Minuet & Apache

The Russians stepped up their offensive against the West at the West's most vulnerable point--blockaded Berlin.

In the wide Potsdamer Platz, which juts from the Russian sector into the British and U.S. sectors, Russian-sector police staged another raid on German black marketeers. A big crowd of Germans quickly gathered, burned Communist flags in the street, and tried to overturn a car suspected of containing a Red bigwig. Women shouted, "Get out of Berlin, you Communist bandits!" When the crowd stoned the raiders, the police answered with gunfire. Several Germans were wounded.

"It Won't Be Long." The Potsdamer Platz was the vortex of battle. One morning a Soviet jeep with five soldiers aboard shot out from the Russian side of the square, raced across it, darted ten yards up the Potsdamerstrasse in the British sector. Two soldiers jumped out; one grabbed a U.S. newsreel cameraman, but the latter wrenched free and escaped. The other Russian chased a German photographer several yards farther up the street. He seemed ready to level his rifle and fire. A British major standing nearby, trim in his Black Watch uniform, put his hand on his pistol holster. The pursuing Russian stopped and walked calmly back to his jeep.

The Russian raids caused the black-marketeers to increase their vigilance but they stayed in business. Money-changers with gaudy new marks in both hands shuffled along, murmuring: "East for West, West for East." The rate went up from 3 to 3.2 East marks for one West mark. Two unshaven old men, selling potatoes from heavy knapsacks, stared at a barbed-wire fence put up by the British. One said: "It won't be long until they have barbed wire all over the city." The other said: "Come along. The air is too thick around here."

Exchange of Prisoners. The Russians arrested the city government's anti-Communist coal administrator, who had defied a Russian demand for his resignation but imprudently stayed at work in his Russian-sector office. The British arrested the German head of the Russian-sector criminal police, who had gone to the British sector to watch a boxing match. Then the Russians topped everything to date by manhandling and seizing Thomas P. Headen, deputy chief of A.M.G.'s Information Control Division, who had ventured too close to an unguarded part of the British-Russian line. The Communist cop and the U.S. official were soon released; it looked like an exchange of war prisoners.

TIME'S Berlin Bureau Chief Emmet Hughes cabled: "The week's pattern is continuing Soviet aggressiveness and continuing Western wariness. Observing the two lines of conduct is like watching a pair of dancers, one of whom is doing a delicate minuet while the other hurls himself into a hot apache number."

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