STRUGGLE IN BERLIN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 77, Issue 6568, 20 September 1948, Page 3

STRUGGLE IN BERLIN

“CONTEST WITH COMMUNISM” THE GERMAN VIEW “ Your great advantage in your contest with Communism,” a Berlin Socialist said recently, “is that the missionaries are Russians,” writes Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley journalist, from Berlin. In this he drew attention to the tendency in London’,! and presumably throughout the Commonwealth, to see in the Berlin struggle, and kindred disputes, a political struggle against Communism. To Berliners it is a physical struggle against the Russians. They have had one taste of the Red Army in action, and do not want a second. A good part of their friendship for ’the British and Americans, with the French a poor third’, in Berlin to-day is not any natural affection, but something more like supplication for protection. They would feel much the same were the Russians capitalists or even teetotallers.

The same Socialist went on to say, with much discretion,, that before Hitler the German Communist Party was quite strong. Indeed, the Nazis never really won Hamburg over. The party there, he suggested, was more or less of German inspiration and growth. Wjith respect to the Western allies —it is hard to tell whether a German is telling you what he feels or what he thinks you would like to hear—he held that Communism as a creed was nowhere near such a bogy in Berlin as the evident presence of Red Array troops. The Red Army has put sections of crack units into the Berlin front window. excellently equipped and behaved compared to second-line troops stationed down in the Russian zone.

According to British intelligence officers, the reasons for the endeavours to pitchfork the Wlestern Powers out of Berlin are threefold. First, Russia has a spy phobia, as strong as 6ver the Japanese had. Any Briton or American taking photographs of anything in the Russian sector of Berlin, which includes the Unter deii Linden, the Wilhelmstrasse, the Cathedral, the Town Hall, and the Kaiser’s palace, is doing so solely to record Russian military dispositions. Beilin is to them a Wlestern centre set 140 miles back into Soviet territory, and they do not look on it as a good idea. Second, and more political, stems from the Russians being lonp - accustomed to exercising political nersuasion in occupied territories without opposition salesmen appearing with rival wares. Throughout Berlin, including the Soviet sector, the elected Mayor, Ernst Reuter, whom the Russians will not allow to take his seat, the deputy Mayor, Frau Schroeder, and Franz Neumann stand up and say just what they- think of the blockade and of the Russian manipulation of political offices and the like. The Russians cannot bring themselves wholeheartedly to applaud these manifestations of corrupt western democracy. Reuter, in particular, is anathema to them, for hp is a Mos-cow-trained Communist who recanted. This, it would appear, is a njuch worse thing to be than an unrepentent capitalist. Weak though German politicians may be throughout the bizonal area to the west, do not under-estimate these stalwarts of Berlin. Except for naming the specific wall, they know just where they will be if the Russians grab the city by force. Seeing their outspoken courage, Germans who otherwise might tag along with tfhe Russians for the sake of a whole skin and something on their plate take heart. No one has been heard to estimate how Communism would fare in ruined and hungry Berlin were it not for the Russian missionaries. The city is in the physical depths where Communism best blossoms. For the present the question is academic. Berliners remember th? first wave of Russian shock troops who battled in their city. They were strong, correct fighters. They warned the people against the second wave who would fellow, and few warnings have been so justified. In this there is a parallel to the German army, whose front-line troops were generally correct enough. It was when the Nazis came to take over the conquered areas that the horror started.

The fear of the Red Army in Berlin, so it seems from conversations I have had, is something like the fear which would have swept New Zealand womenfolk in 1942 had they known a Japanese invasion to be imminent. Whereas in the W'estern zones, on their way to recovery, the plea is that Germany would get along much better if the occupation armies went home, seldom can conquerors have received such encouragement as the Western allies are at present accorded in Berlin. They will continue to be thoroughly welcome till just that moment when the Red Army disappears as a threat to the city.