Germany

on the World Today

SINCE the fleeting “honeymoon" of 1945—46, when the Soviets hoped to dupe the West into leaving all Germany to them, and the Allies dreamed of a Germany controlled and circumscribed by EastWest coöperation, both Eastern and Western policies for Germany have been based, willy-nilly, on de facto partition of the country.

The Soviets made a brash grab for all Germany when they laid down the Berlin blockade, and they have tried carrot-and-stick psychological strategy to woo Western Germany. The West has successfully fended off all Soviet assaults, and it has dispatched many diplomatic notes challenging the Soviets to permit free elections in all Germany. But neither East nor West has been willing to play double or nothing, to risk its position in half of Germany for the sake of gaining the whole.

Immediately after V-E Day, the Soviets rifled East Germany of industrial equipment. Ever since, they have more and more turned the area into an integral part of the Soviet bloc. Soviet state corporations appropriated key East German industrial concerns; leading German scientists and technicians were kidnaped for work in the Soviet Union; the remainder of the East German economy has been exploited and reoriented as Soviet needs require.

Politically, while the façade of a multiparty system is maintained, liquidation of opposition, Communization via the secret police, and subjugation to Soviet policy have proceeded apace. Militarily, the Soviet Army and Air Force have built a mighty net of bases in the area and have developed a fledgling East German army to support them.

The policy of the West

Western policy toward Western Germany has been infinitely different, morally and humanly. It has, however, by its own democratic means, as assiduously attempted to integrate Western Germany into the Western bloc as the Soviets have tried to merge their zone with the East. West Germany has become a member of the Schuman Plan, which hopes to amalgamate the coal and steel industries of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Luxemburg.

Militarily, since former President Truman’s decision in 1950 to dispatch four more American divisions to Europe, West Germany has been developed into a formidable bastion of NATO land and air strength. West Germany herself has been asked to contribute troops to the common defense, under the European Defense Community (EDC) scheme, which would unite German contingents with those of the five other Schuman Plan countries.

EDC, however, although it has been two and a half years in the making, is still far from becoming a reality, principally because the French, who conceived it in order to deny Western Germany an independent army, now balk at legitimizing their own brain child, since they fear both German resurgence and Soviet resentment. The West German government has ratified the treaty, although its test in the German Constitutional Court is still pending.

The desire for unity

East Germany’s Communists have naturally endorsed Soviet policy; however, they make up less than 10 per cent of the East German population. Ninety per cent of the East Germans despise partition, for the obvious reason that it means Soviet entrenchment in their midst. Ever since 1945, they have looked to the West for salvation from their plight, for liberation. Hence they have also had their reservations about an Allied policy that seemed, in their eyes, to be lavishing bounties on Western Germany but neglecting the East.

Understandably, the East Germans have never come to grips with the question of exactly what the West could do for them, short of starting a war to free them. In their trapped, powerless situation, they simply felt it to be inconceivable that as powerful a complex as the West could do nothing. Now that they have shown, by rebellion, how much they can do, the East Germans may understand Western caution even less.

The spectacularly smoldering rebellion in Eastern Germany raises, more sharply than any other event since 1945, the question of all Germany’s future. And it is a cold war maxim that as Germany goes, so goes Europe.

On June 16 the overworked construction crews on East Berlin’s Stalinallee housing project began a protest march toward the offices of the East German Communist government, located in the late Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe Ministry in Leipzigerstrasse. Perhaps the march was actually sanctioned by Soviet authorities, anxious to feign that, under the new “soft” Malenkov policy, workers could “strike” for better conditions.

Whatever its origin, Eastern Germany’s first open antigoveernment demonstration in eight years fused a powder keg of latent fury.

Eastern Germany blows up

Workers, seeing the Stalinallee crews on the move, dropped their tools and marched along. Shopkeepers, clerks, factory hands, truckers, passers-by, women, and youngsters swelled the throng. Word spread like wildfire among the East Berlin citizenry, until more than 50,000 surged and seethed in the Leipzigerstrasse.

Hastily improvised placards demanded more food, better pay, deposition of the hated German Communist rulers, and free elections. Angry bands roamed East Berlin, smashing Communist Party offices, ripping down Red posters. The following day rioters scaled the famous Brandenburg Gate and tore down and burned the Red flag.

Radio newscasts from West German stations, plus the word-of-mouth communication always so highly organized in a police state, stirred all the people of Eastern Germany to arise. In Saxony’s uranium mines, 100,000 semi-indentured laborers struck, smashing equipment, setting fires, beating Red labor bosses. Fire and destruction ran through the great Leuna chemical plant.

Tumult raged in all the major industrial cities, in Leipzig, Dresden, Merseburg, Magdeburg, Halle, and Chemnitz. Road and rail traffic halted; mills slowed down or stood still; Communist functionaries were assaulted; on the streets and in big city squares, loud and livid masses shouted for freedom.

German Communist police proved powerless to cope with the conflagration. Some fired viciously on their countrymen, hut others stripped off their uniforms in sympathy, while the majority, divided between their duty and their people, seemed simply ineffectual. Soviet troops and tanks had to be called in.

The unarmed rioters pushed desperate courage to the point of throwing stones at T-34s; some tanks were disabled by logs jammed into their treads. Gradually, behaving with disciplined restraint, firing over the rioters’ heads, the Soviet units dispersed the demonstrations.

After three days, the first flare of rebellion burned out. Indecision, perhaps caused by the “soft" policy, perhaps resulting from surprise that anyone would dare revolt against them, marked the Soviets’ reaction. In reprisal, they ordered a number of executions and had dozens of alleged ringleaders arrested.

Gruesome as these measures were to their victims, they did not approach the massive, icy rigor of which Soviet power is traditionally capable. Indeed, the German Communist government, shaken to its roots, hastily made a series of concessions, lowering work norms, raising welfare payments, easing crop quotas which farmers must deliver to state-controlled markets, promising more consumer goods, and the like.

Thus encouraged, and still incensed, the rioters acted again, with a sitdown strike in Merseburg, a slowdown in the famed Zeiss optical works at Jena, new uprisings in the uranium mines, and road and rail blocks throughout the Soviet zone.

Food for the hungry

A third rash of revolt came in July in conjunction with President Eisenhower’s offer of 15 million dollars’ worth of food to Eastern Germany. The Soviets and East German Communists promptly rejected the offer. Thereupon, West Berlin and West German official and private agencies made food packages (from German stocks which could now be replaced by the U.S. shipments) available in West Berlin.

Thousands of East Berliners streamed across the city’s dividing line to buy the packages at giveaway prices. More thousands of East Germans came; often, groups of families pooled their money to send one foodbuying emissary to Berlin. But on their return home, the East Berliners and East Germans encountered Communists and police who tried to wrest the precious packages from them. Countless clashes ensued, often billowing into small-scale skirmishes, and bitterness against Communism attained new heights.

The force of Soviet repression is potentially formidable; discouragement may make an end to the rebellion. On the other hand, the basic injustices that fed the conflagration have not changed, despite Red promises.

More important, the rioters, having stripped themselves of that mute acquiescence which alone makes life under dictatorship possible, having placed themselves beyond the pale of the police state, have become new men. They may be beaten down, but in their consciousness it will be a long time before they can lie down again. Finally, the Eastern Germans’ sense of victory and historic achievement may sustain their heroic posture.

The message of the rebellion is clear and indelible. Beneath the surface slogans, the rioters were saying two things: 1) get the Soviets out of Germany, and 2) let the Germans once again be masters in their own country. The uprising sprang out of personal and mass misery; it was not consciously national in conception; but the satisfaction of its basic demands can plainly be secured only by the liberation of Eastern Germany and its reunion with the rest of the country. The rebellion is the most powerful request so far made, by Germans, for the unity and independence of their nation.

The West Germans respond

The Western Germans, during the early post-war years, were too hungry, too apathetic, and too much beset by real or fancied personal suffering to have sympathy left over for their harder-hit brethren in the East. As the economic situation improved, reconstruction and satisfaction of pent-up material cravings took precedence over politics.

The West German government, in its initial stages, needed all its energy just to get organized. In foreign policy, it acceded to the Western integration schemes, both out of conviction and also because that was the price the Western powers asked in return for granting the government more and more sovereignty.

But today, with the Western German economy enjoying a steady prosperity, with the physical and psychological scars of Nazism and war healing, with the impressive consolidation and growing international stature of the West German government, natural patriotic feelings are mounting and wider horizons are dawning.

Western German public opinion speedily swung into line behind the East Germans. The West Germans were affected by the plight of their countrymen, and electrified by their bold resolution. The message of the rebellion, its clarion call to national reunion, was understood.

Newspaper editorials, political speeches, and private expressions plumped for national unity with unheard-of vigor. Guilty awareness of past indifference to Eastern Germany and present inability to come to its rescue intensified the West Germans’ rhetoric. They turned to their American, British, and French occupiers, asking for action.

The struggle for prestige

Thus the East German rebellion has become a test of both Eastern and Western prestige in Germany. Obviously, Soviet policy is profoundly discredited, not only because its always unpopular character has been so signally demonstrated, but even more because the naked force on which the Soviets rely has been mocked by barehanded mutiny.

The West Germans can now see beyond their stomachs, beyond the confines of their rump Germany between Rhine and Elbe, forward to a day when their country may again assume its natural and legitimate shape. The East German rebellion has accelerated this vision.

It might appear that Western prestige, customarily in converse relationship to Soviet prestige, has shot upward. In this instance, that is not precisely the case. Neither Eastern nor Western Germany appears to be content with having the West bask in the reflected glory of the rebellion, nor even with the degree of positive response that President Eisenhower’s food offer represents.

Both Eastern and Western Germany are asking for more substantial Western acknowledgment of the rebellion’s agonies and aims. In short, the West is being requested by much German opinion to mobilize all peaceful means for the attainment of German unity.

Big Four conference?

All leading West German politicians have responded to this ground swell of unity sentiment. The Socialists, with their large potential following in East Germany, have always argued for unity first, integration with the West thereafter. Since the rebellion, they have pushed with new vigor a demand for one “final" Big Four conference at which Soviet willingness to agree to German unity should be tested, while integration with the West would be postponed.

Christian Democratic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s whole foreign policy has espoused integration with the West first, unity thereafter. But now Adenauer, too, has endorsed an early Big Four meeting. Adenauer’s coalition partners, the strong Free Democrats, took a pro-unity stand which was virtually as strident as that of the Socialists.

Meanwhile, the Big Four have been seeing to their positions. The Western powers asked the Soviets to meet in late September, to discuss free elections and a peace treaty for all Germany.

The Soviets replied with a crafty proposal for a “temporary all-German government,” which would represent Germany before the Big Four, help plan a peace conference, and prepare free elections. The note also proposed economic concessions to Germany such as ending reparations on January 1, 1954, and cutting occupation costs to 5 per cent of the German state budget.

However, the “temporary government “ would be formed more or less equally from East German and West German parliaments, a procedure that would give the same voice to a fraudulently installed body as to a freely elected one. Furthermore, the Soviets have frequently “ended" reparations exactions, only to tap the German economy in more devious ways; and the proposed reduction of reparations seems a transparent device to undermine NATO, which is partly supported by such costs.

Such stratagems, intended to recoup the shaken Soviet prestige and to hurt Adenauer’s popularity, are a long way from indicating a Soviet change of heart.

What the Germans want

The Germans have nowhere precisely defined the exact shape of a united Germany, but they would presumably wish it to cover an area roughly that of Germany in 1937, before Nazi aggression. West German proponents of unity want, as a minimum, to fuse all the four present occupation zones. They certainly also expect to recover at least a good part of the German lands beyond the Oder and Neisse rivers, territory which was “provisionally" ceded to Poland at Potsdam but has in fact been annexed by Poland. The eventual fate of East Prussia, now a part of the Soviet Union itself, is less clear.

Whether the united Germany is to be armed is a moot point. Some German politicians might settle for a ban on German troops, but in the long run many of them would probably dislike being defenseless while surrounded by armed neighbors. Similarly, while some politicians might agree to neutrality, others would certainly insist that Germany be free to align herself with whom she chose.

Beyond its meaning for their own country, various German observers see unity as unfreezing the East-West deadlock in Europe. They argue that Western Germany is perhaps the most Communist-proof area in Western Europe, that Eastern Germany need scarcely offer further evidence of its anti-Communism, and that a united Germany would inevitably join the West. They go on to maintain that this shift in the continental balance of power would strike a major blow at the Soviets and that German unity would therefore be the first step in the liberation of all Eastern Europe.

This German view highlights the broadest problems stirred up by the East German rebellion. Once again, as it has intermittently these many years, the German question takes top priority in the chancelleries of the world.