Detente Blues

The steady hemorrhage of people from labor-short East Germany continues to be serious. From January through September, 4,930 East Germans escaped to the West, 20% more than the total for the same period in 1972. This year, the number of escapees is expected to reach 6,500, despite one of the world's most formidable man-made barriers, the Berlin Wall, erected twelve years ago to halt the drain. Last week East Germany's doctrinaire Communist government took steps to stanch some of the flow by staging the finale of a show trial of three West German people-smugglers in an East Berlin courtroom.

The object of the exercise was less to mete out justice than to pressure the Bonn government into cracking down on the flourishing business of helping East Germans, principally highly trained professionals like doctors and engineers, to escape to the West. Stiff jail sentences were part of the message. One of the accused, a West Berlin seaman named Karl-Heinz Hetzschold, 30, got 11 1/2 years for damaging East German interests and illegal profiteering. The lightest sentence was seven years for long-haired Hans-Dieter Voss, 19.

They were charged with smuggling more than 90 East Germans to the West, most of them in specially-equipped automobiles with false compartments, traveling on Communist autobahns. The court was told that the job had become easier in the detente atmosphere following the 1971 Berlin agreement, when the Communists stopped searching all vehicles using transit routes to Berlin. One of the accused testified that he had paid two U.S. soldiers $1,600 to help him.

Western newsmen were invited to ensure maximum publicity. They heard carefully orchestrated testimony that the people-smugglers--who allegedly worked for commercial organizations that charged up to $8,000 to arrange escapes--had been in collusion with the Bonn government and the West Berlin senate.

Violated Agreement. East Germany's party chief, Erich Honecker, underscored the propaganda basis of the trial in an interview with the party newspaper, Neues Deutschland. He charged that West Germany had allowed the people-smugglers to take advantage of relaxed controls on access routes running through East Germany that linked West Berlin to West Germany. To Honecker, this violated "the letter and spirit" of the 1971 transit agreement between the two Germanys, which makes Bonn responsible for preventing misuse of the routes.

As the trial ended, the East Germans announced--ostensibly for purely economic reasons--that this week they will double the amount of money (currently five marks for each day spent in East Berlin and ten for each spent in the rest of East Germany) that West German and West Berlin visitors must exchange for Eastern marks when they visit the East. In fact, the real motive was to slow the rising number of visitors from the western parts of Germany (expected to be 10 million this year); their affluent presence grates on the nerves of East German party chiefs, and inspires defections.

West Berlin Mayor Klaus Schuetz had another explanation for Honecker's charges and the rise in the exchange requirements. "East Germany," he said, "just does not seem to be able to cope with detente any more."

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