Crackdowns

Crackdown followed Allied crackdown as the Allies turned the screws on Germany.

In the Russian-occupied zone, eastern Europe's sweeping Communist-sponsored land reform hit the big landowning Junker, and that stiff-necked class that had long been one of the world's worst curses stood in imminent danger of dissolution. Saxony took the lead. There the Provincial Government issued a decree: all Junker estates of more than 100 hectares (250 acres) were expropriated.

Confiscated also was all land owned by the Nazi Party, active Nazis, war criminals, Reichstag deputies under Hitler. Three days later Brandenburg and Mecklenburg followed suit. The land would be divided among the landless peasants, farm workers and refugee German farmers. Said Communist Party Chairman Wilhelm Pieck: the bloodless revolution may be completed by October.

Here Is Hugo. In the British-occupied zones, the blow fell on German industrialists. In a sweeping move to denazify the Ruhr industries, the Control Council arrested 40 leading officials of the powerful Rhine-Westphalian coal syndicate. Biggest fish in the British net: Tycoon Hugo Stinnes, 48, son of Germany's onetime greatest financier and powerful figure in the Ruhr coal and steel industries. Said the British: "Such men represent the worst in Germany . . . never hesitated to use their vast power to support dubious political movements . . . assisted in the growth of the National Socialist Party."

In the American-occupied zone, control authorities kicked out 40,000 Berlin block, street and house leaders. They had originally been appointed by the Russians to search out known Nazis, handle ration cards, report on available labor. The American report was that the small-fry German leaders had begun to wield power in their neighborhoods just as arrogantly as their predecessors in Germany's notorious block organizations had done under Hitler; some of them had actually worked under the Nazi regime. (The British still held to the block leaders, warned them not to consider themselves little kings but servants of the people.)

In Berlin the U.S. Army got tough with municipal officers. A month ago the Army had told city officials to get the people out rounding up wood to heat their homes this winter. Berlin's Oberbuergermeister dallied, spoke of combining wood-gathering with regular forest thinning. Last week U.S. soldiers rounded up laborers in Berlin, packed them off to Grunewald. There they were given saws and axes, told to get busy. They did.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.