Germany

THE summer of 1962 seems to have brought only anxiety to the people of Germany. The political situation — with the American-Soviet probe producing no concrete results — has remained bleakly uncertain. The economic climate has been troubled by the impasse over Britain’s entry into the Common Market, by Dr. Adenauer’s sudden summoning of a D-mark conference to avert a further slide in the purchasing power of the currency, and by the spectacular Schlieker scandal, involving the utterly unexpected financial failure of West Germany’s most colorful post-war millionaire.

The Communist Wall has continued to throw its depressing shadow over Berlin, where defiance is mingled with apprehension. West Germans have derived small comfort from the economic ills which increasingly beset the puppet Communist state in East Germany. These are a source of concern to the Soviet Union, but they do not bring a solution of the German question any nearer.

West Germans did not write off the Rusk probe as a waste of time. However impatient the lack of East-West agreement over Germany must make them, a great many West Germans have become aware of the need for the United States and the Soviet Union to remain in diplomatic contact over the German question, and especially over Berlin.

The Wall

In recent months the Wall has begun increasingly to resemble a sector of the front line on the Western front in World War I. The East Germans have in many places a double, and in some a treble, line of fortifications. East Berlin houses on the immediate sector boundary look like pillboxes, with windows blocked up and firing-slits left for the trigger-happy East German People’s Police to shoot at fleeing refugees.

Road approaches to the Wall on the eastern side look like some kind of crazy and lethal obstacle race, consisting of concrete blocks in echelon, trenches, barbed-wire entanglements, and wooden barriers fitted with steel spikes. Eighty new machine-gun emplacements have been built by the East Germans this year, and to neutralize the East German habit of firing indiscriminately from them into West Berlin, the West Berlin police have thrown up earthworks and sandbag barriers for shelter. The current picture of the Wall is no longer just unnatural; it is demented.

Tension became extremely acute after the Wall’s first anniversary, on August 13. Partly because of the particularly brutal shooting down of an East German refugee, Peter Fechter, on August 17 by the People’s Police, but partly out of sheer claustrophobia, the usually disciplined Berliners carried out wild and sometimes violent demonstrations along the Wall. Coaches bringing Soviet soldiers for guard duty at the Russian War Memorial in the Tiergarten were stoned; crosses and banners were planted on the Wall ; and American guards at the Friedrichstrasse Checkpoint Charlie on the sector boundary were insulted for failing to succor Fechter, who lay dying for nearly an hour about two hundred yards away. Sooner or later the patience of the Berliners was bound to snap; more than fifty East Germans have now been killed along the Wall, and on at least 370 occasions the People’s Police have opened fire across the sector and zonal boundaries into West Berlin.

Underlying the anger of the West Berliners was the fear that Communist pressure on their city would be increased — by the Russians signing a separate peace treaty with the East German Republic and seeking means to force the garrisons of the Western powers out of Berlin. On August 23 an East German commandant was appointed. Most Germans believed that these steps presaged the permanent division of their country.

Failure behind the Wall

The Wall has cut down the exodus of refugees to the West (averaging 20 a day now, against 600 a day until August, 1961), but it is a confession of weakness and a constant reminder of the failure of Communism to function in the East German Republic. The miserable failures of the Ulbricht regime have been abundantly illustrated in recent months. In spite of nominal increases in industrial production, there has been no rise in the standard of living. It takes an East German worker 2 hours to earn a pound of butter (1 hour in West Germany), 85 hours to earn a man’s suit (43 hours in West Germany), 521 hours to earn a small refrigerator (101 hours in West Germany). Even this disparity leaves differences in quality and in delivery dates out of account. An East German television set must be ordered three years in advance, and an order for an East German motorcar may never be filled.

East German food shortages have become more frequent and more harassing. An “Eat fewer potatoes” campaign was launched in the early summer, and leading politicians told citizens it was disgraceful to stuff themselves with potatoes every day, when the Soviet citizen has less to eat than they do. In July rationing of meat was reintroduced in East Berlin, hitherto treated as a Communist showcase for the Western world, and therefore better supplied with food and consumer goods than the remainder of East Germany. Rationing of butter had already been reintroduced throughout East Germany, with customers registering at a single shop and being strictly limited to a fixed amount each week.

The Ulbricht regime admitted alarming shortages in agricultural production but blandly added that imports of basic foodstuffs could not be stepped up. “since this would mean the reduction of imports of coffee, lemons, and the other things we need.”The ultimate insult was offered by a Christian Democrat newspaper, Neue Weg, with the announcement that “Uncle Doctor” was against increasing supplies of meat and butter, “as this would be injurious to our health.”

Food shortages, military conscription, and the total nationalization of agriculture as well as industry are draining the East Germans of even an elementary spirit of survival. During the last year, in spite of the Berlin Wall, the population of the East German Republic has shrunk by about 100,000. As compared to a working population of barely 10 million, there are 3 million old-age pensioners.

Endemic economic crisis drove the East German regime - probably at the instigation of the Russians — to the unprecedented step of asking the Federal Republic for a long-term loan of considerable size. After the news of this East German request leaked out in Bonn at the end of May, details were divulged with ladylike reluctance by the West German government, which was evidently utterly unable to make up its mind whether it was better to offer a loan on special terms or to let the East German regime stew in its own juice.

Ulbricht wanted about 3.2 billion marks’ worth of raw materials and foodstuffs, to be delivered over the next ten years and paid for over the next twenty-five. At the same time he proposed a 25 to 30 percent increase in interzonal trade, which had a two-way volume last year of 1.8 billion marks. The East Germans, it was revealed, began angling for these trade concessions at the end of 1961.

The West Germans did not know how to exploit East German insolvency. Yet increased interzonal trade and a long-term loan would make East Germany much more dependent on the West than previously. They would reduce to nonsense the declared East German policy of making itself economically independent of the Federal Republic. They would help to foster more contact with still anti-Communist East Germans.

West German indecision

The Federal Government could have stated its terms. Instead it succumbed to mental paralysis. The truth is that the closing phase of the Adenauer era has engendered a donothing complex. Any West German political initiative would require the radical alteration of Adenauer’s policy of waiting for the Communist bloc to dissolve and for the Red Army to retreat behind the Oder. Failure by the Federal Government to exploit East Germany’s economic need may prove to be just another chance missed in the cold war.

The West Germans, admittedly, have been preoccupied with their

own troubles. One of these has been the three-legged race run by Dr. Adenauer’s Christian Democrats and their Free Democrat coalition partners. During the summer the government coalition began to creak badly. The Free Democrats complained that the government was failing to economize on federal expenditures and that Dr. Adenauer had intervened on the side of metalworkers and coal miners, who claimed and got major wage increases.

The two parties argued over taxation, over foreign policy, over appointments, and over government scandals. They attacked each other bitterly in the North Rhine - Westphalia Land election in July, when they both lost votes to the opposition Social Democrats. The Free Democrats will not be contented partners as long as Dr. Adenauer stays in office, and they are increasingly irked that he will try to prolong his term beyond the agreed date of October, 1963.

The fear of recession

The West Germans are also worried by the possibility of economic recession. In mid-July Dr. Adenauer called an emergency D-mark conference of ministers and advisers. The labor shortage had become more pressing. There were 625,000 vacant jobs and fewer than 100,000 unemployed. More than 620,000 foreign workers were already in West Germany, but their further influx is limited by availability of housing. The labor shortage will become more acute next year and will be sharpened by the growth of absenteeism in industry. Meanwhile, the trade unions have been busily pressing demands for higher wages and shorter working hours. The wage level has risen 11 percent in one year. It is no surprise that the purchasing power of the mark declined by 4 percent during the same period.

The possibility of recession loomed larger as a result of the Schlieker scandal. The 48-year-old Willy Schlieker has in the last fifteen years built up a fifteen-firm steel, shipbuilding, and trading combine, which in 1961 had sales totaling $200 million. Schlieker was regarded as a genius. He made one big killing after another — by selling steel and scrap to East Germany, by importing American coal during the Korean war, by securing a rent-free lease of shipyards from the Hamburg city government, by inventing a new kind of ship through sawing old vessels in two and adding a “jumboizing” new midsection. Large-scale automation made his Ottenser shipyards the most efficient in Germany. His electrosteel plant at Neviges became the biggest in the Federal Republic.

Because he kept his working capital far too small ($5 million) and invariably plowed back all profits into an expanding business, Schlieker ran short of liquid funds at a time when his shipyards were losing money. In July a total indebtedness of around $20 million was disclosed, and the Schlieker empire began to totter.

The West German press claimed that this event was “atypical" and “unique.”But within a week another shipyard (admittedly, a small one), the Hanseatic, went bankrupt. A few days later the big Flensburger shipbuilding company passed its dividend. Two firms of a different sort, the Opal stocking company and the Buessing motorcar company, announced liquidation. West Germans began to consider other economic pointers with concern. The Federal Republic’s export surplus fell by more than half during the first six months of 1962.

For the first time in ten years the federal tax yield ran behind estimates, by around $75 million for the first half of the year. Behind these figures lurked the fear of creepinginflation, which has already produced a crisis for capitalism elsewhere in Europe.

Nazi legacy

On top of political and economic worries came an ugly jolt to West German prestige. In July the Federal State Prosecutor in the High Court at Karlsruhe, Dr. Wolfgang Fraenkel, was dismissed. It was discovered that he had served on Nazi courts and had been involved in the sentencing to death of at least thirtyfour people during the war. They included young Frenchmen and Belgians who had been deported to Germany as slave laborers, as well as Czechs, Poles, and Jews who had committed trivial offenses. In some cases the death sentence was substituted for imprisonment.

Fraenkel was a meticulous, pettifogging jurist who faithfully administered Nazi laws and saw nothing wrong in doing so. And it was scandalous that such a man should have been appointed to one of the highest legal posts in the country in March of this year. Plenty of people knew something of Fraenkel’s past, and the Ministry of Justice was culpably negligent in failing to examine his record.

In addition to Fraenkel there were at least thirty judges and attorneys still serving in the West German judiciary who had passed death sentences of doubtful legality in Nazi courts. The worst feature of the situation was that the relevant information came from the East Germans, who are in possession of the Nazi legal archives. The cleanup of the West German judiciary has come too late. That does not mean that it is any the less welcome.

Invitation for De Gaulle

To turn to a happier theme for West Germany — a visit to Bonn in the fall was arranged for General de Gaulle as a “return” for Dr. Adenauer’s supremely successful state visit to Paris in the summer.

Occasions of this kind may be regarded by many people as mere formalities. But their symbolic value is still considerable. Who would have expected, a few years ago, to see a German Chancellor laying a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe? Or a French head of state receiving a rapturous welcome in the old Prussian garrison town of Bonn?

There has sometimes been a hint of contrivance about expressions of Franco-German solidarity. But the significance of the reciprocal visits of Adenauer and De Gaulle is that they could only be ventured in a strongly favorable climate, created out of mutual understanding and much good sense. Dr. Adenauer, who once had his eyes fixed on the elusive goal of German unity, will probably find that the civilized world will look on Franco-German reconciliation as his supreme achievement.