Astor broadly supported the Cold War containment policies of Atlantic alliance and consequently had difficulties with "The Observer"'s foreign editor, the German emigre Sebastian Haffner. Haffner was unwilling to dismiss the March 1952 Stalin Note with its offer of Soviet withdrawal in return for German neutrality. In 1954 he accepted a financially generous offer to transfer to Berlin as "The Observer's" German correspondent but again broke with Astor in 1961 when "The Observer" refused to call for a more forceful allied response to the building of the Berlin Wall.