GERMANY: Drang Nach Wesfen

In November 1934, at the Soviet embassy in Berlin, Hitler’s War Minister Werner von Blomberg raised a glass of sparkling Crimean wine in a toast: “Never shall we forget what the Soviet army did for Germany. I drink to the well-being and to the future of the great and glorious Soviet army, to faithful comradeship in arms, today and in the future!” The toast marked the end of the military-training deal which Germany and Bolshevik Russia secretly made after World War I. Germany had needed arms and space to train; Russia, know-how. Both had got what they wanted. By 1934 Hitler was ready to junk the deal, make his own arms and planes. By June 1941 the Nazi-Soviet war doused Blomberg’s hope of “faithful comradeship in arms.”

But last week the hope was glowing again. Soviet Russia was building the nucleus of a tough new German army in the Eastern Zone of Germany.

“The Only Life.” On the drill fields the old Wehrmacht close-order commands crackled out: “Die Augen—links! . . . Das Gewehr—über!” Officers of the Bereitschaften—or “ready squads,” the soft name for the new army—wore gaudy Wehrmacht epaulets. Recruits were dashing and proud in well-tailored blue uniforms with mirrory leather belts, spanking black boots.

Said one young German soldier to a friend: “Damn it, you feel like a man again when you hear those commands! You say to yourself, ‘Pull yourself together, get it right.’ I’m not a Communist, but this army is the only life today.”

A youth who goes into the Bereitschaften is paid 345 marks a month, about double the pay of a skilled worker. In the Communist army he also gets his clothes and 150 cigarettes a month.

Since summer a brisk recruiting campaign has been going on and upper-teenagers, already indoctrinated by Communist youth groups, have flocked to the colors. In Jena, Leipzig, Rostock, Halle, along the whole belt of Wehrmacht barracks in Eastern Germany, discipline and fanaticism are forging the cadre of an army. Former Nazi officers, retreaded in Russia, drill stiff bearing into formless figures.

From reveille at 6 until retreat at 5, the recruits take general combat training—map-reading, technology and basic tactics in classrooms; firing-range practice and maneuvers in the field. In the evening the political commissars explain: “The People’s Democracy considers the officers of its People’s Army as the guarantors of peace . . . Your strength must force the Western imperialists to evacuate Germany.”

This propaganda, the study in the classrooms, and the brisk hard exercise in the field have expert supervision: they are directed by German Communism’s ablest and most famed soldier-of-fortune.

General Gomez Returns. In 1937 a German Communist, fighting in Spain, wrote in his diary: “The general is a gigantic man. His eyes lie deep in his massive face. His nature is jovial—but I suspect that the joviality can fall like a mask and the features can grow taut.”

The man he described was Communist “General Gomez,” commander of the Loyalist XIII Brigade, later chief of staff of all the International Brigades. He was really Hans Zaisser, born in 1893 in the Ruhr. In World War I, Zaisser fought as a German noncom. Later he joined the Red military organization (M-Apparat), was a leader in the 1923 abortive uprisings in the Rhineland. When Hitler came in, he fled to Soviet Russia.

After World War II Zaisser returned to Germany, became Minister of the Interior in Saxony. Last August he received a new title: Chef der Abteilung für Schulung bei der deutschen Verwaltung des Inneren (Chief of the Division for Training Connected with the German Administration of the Interior). The title was a fancy cover for his real job, head of the Bereitschaften-cadre army.

Zaisser’s army has a planned initial strength of 45,000 men. It began as an elite officer-training cadre for the Volkspolizei (People’s Police), which was—and is—an ill-organized, straggling, desertion-ridden mob of 250,000 men. In the year it has been in operation, the Volkspolizei has proved to be unreliable for the Reds’ long-range purposes.

Zaisser removed from the People’s Police a hard core of former Nazi officers, carefully screened P.W.s and recruited youths. Then he set them up in Bereitschaften under direct control of the Russians. The ready squads, of 250 men each, are armed with rifles, submachine guns, machine guns and light artillery. In equipment they have a better start than did the bootleg German army of the ’20s, which was also founded on a cadre of the best officer material.

Hans Zaisser’s army nucleus worries democratic Germans in the West. They can see compulsory military service in the Soviet Zone around the corner, with a full-fledged War Ministry in the puppet Communist government of East Germany.

The immediate effect, they concede, is chiefly political rather than military. Zaisser’s army is impressive proof to them of Soviet Russia’s earnestness in the struggle for Germany and Europe.