I'm reading Forged in War by Warren Kimball, a book about the wartime Churchill-Roosevelt relationship (really good btw), and there's this tantalizing passage about German-Soviet peace talks in Stockholm in spring/summer 1943. To directly quote it:
in the spring and summer of 1943, Soviet-German probes about a separate peace began during meetings of mid-level officials in Stockholm.
But he doesn't provide any sourcing or evidence for this claim. I'm wondering if someone on here could go into detail about these peace feelers, which seem pretty surprising to me in the wake of Stalingrad.
Most modern scholars of Soviet foreign policy dismiss these claims. According to historian Geoffrey Roberts they come from rumors without much basis in reality - Stalin's foreign policy up until that point had been based on preventing the US and UK from negotiating a separate peace and getting them to present a unified front with him. Trying to jump ship exactly when his fortunes were on the upswing would be an improbable shift. If any meetings did occur - no evidence has appeared beyond rumors from neutral nations - they likely involved Soviet attempts to meet with members of the German opposition to Hitler, not peace feelers to the German government itself.