Agreement on Germany

The U.S., Britain and France last week reached agreement on a blueprint for Western Germany. In eight days of intensive conferences in Washington, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Britain's Ernest Bevin and France's Robert Schuman accomplished more than they and their regiments of advisers had in the past eight months.

While the Western allies were still congratulating themselves on an important measure of progress toward a democratically ordered Europe, the damper came.

It seemed that a good many Germans were still far from satisfied with what the new agreement promised them.

Civilian Control. The simple, 700-word occupation statute should have given the Germans a number of things to be grateful for. Along with the statute, the Western allies confirmed a previous agreement to stop most of the dismantling of German industrial plants, and to admit the West German state as a full-fledged partner in the Marshall Plan organization. Once the state comes into being, Military Government will end. Some occupation forces, however, will remain. The allies will retain certain key powers of control, to be vested in three civilian high commissioners. They will completely control "disarmament. . . demilitarization . . . related fields of scientific research . . . reparations . . . the Ruhr . . . decartelization . . . displaced persons and refugees . . . protection, prestige and security of the occupying forces . . . foreign affairs . . . foreign trade and exchange . . ." In these fields, the three-power agreement provides, on French insistence, that any high commissioner can exercise a veto. The high commissioners may also take a hand in any other matter if they consider it "essential to security or to preserve democratic government in Germany."

A U.S. liaison officer rushed a copy of the occupation statute to the deadlocked constitutional assembly at Bonn, with an urgent appeal from the Western Foreign Ministers to accept it and get cracking with their draft of a German constitution.

The German politicians at Bonn went into a huddle, announced that they would withhold "official" comment for several days. But it was already clear that the Socialists --who had made the loudest demands for a more centralized Western German state" --were bitterly opposed to the new agreement. Berlin's Socialist newspaper Sozial-demokrat called the statute's stringent restrictions on German sovereignty "reasons for sorrow."

"Unbelievably Better." This hostility was far from unanimous. Ernst Reuter, Berlin's hard-hitting Socialist mayor, just back from a trip to the U.S., said the agreement was "unbelievably better than anything we had expected after all those months." Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer, president of the Bonn council, warned that "failure to reach agreement [at Bonn] would be a fiasco for the democratic idea and a catastrophe for us all."

It was true that the occupation statute was far from perfect, and that it contained seeds of future allied wrangling and German frustration. But Russia still maintained her unrelenting pressure to wreck

Western German recovery; the U.S. stood committed to resist that pressure, as was underlined last week in a U.S. Army Day parade at the training grounds at Grafen-woehr, Bavaria (see cut). In this situation the Socialists--for all their good intentions--would be irresponsible in rejecting the best offer which the Western allies could for the time being make.

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