The Eleventh Meridian

The Communists had given noisy warning of what might happen if the West German Republic cast its lot with the allies. "The signing of the contractual agreement," blustered East German Premier Otto Grotewohl last month, "will produce in Germany the same conditions that existed in Korea." He added later: "It will bring Germany to the brink of a civil war, and of a new third World War."

Last week, with the contractual agreement signed but not sealed, the Reds were doing their best to make Grotewohl's prediction come true.

Across the heart of Germany, from the Baltic to the Alps, the "chicken-wire fence," which split but did not sever the East & West zones, became the newest extension of the Iron Curtain, and a bristling military frontier. Where there had been a steady if illegal trickle of East-West trade, now there was an absolute barrier, charged with electric hatreds, and ominously reminiscent of Korea's 38th parallel.

Splitting the Sea. Along the actual border, blue-jacketed troopers of the East German People's Police (Vopos) hewed a narrow gash, 850 miles long and eleven yards wide. Behind it they systematically gouged the life out of a 5,000-yard "dead zone" across which none dared pass, razing forests and farmhouses, smashing villages and tossing 22,000 Germans out of their cottages along the eleventh meridian.* Eight thousand refugees clutching clothes and cooking utensils risked the Vopos' guns and fled to West Germany.

In the north, at the Baltic Sea, an old German stood in sorrow, watching the waves curling up the gritty beach at the seaside town of Travemuende. The waves split on a two-foot iron stake threaded with barbed wire. "The Communists," he said, "are not content with splitting our country. They are even splitting the sea."

South of Travemuende, the eleventh meridian lances through fir-tufted hills. With Teutonic thoroughness, the Reds have driven a 33-ft. strip of plowland through villages, fields and farmyards. On the highways the new divide is a steel barrier, or a deep-dug ditch; sometimes, it is a sea of soft sand, carefully smoothed so as to catch the footprints of all who try to pass. Heavily armed Vopos glare across the meridian at the outnumbered West German guards. Behind them in the Communist hinterland is silence and fear.

Reported TIME Correspondent Tom Lambert: "The fear shows clearly in the faces of the few who flee. I have seen the same silent terror in the faces of North Koreans stumbling southward, wading ice-crusted rivers, to escape the Red armies."

Fencing the Street. At the spot where the newly gashed border joins the reinforced frontier of Red Czechoslovakia, 18 of the 22 houses in the Bavarian village of Moedlareuth lay on the east side. A Vopos detachment swung into the village, and built a stout wooden fence, ten feet high, clear through the main street. Miller Wurziger's grain mill stood in the way, so the Vopos tore it down. Wurziger and his son jumped from an upstairs window of their house and dragged Frau Wurziger to safely through the pig sty. Of Moedlareuth's 18 East zone families, six have fled to the West, four "political unreliables" have been dragged farther East.

Liebau is another deserted village that straddles the border. Its 20 families had once turned down a Communist invitation to demonstrate against "American warmongers." One night last week, the Liebauers loaded whatever they could on to farm wagons, and stealthily made off into West Germany. Only one old man stayed behind. He watched the Vopos searching the houses, then asked permission to cross the line to persuade his neighbors to return. Once safely in the West, he tacked a note on the frontier barrier: "I talked to the Liebauers. They are not coming back. Neither am I."

* Unlike Korea's 38th parallel, which ran approximately eastwest, the Potsdam line dividing Germany snakes unevenly from north to south roughly along the line of the eleventh meridian east of Greenwich, until it reaches Bavaria, where West German territory bulges eastward to the Czech border.

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