Foreign News: Masterly Performance

Russia’s Free Germany Committee came home to roost last week. The newborn German Communist Party met in Berlin and issued a manifesto setting forth the Party’s program for the next step in Russian-occupied Germany. The program, whose moderation was startling chiefly to people who try to understand Communist behavior without understanding Communism, called for a popular front, parliamentary government and the unhampered development of private enterprise. The manifesto specifically:

¶Rejected the Soviet system for Germany, “because such a course does not correspond with the conditions of the development of Germany at the present moment.”

¶Demanded the “development of private enterprise on the basis of private ownership” as a task “in the struggle against hunger, joblessness and homelessness.” ¶Demanded the “complete liquidation of the remnants of the Hitlerite regime and the Nazi Party.”

¶Projected a careful purge of the schools and “the introduction of a genuine, democratic, freedom-loving, progressive spirit.”

¶Proposed the legalization of trade unions and “defense of the masses from arbitrary, excessive exploitation.” ¶Proposed confiscation of the big estates of Nazis, Junkers and “imperialists” and their division among the “landless peasants.”

¶Conceded the need for reparations to countries ravaged by “Hitlerite aggression,” with the proviso that the heaviest burden be placed on “the shoulders of the wealthiest groups.”

Popular Front. The manifesto, which promptly received the blessing of Marshal Georgi Zhukov, administrator of the Russian occupation zone, was signed by Wilhelm Pieck, head of Moscow’s former Free Germany Committee (TIME, Oct. 30) and a number of other German Communists who have returned from Russia or from concentration camps to take key jobs in the new German administration.

The Communists hoped that their manifesto would “serve as the basis for the formation of a bloc of antifascist, democratic parties.” This popular-front tactic began to work at once. Members of the Social Democratic Party decided to cooperate with the Communist Party in a joint working committee of 20 to carry out the Communist program. Since the German Communists in the past have fought Social Democrats even more fiercely than they fought the Nazis, this was a historic handclasp..

The manifesto had declared that 10,000,000 Germans must share the guilt of Naziism, but it added: “We Communists declare that we also feel ourselves guilty, inasmuch as we were not able, in consequence of a series of mistakes, to force an anti-fascist unity of workers for the overthrow of Hitler.” In view of the fact that in the past the German Communist Party had done everything possible to prevent an anti-fascist unity of the workers, this modest admission was a political necessity.

The chief victim of former Communist policies had been the Social Democrats, once Germany’s No. 1 political party. In 1932, the German Communists had declared the Nazi Party to be a “lesser evil” than the Social Democratic

Party. This policy of the Stalinist majority had split the German Communist Party, was directly responsible for bringing Hitler to power. Now both parties were willing to let bygones be bygones and work together for the new Communis program, with its twin purposes of quieting the fears of the German people and the western powers about the future of Russian-occupied Germany.