GERMANY: Strength for the West

At war’s end Germany’s economy was as flat and hashed up as a hamburger, but not nearly so nourishing.

Today the remarkable fact is that Western Germany is pouring out more goods of all kinds than in 1938, the peak year of Göring’s arms drive. From the Baltic shores to the rolling green hills of Bavaria, there is a throb and a hum. On the wide, sweeping autobahns there are more cars than ever before in German history. Building of houses is up to America’s boom-time rate. Once shattered and chilled by Allied bombs, the Ruhr’s blast furnaces this week were hot and glowing, reddening the night sky with a dramatic picture of economic resurgence.

Total German output is now 128% of 1936’s. Production of iron ore, crude oil, light metal products, artificial fibers, optical and precision instruments has reached an alltime high.

What has done this? There are many factors, but basically the answer is a mixture of American dollars (over $4 billion in aid of all kinds) and German energy.

And who are the men who have stirred the mixture? They are a curious class: tough and harddriving, acute in their business dealings yet politically obtuse, often irresponsible.

Until U.S. pressure induced Bonn to choke off the flow of strategic materials to the Soviets, many of these businessmen who consider themselves anti-Communists had complacently fattened their purses and paunches by slipping steel and machinery to the Russians.

WILLY HERMANN SCHLIEKER is the outstanding example of this type. Only 37, Schlieker is one of the Ruhr’s ablest, richest (total 1950 business: $24 million) operators in the steel business. Son of a poor Hamburg ship fitter, he started work at 16 as an SS typist, joined the Nazi Party in 1941. He has twice reorganized the German steel industry: once for Hitler’s war production boss, Albert Speer, later for the Allies. With similar impartiality, he shipped $12 million worth of goods to the Soviets in 1949-50. Then, when Bonn clamped down on this trade, he switched westward, made $700,000 profit this year out of trading German steel for U.S. coal. Schlieker now claims to be a reformed character. To prove it, he recently gave Düsseldorf $475,000 for workers’ housing. A British dossier concludes: “Schlieker is a ruthless opportunist, vain, ambitious and egotistical . . . With his ability, ruthlessness and adaptability, he seems destined for a leading role in Ruhr industry whatever form of organization it adopts in the future.”

FRIEDRICH HARDERS at 42 is chief trustee of Dortmund-Hörder Hutten Union, Germany’s largest steel company. He is a single-minded technician. Never a Nazi Party member, he still knows or cares little about politics but has managed to reach the conclusion that exporting to the East is bad “for the moment”: “You can’t send people iron and steel if there’s a danger of their using it against you.”

ULRICH HABERLAND, 50, is the temperamental boss of Leverkusen’s huge Bayer works (biggest single chunk of the I. G. Farben chemical empire now being decartelized). Ex-Nazi son of an East German clergyman, he now claims to be apolitical. He is the reviving chemical industry’s chief business strategist.

FRITZ BERG, 50, is the bustling prototype of the smaller German industrialist. Sole owner and boss of seven small metal works, he also heads the German equivalent of the N.A.M. A traditionalist, he fits right into the feudal atmosphere of his home town Altena with its margravial castle (1122) on the heights, its grimy, smoking industries below. Berg was a Nazi Party member from 1937 to 1945.

Such men are hardly the stuff from which sturdy democracies are made. Yet they, as much as Konrad Adenauer’s government, have made truncated West Germany a going concern. Serving their own interests, they also serve the West. For a resurrected Germany, economically and politically linked to NATO, may decisively swing the European balance of power against Russia.