PROPOSED MARCH IN BERLIN

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26032, 8 February 1950, Page 5

PROPOSED MARCH IN BERLIN

COMMUNIST YOUTH ORGANISATION

REQUEST TO WESTERN AUTHORITIES

(Rec. 7 p.m.) BERLIN, February 6. The Free German Youth, a Communist organisation, asked Western Berlin officials to-day for permission for 500.000 youths to march through the Western sectors of the city at Whitsun. Allied and German officials have been told that the youths plan to seize Power in Western Berlin during the Whitsun holiday. In its formal application to-day. Which was made to Western Berlin’s Mayor (Professor Ernst Reuter), the youth organisation promised an orderly march. A Government spokesman said that this promise could mean that the marchers would be accompanied by police from the Eastern zone. The City Government’s reply to the application would be given after talks with the Allied authorities. An Allied official said: “If we let them in there will surely be violence, and if we bar them there will be violence.”

Many members of the youth organisation are German Army veterans in their twenties and early thirties. Western intelligence officers say that reports have piled up in the last month H*at the youth organisation plans to <nsrupt the city’s transport, overpower the 11,000 Western Berlin police, and taxe over the city government.

v-n e ? 4hs in U.S. Accidents.—Accidents “hied about 91.000 persons in the States last year, and cost '•200 000.000 dollars. " The National ®aiety Council, reporting this, said that heath roll was the lowest on record.—New York, Feb. 6.