EAST GERMANY’S POLICY

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25934, 14 October 1949, Page 7

EAST GERMANY’S POLICY

CABINET APPROVED MR GROTEWOHL SPEAKS IN ASSEMBLY BERLIN, October 12. The East German Parliament to-day formally confirmed Mr Otto Grotewohl as Prime Minister, accepted his Cabinet and approved a programme of Communist ideals. The delegates sat through a full day’s speeches to reach their one moment cf action. When it came, they voted for the regime by jumping to attention. Mr Grotewohl and a score of other speakers during the day thanked the Russians lor giving their blessing to the East German Government, and attacked the Western Powers as “imperialistic and capitalistic warmongers.” Mr Grotewohl. in his speech to the Assembly, sounded the same theme as at last night’s mammoth torchlight parade—"peace and the unification of Germany.’ “We know that in our fight for unity—which is simultaneously a fight for peace—we are not alone,” shouted Mr Grotewohl. "We know that the Soviet Union stands at our side.” Mr Grotewohl laid down a programme pledging Eastern Germany to follow the foreign policy adopted by the Soviet satellite Foreign Ministers at the Warsaw conference in 1948. and accepting the. Oder-Neisse frontier, which ceded former German territory to Poland and Russia as the final “peace border.” Mr Grotewohl also called for the development of trade with Communist China; a new economic plan even more intensive than the current twoyear plan to get under way in 1950: the abolition of food rationing next year except for meat and sugar; equal rights for former Nazis who were not convicted of direct crimes and “a fight with the sharpest forces of the law against any revival of Nazism, militarism or fascism.”