Strike

Barely a week after the lifting of the Berlin blockade, the city echoed to the blast of gunfire and the shouts of angry mobs. Trouble started over the fact that Berlin's city railways and elevated lines, which are controlled by the Russians, paid their workers in East zone marks, although most live in the Western sectors. Those workers wanted their wages in West marks (the only legal tender where they live, and four times the value of the East marks). Last week, 16,000 workers of the non-Communist Independent Railway Workers Union walked out.

The Soviet-run German railway authorities thought they knew what to do about that; they ordered strikebreakers into action. Armed trains bearing police reinforcements and carloads of young Communist shock troops began to pour into West Berlin elevated and railroad stations. The strikebreakers barricaded themselves inside a dozen Berlin stations.

"Back to Your Masters." Tempers on both sides turned ugly. Strikers, armed with crowbars and clubs, battled with the Red strikebreakers. At the Tempelhof station, Major General Pavel A. Kvashnin, Soviet transport chief, barely got away when strikers tried to rough him up amid cries of "Kill him! Hang the fat swine!" When strikers stormed the Schoeneberg elevated station, Communist railway police inside unleashed four police dogs. When this did not stop the strikers, the police gave up and were escorted through the crowd, to shouts of "Go back to your Russian masters!"

On Sunday at Charlottenburg, in the British sector, a crowd of 2,000, some of them young toughs between eight and 16 who had no connection with the union, stormed up the station's sandy slope to capture a train bringing Communists from the Soviet sector to occupy stations down the line. A striker leaped into the engineer's cab, slammed on the brake. As the train bumped to a halt, Communist cops began shooting into the crowd. Four times the station changed hands; twelve were seriously wounded. Finally German police from the British sector took over. The Communist cops meekly gave up their arms and were marched off under escort.

"We Cannot Fight On." West Berlin's mayor begged the U.S., British and French to let Western police take over the protection of all railways in their sectors. U.S. Brigadier General Frank L. Howley called the Western commandants into session to discuss what he called an "intolerable situation." To avoid international complications just before the Paris Big Four meeting, the commanders hedged. Western police, they decided, could intervene only to restore order when individual fights got out of hand.

This week, after at least one death and a total of 1,200 injured, the strikers still held some of the West sector stations, but the Red railway administration, which by then had run in hundreds of strikebreakers and guards, seemed in no mood to give in to their demands. Said Union Official Christian Hanebuth: "We cannot fight on physically against their guns." But next day, 3,000 strikers and their sympathizers went right on fighting, tried to storm the railway station at the Berlin Zoo. Communist police fired on them, killing a 16-year-old boy. British authorities sharply demanded the withdrawal of the Red railway police. Cried one strike leader: "Be patient, fellows . . . We are reaching our goal."

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