THE NATIONS: Pieck’s Progress

Signal honors came last week to Wilhelm Pieck, the little white-haired, pink-cheeked old (73) boss of German Communism. They came because, after the summer’s respite, the Russians were opening a new, rougher phase in the battle for Germany.

Father Unity. Pieck had helped found the German Communist Party in 1919, has been a faithful party wheelhorse ever since. When Hitler came to power, he found a home-away-from-home in Moscow. While Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, at Yalta, discussed Germany’s future with their ally Stalin, Pieck was busy making speeches to German P.W.s in Russia, forming the nucleus of a future German Communist regime. When the Red Army moved into Berlin, Pieck was flown into the city by special Russian plane. He had work to do there.

Last week, after four years as the sly, tireless head of the Communist-run German Socialist Unity Party, “Father Unity” (as his comrades called him) was formally inaugurated as president of the new Red puppet republic in Germany’s Russian zone. Pieck, a worker’s son, watched a torchlight parade of 300,000 Berliners (complete with fireworks, goose step and Prussian military marches), inspected the Communist-trained “people’s police.” Berliners compared the show to the one the Nazis staged when Hitler seized power in 1933. Two days after the fireworks came the greatest honor of all: a personal letter from Joseph Stalin.

Wrote the big leader to the little boss: “The experience of the last war has shown that the German and Soviet peoples made the largest sacrifice in that war, that both these peoples have the largest potentialities in Europe to complete great actions of world significance … I wish you success on this new and glorious road. Long live and prosper the unified, independent, democratic, peace-loving Germany.”

Communist Fiat. This throbbing plea for German friendship was only the beginning; this week Stalin continued to woo Germany by announcing that German P.W.s (of whom an estimated 225,000 are still in Russian camps) would soon start going home. Then Moscow went through the diplomatic farce of “recognizing” its puppet regime and exchanging ministers with it. In Washington, Secretary of State Dean Acheson denounced the puppet republic as being “without legal validity or foundation in the popular will . . . created by Communist fiat.”

But little Willie Pieck buckled down tc his new job in Berlin’s eastern sector, fat and florid as usual, thinking about great actions of world significance.