President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill publicly pledged their countries' full support of a European Defense Community with the Federal Republic as a full and equal partner.