REUNIFICATION OF GERMANY

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31088, 17 June 1966, Page 9

REUNIFICATION OF GERMANY

West German Leader Would Accept Russian Troops (N.Z.P.A. Reuter —Copyright? BONN, June 16. The Parliamentary leader of West Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats, Dr. Rainer Barzel, has dropped a bombshell with radical proposals for a reunited Germany in which the Soviet Union would still have the right to base troops in Germany. The West German capital was stunned when an advance report was circulated in Bonn of a speech Dr. Barzel is to make later today in the West German Embassy in Washington and again tomorrow in New York.

Officials said that Dr. Barzel, who is widely tipped as the future Chancellor, had not cleared his speech in advance with Chancellor Ludwig Erhard. Dr. Barzel, is deputy-chairman of Chancellor Erhard’s Christian Democratic Union.

His speech makes proposals on German reunification the dominating issue in German politics which go far beyond anything ever mooted by any Christian Democratic leader, although some are similar to the views of the party’s Free Democrat coalition allies.

Dr. Barzel suggested that Bonn should take over East Germany’s long-term trade zsreement with the Soviet Union on a 20-year basis as a step towards reunification. He submitted that there could still be a place for Soviet troops in a reunited Germany as an alternative to the security guarantee for Moscow of maintaining East Germany as a separate State. He also proposed that allGerman expert commissions be formed to draft plans for the future of Germany on behalf of the wartime “big four” —the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France —which are responsible for Germany. Working Group Simultaneously the three Western Powers and West Germany should form a working group to study all proposals so far made for a German settlement and prepare a joint approach to Moscow.

Dr. Barzel’s blueprint for a united Germany also suggests that the Communist Party—at present banned in West Germany—should be free to operate throughout the country. Political observers in Bonn were puzzled at the timing of Dr. Barzel’s speech. But they doubted that such a senior politician would be seeking prestige by sensationalism.

It was seen more as a dramatic move to end stagnation in the German question and to counter the opposition Social Democratic Party’s

planned exchange of public speakers with the East German Communists. Some observers linked the speech with important forthcoming elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany’s most populous state, in which the Social Democrats’ popularity has risen steeply in recent months. But’ it clashes with Dr. Erhard’s express wish that all parties should work together on all-German policy and that there should be no ventures by individuals. Dr. Barzel holds that West Germany must demonstrate her “humanity and integrity," that a settlement in Europe requires close friendship between Bonn and Paris as well as a more cohesive Atlantic community, and that the Western alliance should be less a military “fire brigade” than an arrangement for joint political and economic action. The essence of Western

policy, Dr. Barzel believes, must be a major effort to persuade the Soviet Union that the division of Germany is more dangerous than her unification would be. Defeatist Symbols In time, he said, it could be demonstrated that Soviet security, prosperity and ideology were not inconsistent with permitting a free election throughout Germany. If the Communists were not afraid of fair political combat, he said, they might be persuaded to exchange the defeatist symbols of a wall in Berlin and closed frontiers for the right of “agitation” in a unified Germany. German reunification “does not depend on the very last Soviet soldier leaving German soil,” says Dr Barzel in his prepared speech.

Personal View “In fact, in a reunited Germany and in the framework of a European security system, there might be even room for troops of the Soviet Union. Talking to reporters in Washington, Dr. Barzel insisted that the suggestion he made in his speech was entirely his own, and refused to say whether it had the blessing of his government. The proposal, he said in his speech, was a “calculated risk.” But it was necessary because the German people were getting increasingly disappointed with the failure of their allies to achieve unification. ‘Act And Urge’ “The prevailing mood in Germany is marked by disappointment,” he said. “Neither the unity of their country nor the unification of Europe has been achieved. The Atlantic community is stagnating. “We refuse to just sit and wait. We shall act and urge.”