GERMANY: Pieck’s Progress

In Berlin’s Russian zone the press announced big news: with Russian blessing, the capital’s four political parties had forged the Anti-Fascist Democratic Union. The new German popular front had agreed on a five-point program: 1) cleansing Germany of Hitlerite remnants; 2) speedy reconstruction to provide work, bread, shelter and clothes; 3) a democratic state; 4) freedom of thought and worship; 5) recognition of Germany’s reparation debts.

The Union’s chief architect and the man most likely to dominate its central committee was shrewd, grey Communist Wilhelm Pieck, onetime Reichstag Deputy, more recently a founder and charter member of Moscow’s Free Germany Committee. The four parties included the three authorized last month by the Russians

(Communists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats) and one newcomer, the Liberal Democrats. In a manifesto calling for a “liberal ideology and conception of the state,” the Liberal Democrats took up a Weimar Republic tradition. The new party’s leaders included two aged democrats: Eugen Schiffer, 85, a Weimar Minister of Finance and Justice; Dr. Wilhelm Külz, 70, former Bürgermeister of Dresden and Weimar Minister of the Interior.

The new Popular Front was reported to have offices in all sectors of Berlin, including the British and U.S., where political activity is severely restricted. In the Russian zone its program was hailed as the opening of a new page in German history.

Why had the Russians promoted the Union on the eve of the Big Three parley? London’s Daily Herald offered a clue. The Big Three, it reported, will discuss a common administrative policy for all Germany and an overall German government under Allied control. In any such discussion, Generalissimo Stalin would be way ahead of the game. His part of Germany was the only one with ready-made political parties and a program on which the new Reich might be built.