It's hard to find many Soviet figures speaking their own minds prior to the death of Stalin, but in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death in 1953, a disagreement on part of this issue did erupt. While there was broad consensus that a Soviet puppet regime in at least Poland and Romania was necessary for Soviet security, Lavrentiy Beria, who had been head of the NKVD and wanted to succeed Stalin, thought that East Germany was an unnecessary drain on Soviet military and economic resources and the split Germany unnecessarily poisoned relations with the West. There's numerous sources for this story, but I'll point to Stephen Kotkin's Armageddon Averted. Beria actually proposed that East and West Germany be merged into a neutral disarmed state that could join neither the Warsaw Pact or NATO and that all Warsaw Pact and NATO forces withdraw back to Poland or France, respectively. This proposal was a nonstarter with the United States, the West German government (which was not keen about having a potentially communist-leaning third of the country enter the electorate under a Communist Party), and the East German government (which would have been dissolved under this proposal). After Beria's death and Khrushchev's rise to power, the offer was off the table, and Khrushchev's brutal crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution's attempt to break Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact reaffirmed the USSR's commitment to remain in control of all the Warsaw Pact satellites.