RE-EXAMINATION NEEDED OF EXISTING SITUATION

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26025, 31 January 1950, Page 4

RE-EXAMINATION NEEDED OF EXISTING SITUATION

GERMANY

[By WALTER LIP PM ANN in the "New York Herald Tribune”} < (Reprinted by Arrangement)

New York, January 19.—Two Pieces of news from Germany, , b 9. t k the last week, show, I Relieve, that neither in Paris iwr in Bonn do the men who know the score think ’hat the present situation can last very much longer. .. . . One was the story brought to light bv Mr Drew Middleton that Dr. Adenauer had made . contact through Lieutenant-General Kurt von Menteuffel with a group of 18 German generals and staff officers, called . the Brudershaft, and that he has received from them a plan for German rearmament. The other story was that Dr. Adenauer had raised the question of the Saar valley the day after negotiations began in Paris between the French Foreign Office and the semi-autono-mous government of the Saar. There is a connecting link between these two apparently unrelated stories. Almost certainly it is that both Mr Schuman and Dr. Adenauer are making ready for the reopening of tne whole question of a German peace treaty. Military Proposals The military proposals show what the Germans believe to be the probable time-table. They call for one infantry division by June of this year, and then an armoured division by 1951. It is evident that these proposals have nothing to do with FieldMarshal Montgomery’s day dream, which some of our own officers in the Pentagon have been dreaming too, that the Germans can be induced to supply the troops while the Western nations supply the equipment and the generals for a Western army. The German officers and Dr.. Adenauer are not thinking of one infan-• try division by this June and one armoured division by 1951 as .Rearmament to stop the Red Army from advancing across the Elbe. They know quite well that you do not stop a bear with a popgun; if you try it, you will only provoke him. They are thinking of the time when the Red Army evacuates East Germany, leaving behind it the so-called “people’s police, a German force now under the command of General Mueller. Apparently. they expect the Russians to make a move some time this spring looking to the actual withdrawal, or to the opening of negotiations for the withdrawal, of the armies of occupation. The German officers, though their armies have been disbanded and most of their heavy equipment removed, continue to have the main elements of a general staff, appointed, it is supposed, before the surrender in 1945, and they are known in any event to be operating an intelligence service. There is no impenetrable iron curtain separating the German officers who live in the West from those who live in the East; and there can be little doubt that more or less clandestine communication and intercourse goes on continually among the officers on both sides of the line, as well as among politicians and businessmen. The estimate of these officers as to what is coming—namely decisions affecting the whole of Germany—must be taken seriously.

The French Estimate So, too, must the French estimate. For among the three Western delegations the French delegation now in Germany is by all odds the most competent, the best informed, and the most expertly trained in German affairs. The action of the French Government in respect to the Saar shows that like the Bonn government it believes that the time is rapidly approaching when the‘German peace treaty will be dealt with. Mr Schuman and Dr. Adenauer disagree about the Saar. But they understand each other very well becausethey both know that the period of the great decisions about Germany is near. Both are getting ready for it.

Dr. Adenauer, a shrewd and iap sighted man who may yet prove to h» the German Talleyrand if he survives long enough, has a quite understand! able policy. It is to obtain every p o « sible concession from the Western nations before he comes to grips in his negotiations with Eastern Germanv and the Soviet Union. He wants enough soldiers to offset the East Ger. man soldiers if and when the Red Army withdraws. But he wants also to have a free hand in his negotiations with the East. He would have a very free hand if there were nothing left-I as regards territory, reparations, or sovereignty—which he has to negotiate with the West.

There is almost nothing left now except the Saar, permission to rearm, and the American subsidy which gives the Western Powers a hold on the Adenauer government. If he could get the Saar now, if he were allowed to rearjn now, and if he could be assured that the American subsidy would con, tinue for some considerable time to come, the German settlement and the German peace treaty would be made—. with France, Great Britain, and the United States on the outside of the real negotiations, more or less commit* ted to the unreserved support of Dr. Adenauer but without any certainty that they knew what was going on Dr. Adenauer would then nave every, thing that the West has to offer before he began to deal with the East, Mr Schuman’s stand on the Saar The firm stand taken on the Saar by Mr Schuman, which happily has the support of Mr Bevin and Mr Ache- i son, involves something much greater than the disposition erf the Saar valley itself. It means that the Western ■ Powers intend to have a principal part in the coming German settlement, thftt there is a limit to the process of 11. quidating their influence and power which has been going on in recent • months. The great trouble with this liquidation, as Mr MpCloy has managed it is that he has been acting without fidj realisation that a German settlement u necessary and without a clear idea of what it involves. Indeed, the Amerh cans in Germany have been under the illusion that the separate state of West Germany is a more or less permanent thing, that the partition cap last, and that Western Germany as such can be integrated into the Atlantic commun# ity. And since the Western German politicians are decent and able men, our German policy has been to help them by persuading the French and the British to give them what they But the Western German politicians * are Germans, patriotic Germans, and never will any honest and patriotic ’ German regard the West German State as anything but a transitory make, shift on the way to an all-German settlement. No German will accept a divided Germany, with the Western part the client of the United States and the Eastern part the satellite of the Soviet Union. Therefore, though the controls and the symbols of defeat do have to be liquidated, they should not be liquidated in such a way as to deprive the Western nations of their bargaining power in the alLGer* man settlement. Both in Germany and in the State Department there is needed now, we are to be prepared for what is coming, a fresh examination of the Garman question. Mr Acheson should find another Jessup to re-examine the situation. For there is no use disguising the fact that Mr McCloy, with all his practical ability and high purposes, does not speak or understand German, does not know Germany, especially political Germany and its history and its habits and its traditions, and that his political advisers in Germany are, as compared with the men against whom they must mateh their wits, novices,