Young Communist Exposes Terror of Soviet to Germany

Grey River Argus, 20 September 1949, Page 8

Young Communist Exposes Terror of Soviet to Germany

BERLIN, September 15. Joseph Reimann, the 23-year-old son of West Germany’s Communist lender Max Reimann, flew from the Soviet Zone to-day and put himselt under the protection of the British Miltiarv Government. A British statement has been issued quoting Reimann as -saying: “I wanted to escape from the terror in the East Zone and especially from the East Zone police. After seven years in the Army and in Russian prison camps, I found myself once again undergoing military training. I want to be a free man again.” Joseph Reimann walked into the British headquarters in Berlin, say’ng he was “just fed up and made a bolt for it,” and requested asylum as a political refugee. The British authorities said that 'Reimann was from Berlin in an R.A.F. plane, bu they refused to say where he is now. Reimann had been a member of the Soviet organised “German People’s Police” for several months. After Reimann returned to Berlin from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp last March, -an anti-Communist Hamberg paper published a report that life in a Soviet prison camp hstd cured him of Communism and that he had refused to visit his Communist father. There have been several recent desertions of Soviet Zone police, most of them fleeing into the American Zone of Bavaria. Most of the deserters have told the authorities that they fled to avoid being sent with German detachments, to fight in Greece or. the Balkans.