Troubled History Of The Saar

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27489, 25 October 1954, Page 11

Troubled History Of The Saar

(Rec. 9 p.m.) PARIS, October 23. The Saar, the coal and steel pocket state which was Hitler’s first territorial gain under the famous 1935 plebiscite, has been a festering sore in French and German relations for almost 300 years. The rich industrial territory of 967 square miles and 1,000,000 inhabitants, has pitched from one side of the French and German border to the other since French and German princes disputed the ownership in the seventeenth century. Although German in language and culture, it was awarded to France at the end of the 1914-18 war as compensation for French industrial losses in Northern France, with a proviso that a plebiscite should be held after 15 years. The Saarlanders voted by 10 to 1 in favour of incorporation in Hitler’s Reich.

It was one of the worst hit areas in Europe in World War 11. In one raid 35,000 tons of bombs were dropped, and the American 7th Army found 65 per cent of the Saar’s resources destroyed when they captured it in 1945. The trickle of production has grown in nine years to an output of more than 16,000,000 tons of coal and 3.000.000 tons of steel last year. There is little agriculture in the Saar. It can supply only 20 per cent, of its foodstuffs. and 90 per cent, of the imported food comes from France. Under the Constitution of 1947 the Saar, governed by a parliament of 50 members, is an autonomous state linked economically with France. The zone will now be “internationalised” in the framework of the new Western European Union.