SOVIET “TRICK” IN GERMANY IS DENOUNCED

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 March 1948, Page 5

SOVIET “TRICK” IN GERMANY IS DENOUNCED

LONDON, March 11. The Berlin correspondent of The Times .says that General Sir Brian Robertson’s denunciation of the Russian-sponsored Socialist Unity Party as a “stooge” party was made at a meeting of the Allied Control Council, and the occasion was a letter from the three German chairmen of the “Union of the Socialist Unity Party and the Communist Party of Germany” protesting against alleged-vetoing of the union in western Germany and the banning of its meetings and publications. The letter was accompanied by a long Russian memorandum presented by Marshal Sokolovsky, the Soviet Military Governor, which said among other things that under the Potsdam Agreement “democratic” organisations were allowed.

Marshall Sokolovsky, in a personal statement, also alleged* that in western Germany war criminals were still at large and were being used in “the crusade against Communism.” General Robertson, who according io The Times correspondent, spoke with deep feeling and indignation, said that the Communist Party had been shown great tolerance. It was a noisy party and in view of its truculence and extravagances it should account itself fortunate in the treatment it had received.

The Socialist Unity Party had not, General Robertson said, been prohibited in the British zone. The German people in the British zone did not want it. They regarded it as a fraud as “a trick for enticing workers away from a genuine Socialist conception into the toils of Communism.' The Socialist Unity Party’s idea of unity deceived nobody, General Robertson added. It was a “stooge” party, and the unity to which it invited followers was unity in bondage. Its German chairmen and fellow conspirators were playing a very dangerous game. They would find out how big their mistake was when the iron curtain which shut off eastern Germany from the West was lifted. “They will then be brought to account by the people of Germany for their attempts to betray democracy and to fasten on the necks of their fellow countrymen a yoke of their own importation."