GERMANY: Red Recessional

Less than 24 hours after the Russian-backed SED (Socialist Unity Party) went down to crashing defeat in Berlin’s municipal elections, the Kremlin struck with a new, sharp policy of further removals of men and machinery. But the move was a defensive one which confessed defeat of more grandiose aims; it was a recessional from the Red dream of immediate domination of Germany. It was also the frankest admission to date of Soviet internal stresses and shortages.

At 2 a.m. on Oct. 23, all over the Soviet zone, doorbells began buzzing. Men who answered found Soviet troops on their stoops with an order from Marshal Vassily Sokolovsky, Russian commander in Germany. The order: you must work in Russia for at least five years, so pack at once and “count on being en route three to four weeks” (which sounded like the Urals or even Siberia).

Before dawn, trainloads of skilled German workers were rolling eastward. A few had already signed contracts to work in Russia; one who escaped near the Oder reported that soldiers went through the train and signed the rest on the dotted line.

Schumacher v. Sauckel. Factory managers got an equally rude surprise. In June, Sokolovsky had personally assured them that “in principle removals have been completed.” Last week several directors of the great Zeiss works at Jena, which was dutifully sending 90% of its product to the Soviet Union, were in Berlin negotiating for further supplies. Their phone rang ; it was the director in Jena with news of instructions to dismantle the entire plant and ship it to Russia. Similar orders went to the Junkers aircraft factory at Dessau, the Siebel jet-engine works at Halle, and to big textile, electrical and machinery plants throughout the Soviet zone.

The German reaction was violent. Next morning excited groups stood on Berlin street corners in the pouring rain discussing the affair angrily. Recalling the NÜrnberg fate of Fritz Sauckel, who ran the Nazis’ slave labor program, one-armed Berlin Social Democratic Leader Kurt Schumacher made an embarrassing point:

“If the world’s conscience accepts without comment the deportation of German technicians to work in Russian factories, then I do not understand the execution of Sauckel.”

The British and Americans also protested at the next meeting of the Berlin Kommandatura. But Russia had broken no Allied agreement. The Anglo-Americans did not come into court with surgically clean hands, because they had exported a few hundred German scientists and technicians themselves (TIME, Oct. 28). Snapped a Sokolovsky aide: “We don’t ask you what time in the night you woke them up to take them.” A direct appeal to Stalin from some 20,000 Zeiss workers in one-industry Jena had more effect. This week London reported that Stalin had ordered Sokolovsky to halt the Zeiss dismantling, pending further study.

After grabbing what German equipment and manpower it can, Russia will either:

1) accept the inevitable liabilities of a long occupation of an unfriendly country;

2) withdraw to the Oder and let eastern Germany rot; or 3) accept the Byrnes invitation to join in a united German economy, perhaps by February. By then the Russians may present their Allies with 20 million hungry eastern Germans almost stripped of productive machinery—a nightmarish economic liability which could haunt Europe for many years to come.

Soviet Zone v. Soviet Union. Even so, eastern Germany will be better off than western Russia. Foreign and Soviet observers who have recently reached Berlin from various parts of the U.S.S.R. unanimously agree that the average German in the Soviet zone is better fed, better dressed, and better housed than the average Russian in Moscow, Sverdlovsk or Leningrad. He is incomparably better off than the average citizen of devastated Ukraine and Byelorussia.

One Soviet officer who went home to his small Ukrainian town after four years in the Army found his house destroyed and his family scattered. After reassembling the remnants of his family, he asked the town authorities for a house. They gave him a slip of paper entitling him to buy an ax and showed him on a map a 100-square-yard plot in a forest near the town. “Make yourself a house,” they said. The officer went back to Berlin.