REPORT OF NEW POLICE UNITS

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25610, 27 September 1948, Page 7

REPORT OF NEW POLICE UNITS

The British-licensed German newspaper “Die Welt” says that a picked force of armed police which is easily convertible into a civilian army of about 1000 is being built up by the Russians in Eastern Germany. “Die Welt” says that new units known as people’s police are being armed and given military training and quartered in barracks. The officers are drawn from Russian-trained Germans captured during the war. It suggests that the people’s police could be used to seize power if and when the Russians withdraw from Germany. The American official “Neue Zeitung” said yesterday that Communist “action groups” were being trained secretly in Western Berlin and would stage big demonstrations against the city administration at the end of October. The groups would try to interrupt the City Council’s work in the< Western sectors as they had done in the Soviet sector.

British-sector nolice yesterday made several arrests when fights broke out at the end of an outdoor meeting called by the Communist-controlled Socialist Unity Party in the Tiergarten district of the British sector.

The fighting began when anti-Com-munist youths tried to break up the meeting. Two hundred policemen who were on duty formed a cordon across the square and dispersed the crowd. Friedrich Ebert, son of the first president of the German Republic, was the main speaker at the meeting.

The Soviet-licensed press yesterday appealed directly to the population of Berlin’s Western sectors to **get rid of the warmongers.” The Socialist Unity Party’s newspaper, “Neue Deutschland,” said: “The whole of Berlin has to suffer because the Western Powers refuse to come to an understanding in Moscow.” The Communist “Berliner Zeitung” said: “America is against the proposal that all occupation troops should withdraw from Germany within a yeas after the conclusion of the peace treaty. The reason is that this would not be in harmony with its aim to use Western Germany as a military platform.”

The ban in the Soviet sector on Western-licensed newspapers was completed on Friday, when the contracts >of the British-controlled “Die Welt” and the French-licensed “Kurier” were cancelled by the Soviet central distribution agency, says Reuter’s Berlin correspondent.

The American Military Government has ordered all Soviet-sponsored newspapers and other publications to be banned from the American zone, as a reprisal. The Associated Press correspondent in Berlin says that the United States authorities have protested to the Russians that a stunting Yak fighter flew dangerously close to an American passenger aeroplane in the- air corridor between Berlin and Frankfurt.