GERMAN PLANT FOR REPARATIONS

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25305, 3 October 1947, Page 7

GERMAN PLANT FOR REPARATIONS

British And U.S. Decisions Expected This Week

GENERAL CLAY PUTS VALUE AT £250,000,000

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) ‘ ;(Rec. 10.30 p.m.) LONDON, October 2. It is expected that a joint list of the plant which is to be dismantled as reparations in the combined British-American sones of Germany will be issued this week.

General Lucius Clay, Military Governor of the United States zone, said at a press conference in Berlin yesterday that he estimated the value of such plant at £250,000,000. The dismantling programme, he said, was based on the new level-of-industry plan and had been very carefully determined, so that there would be an integrated and ’self-sustaining industry in the two western zones. If the German people analysed the new level of industry left to them they would find that it would take them all their efforts to get it going in the next five or six years, and that it promised them a reasonable standard of living.

During these five or six years they would receive substantial help from America and Britain—help without which they could not reach that level of industry at all.

In any case, the value of the plant to be taken would be less than the help provided by America and Britain in any one year of the occupation. He did not expect that the Germans would offer any organised refusal to dismantle the plant. Deliberate sabotage of Allied policy in this way ; should it occur, would “lessen the readiness of the American and British people to pay for food for Germany.” The Allied authorities, General Clay added, might decide to cut food sup-

plies if there were any deliberate resistance by German labour. The German news agency, quoting the United States Military Government, says that the dismantling for reparations of the Focke-Wulf aircraft factory in Bremen will begin in 10 days and will take three or four

Equipment from the factory which produced some of Germany’s best fighter, aeroplanes will be divided among Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Czechoslovakia, and Greece.