COMMUNISTS IN GERMANY

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25734, 21 February 1949, Page 7

COMMUNISTS IN GERMANY

RELEASED LEADER’S SPEECH ATTACK ON SUPPORTERS OF WEST RENEWED (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 8 p.m.) BERLIN, Feb. 19. “Mr Max Reimann, German Communist leader in the Western zones, making his first speech since the British released him from prison to participate in the drafting of the West German Constitution at Bonn, renewed his attacks on German politicians who work with the Western Allies,” says the Associated Press correspondent at Frankfurt. “Mr Reimann predicted that Communism would win in Germany and that German politicians should not be startled if one day the German people upset their apple cart. “Mr Reimann’s remarks were similar io those which led to his trial and imprisonment by the British.’* Reuter’s Hamburg correspondent says that British and German criminal investigation officials raided the Hamburg office of the Communist Party and spent an hour searching the rooms. They confiscated a large number of postcards bearing a portrait of Mr Reimann.

“A walk-out by the Right Wing majority broke up a meeting of the German Economic Council after allegations had been made that former Ruhr magnates had been recommended as trustees for the German steel industry,” says Reuter’s Frankfurt correspondent. “A Social Democrat member, Mr Herbert Kriedemann, accused the chief of »the Bizonal Executive (Dr. Hermann Puender) of going behind the back of the council’s permanent committee in putting before the Military Government a list of 12 former major industrialists as proposed steel trustees.”

Shooting Incidents in Berlin “A no-man’s-land has been drawn through the centre of Berlin to enforce the Russian blockade,” says the Associated Press correspondent in Berlin. '‘The Communists have established ‘danger zones’ where they halt and inspect traffic seeking to cross from the Russian sector into the blockaded Western sectors. This action was taken after shots fired by the Soviet-controlled police on Friday at a blockade-running lorry had bit two bystanders.” “Tension between Communists and anti-Communists heightened after two shooting incidents involving Sovietcontrolled police,” says the correspondent of the Associated Press. “A motorist was killed during the night when police fired on him as he was trying to escape from the Russian sector of the city into the American area. Later a German man and a 14-year-old girl were wounded when the police fired on the man’s vegetable lorry when it failed to stop at the halt sign marking the demarcation of the two sectors.”

Soviet soldiers made a quick sortie into the United States occupation zone by locomotive and hauled 31 freight cars into the Russian zone, said an American Military Government spokesman, quoted by the Munich correspondent of the Associated Press. The incident occurred last night at Burggrub, in northern Bavaria. “An undetermined number” of Soviet soldiers and Gerinan border police rode the locomotive 100 yards into the American zone, seized the waggons, and then sped back into the Soviet zone.

A police report said that a group of railroad workers from a town just across the border in the Russian zone entered the American zone earlier in the day. They repaired a short length of track on the line where the freight waggons were standing.