POSITION WEAK

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 70, Issue 128, 15 March 1950, Page 3

POSITION WEAK

WESTERN FORCES IN RERUN PREDICTED MARCH FROM EAST (N.Z.P. A.—Copyright) (Rec. 9.30) LONDON, Mar. 14. The weak military position in Berlin of the three Western occupying Powers is emphasised following predictions that German police and German youths may attempt to take all the city during the Whitsun holiday at the end of May, states the “New York Herald Tribune.” The paper’s Berlin correspondent, states that the three Western Powers have only a token force of 11,000 men in their three sectors, while the figure of the Soviet-trained army of the Eastern Germans dressed in police uniforms is put $s high as 204,000. These Germans are organised round 44 different police schools and are commanded by Kurt Fischer, a Communist veteran of the Spanish Civil War. German political commissars modelled on those in Russia are attached to each school, and Soviet officers in the blue uniforms of the East. German police serve as instructors in the use of Soviet weapons.

The march on Berlin forecast by Mr Gerhart Eisler, the Minister of Propaganda, is being sponsored by the Free German Youth from which the East German police are recruited. The line between them is, therefore, thin and they~ both parade in blue. Strong ,Temptation Whether or not the Communists will make a serious attempt to take Berlin in May, the correspondent continues, the small size of the Western force in the city must provide a strong temptation to them to try. The East German police and army outnumbers both Western troops and' the West Berlin police force by about 10 to one. •Discussing the possibility of the Western Powers increasing the garrison in Berlin, the correspondent adds that reluctance to do so may be attributed to the fear that these troops would be cut off and lost in a war. The main body of roughly 300,000 "American British and French troops is miles away, separated from Berlin by Sovietcontrolled territory. Another correspondent of this American newspaper, who recently visited Leipzig fair, reported an overwhelming impression of the failure of the Rusians to make any genuine headway toward the propaganda goal of ‘ Ger-man-Soviet friendship.” “But,” he continues, “with the power of Soviet troops and the weapon of the Commun-ist-controlled East zone police and the fear of labour camps and informers, it is not necessary to convince— only to keep the people quiet/ and to an observer let in from the West for a few days it appears to be only a matter of time a year or perhaps 18 months—until the fight for daily existence will have induced the zone Communists to do the Russians’ work of informing on and controllong then neig ibours in the hope of more food. , “The chief Western weapon to counter this and to keep alive what feeble intellectual resistance there is, is the radio. American and British transmitters are heavily jammed, but it is not yet a prime to listen.”