PROBLEMS OF GERMANY

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25206, 10 June 1947, Page 7

PROBLEMS OF GERMANY

STATE PREMIERS’ CONFERENCE

RESOLUTIONS TO BE SENT TO CONTROL COUNCIL (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) ~ LONDON. June 8 Dr. Hans Ehard, Prime Minister of Bavaria, expressed satisfaction with the conference of German state Prime Ministers from the British. United States, and French zones, says the correspondent of Reuters in Munich. The Prime Ministers of the five states in the Russian zone refused to attend the conference because the conference would not discuss the question of political unity. Dr. Ehard said the conference had enabled politicians from all parts of Germany to discuss German problems and particularly matters related to the economic fusion of the British and American zones. The conference drew up a series of resolutions relating to Germany’s most urgent problems for submission to the Allied Control Council. Mr Leo Wohlled. Prime Minister of South Baden, intimated that South Baden (in the French zone* would welcome an opportunity for closer relations with the British and American zones. The correspondent of “The Times” in Munich, discussing the conference, says the refusal of the Ministers from the Russian zone to join the conference smacks too much of stage management to warrant any other assumption than that the representatives of the Russian zone attended the conference with the plain intention of making a -political demonstration. The Social Democrats had hoped that such an opportunity for discussing common problems would have been put to fruitful rather than propaganda uses. The beginnings of a new Germany have emerged from the conference. The post-war Germany has for the first time gained a world plgtform and has used it with dignity, but Germany in appealing to humanity to help her out of ner hardship and misery has been unable to avoid politics. * The correspondent says it will not go unobserved that political initiative for the first conference of German Ministers and the alignment of the new Germany that merges from it hrs come out of Bavaria, the largest German state to retain its old boundaries, nor will the world have forgotten the other voice, speaking at Munich nine years ago, when the ruin and distress with which the conference is concerned could have been averted. The voice of Munich to-day is neither docile nor hysterical, nor. in discussing the enormous problem of Germany, sometimes with a strong inflection of nationalism, is it uncritical of the occupying Powers to whom a series of demands are offered. Above all, for the first time since the war, the correspondent concludes, there is a ring of authority in the German voice, as though it has found its power in the urgency of a situation which the Allies cannot control alone.