THIRD REICH WILL BE DECENTRALISED

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 118, 21 May 1945, Page 5

THIRD REICH WILL BE DECENTRALISED

BERLIN LOSES POWER

Administrative Transfer To Provinces N.Z. Press Association —Copyright Rec. 11.30 a.m. LONDON, May 20. "The Third Reich will be decentralised and the political and administrative power hitherto concentrated in Berlin will be taken over by the great industrial, maritime and agricultural provinces," says a Reuters correspondent in Germany. Colonel B. K. Thomas, of the operations planning department of the British Military Government, said the Reich would not be dismembered in the crude sense of the term. The object of the occupying forces was to control and not to govern directly. The appointment of suitable Germans, from burgomasters upwards, would eventually reach its obvious climax in the government of the Germans operating under the direction of the occupational authorities. ( . n „„ : Col. Thomas said that about 1000 military and Government officials are at present governing between from two to five million Germans. When the British take over the area of occupation will finally be agreed upon. There will be 2000 officials controlling about 18,000,000 Germans. "Soldiers of the occupying armies will naturally play their' part in the Military Government, Col. Thomas proceeded. "AVhat at first seems to be a small number of officers is not at variance with the numbers of responsible officials which the Nazis found necessary in the same zone. Free Refugees Fill Posts Col. Thomas added that free German refugees in Britain and elsewhere would play a part in military Government. One such refugee was already holding an important post at Field-Marshal Montgomery s headquarters. The exact boundaries of the British zone had not yet been delineated, but it in general covered what once was Prussia, including part of the Rhine province west of the river and the provinces of Westphalia, Hanover and SchleswigHolstein. „ , ... Forty-seven per cent of the Nazi burgomasters in the British area fled before the Allied armies and one-third of the remainder were summarily dismissed. The British as a general rule had not dismissed the burgomasters in farming zones, many of whom held their posts before Hitler came to power. Military Government officers were under strict orders not to have anything to do with politics, but there was little sign of any German political resurgence. German taxes would pay for the occupation army and military government, which implied efficient administration. The British were employing only a small number of Germans in military government on routine matters and they were segregated as far as possible from the British. Germany will be so completely "deindustrialised" that reparations will be payable only in the form of labour or natural resources, said Mr. E. Pauley, who will represent the United States on the German Reparations Commission, when interviewed by the New York Herald-Tribune. Mr. Pauley indicated that his views on Germany's future closely * resembled the hard peace plans attributed to the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Morgenthau, favouring not only the destruction of the German heavy industry, but also r.emoval to the Allied or liberated nations of any purely civilian industries capable of supplying more than the German people's absolute minimum needs. Germany, he said, should also redistribute to liberated peoples all the remaining food and goods stolen from Europe in the past five years, leaving only enough to maintain the bare level of subsistence.