GERMANY’S SURRENDER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27291, 18 January 1950, Page 5

GERMANY’S SURRENDER

MILITARY POWER ONLY PROFESSORS QUOTE LEGAL OPINION NZPA Special Correspondent Rec. 7 p.m. LONDON, Jan. 17. A new German political group known as “ German Action ” has published an opinion of two leading German legal authorities claiming that Germany, at the end of the war, surrendered only her military power and not her national sovereignty. On the basis of this opinion, the two legal authorities. Professors Herbert Kraus and Rudolf Smend, of Gottingen University, claim that the Allied Powers are bound to observe The Hague Convention and the Atlantic Charter in dealing with Germany. The statement said that wrong conclusions might be drawn if the world continued to believe that Germany surrendered her political as well as her military power. After quoting extensively from the Instruments of Surrender signed at Rheims and Berlin in May, 1945, the two professors claim that in neither of them is there any reference to the surrender of anything more than the German armed forces. The “ German Action ” movement uses the old imperial eagle as itssymbol and is led by Prince Hubertus Loewenstein. It claims to be a nonparty movement devoted to the reunion of East and West Germany.