The Ink of Hate

For months, the Russian propaganda machine has been hurling epithets at West Germany, and the closer the summit comes, the thicker the epithets come. In the Moscow press, Konrad Adenauer's ministers are "Hitler rabble" and "Nazi criminals." When swastikas were found over his signature on the guest book after his visit to Washington's National Gallery of Art last month, Izvestia charged that Adenauer himself had drawn them. When the West German government finally lashed back last week with an angry note protesting Khrushchev's "obvious untruthfulness," Moscow not only rejected the note as "slanderous" but produced a new propaganda gimmick: an elaborate mock war-criminal trial of one of Adenauer's Cabinet ministers.

Target (in absentia) was stocky, heavy-jowled Refugee Minister Theodor Oberlander, 54. Soviet and foreign newsmen, photographers and TV cameramen were summoned to the October Hall of Moscow's House of Unions. Before a panel including a well-known geneticist, a ranking Orthodox prelate and a retired lady fighter pilot, some ten "witnesses" testified to Oberlander's purported participation in wartime Nazi atrocities.

The charges were old, and Oberlander promptly denounced them as "monstrous lies." But there was no doubt that he had been a dedicated Nazi. Adenauer had long overlooked Oberlander's past because as a Refugee Party leader, he brought the government strong support from West Germany's 10 million refugees. But Moscow's sideshow came at a time when opposition Socialists and a growing number of Adenauer's Christian Democrats were arguing that Oberlander had become a political liability both at home and abroad. Last week, faced with a Socialist threat of a parliamentary investigation to look into Oberlander's record, Adenauer gave in. Oberlander was sent off on a "holiday" until May 1--when he will be eligible for an $8,500 pension and then "retire."

Predictably the Communists began baying for the resignation of the Bonn government's other prominent ex-Nazi--Interior Minister Gerhard Schroeder. At this point Western governments ostentatiously closed ranks with their much-vilified friends in Bonn. With an almost audible sigh of relief, West German newspapers headlined Secretary of State Herter's Chicago speech rejecting Khrushchev's charges of Nazi militarism in Bonn as "completely without foundation," and De Gaulle's tribute in London to "our common ally." As for the British, foreign experts pointed out that the attacks on Bonn were no doubt designed to divert attention from the Communists' harsh new farm program, which has collectivized all but 10% of East Germany's tillable land and sent 13,400 refugees pouring into West Germany in the last month.

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