Across the war years, a number of tantalizing proposals had been floated to Roosevelt that promised American gain, but at the expense of the alliance—and almost invariably, at the expense of the Soviet Union in particular. These included the Hungarian government’s 1944 attempt to forge a separate peace with the United States, to the exclusion of the Soviets, and any number of overtures from different German military commands in the last days of the war with offers of a stand-down of German forces on the Western Front so that they might continue fighting on the Eastern. Each time, Roosevelt had
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