GERMANY: Shadow Army

Bit by bit, the jigsaw of Russian intentions for Eastern Germany was fitting together. At first there had been only isolated clues—the wing of a prison converted into barracks at Dessau, an order for 5,000 shoulder insignia of the old German style, the sight of men marching and drilling on a onetime Wehrmacht training field near Rostock. Then the evidence came faster. The Russians were busily organizing a military “police” force of a quarter of a million Germans, almost twice as large as the entire force of pre-Hitler Germany.

By last week the T.O. (table of organization) of the Eastern zone police looked like this:

Administration 33,500 Executive, including traffic 49,700 Criminal, including”political” (K-5) 26,500

Armed railway forces 34,000

Factory guards 65,000

Frontier police 13,500

Training 8,800

Military “alert police” 15,000

More than 112,000, including the new “alert police” (who were wearing green-dyed Luftwaffe uniforms), were under arms. Probable commander of the “alert” force was German General Walther von Seydlitz,* survivor of Stalingrad and a key figure of the Moscow-sponsored Free Germany Committee. On the evening of Oct. 153 special Russian plane landed him at Johannisthal-Schbneweide airfield near Berlin; then he was whisked to Soviet military headquarters at Karlshorst.

“The New Himmler.” Other Germans were important to the Russian plans. One was Kurt Fischer, appointed head of the department of the interior of the central administrative agency of the Soviet zone last July. In his 503, Fischer seems to most Germans to have the appearance of a typical Biedermann (Babbitt): neatly dressed, round-faced, with greying, slightly wavy hair. But Fischer was a veteran of the Communist Spartacist League, which ruled Berlin for ten days in 1919.

Just behind Fischer in the new police setup was the minister of the interior of Brandenburg Province, Bernhard Bechler. Still in his 40’s (and a former major in the Nazi Eighth army at Stalingrad), Bechler was as yet little known outside Berlin; but Berliners had begun to call him “the new Himmler.” Talking with fellow Communists, Bechler was succinct. Said he recently: “We have until 1950, at the latest, to liquidate the bourgeois parties. By that time, the state police will be trebled and so well trained that, with the help of them and of the armed action committees, the S.E.D. [meaning the German Communist Party] can take power.”

Bechler’s private life reads like the plot of a bad novel. After the Russians captured him at Stalingrad, he consented to go on the Moscow radio. Neighbors brought the good news to Frau Bechler: Bernhard was alive. Frau Bechler promptly denounced the neighbors to the Gestapo—for listening to the enemy radio.

When the Russians took Berlin, the neighbors evened the score, denounced Frau Bechler; she was sent to Sachsenhausen prison camp. This seemed a kind of providence to Herr Bechler himself; he had his wife declared legally dead and married his secretary. Last August, awkwardly enough, Frau Bechler was released from Sachsenhausen. Finding Bernhard now minister of the interior and a husband for the second time, she wisely made plans to flee the zone; but she never carried them out. A week after her release, she disappeared and has not been heard of since.

The New Weapon. A third man the Russians were counting on was Walter Ulbricht, a 55-year-old former carpenter who had spent the war in Moscow and come back to lead the Communist Party. Recently he paid an inspection visit to the huge camp of Fürstenwalde, on the banks of the Spree, where 5,000 ex-P.W.s from Russia had been mobilized for the new military police.

In the larger East-West struggle, what was the significance of the new police? Ulbricht spelled it out. Said he: “The first phase in creating a new political order in the Eastern zone is now completed. The zone now needs a strong Machtapparat [power enforcement machine] which will be capable—possibly without the assistance of an occupying power—of guarding this achievement. . . The Eastern zone police must be … ready to take on the tasks now carried out by the Soviet army.”

In other words, a shadow army was in the making, so that one day—if & when the Kremlin wills it—Soviet armies may retire eastward. Did it mean that the Soviets were committed to an early withdrawal of their own troops from Germany? Not at all: they were committed to nothing. They had merely fashioned a new weapon to be used as needed. They could propose that all four occupying powers remove their troops from Germany. The Russian Red army would get out, leaving the German Red “police” in its place; if the Western armies left their zones unarmed and undefended, the Reds hoped to be ready for a new Der Tag.

*Berliners last week recalled a story about an earlier General von Seydlitz. When Frederick the Great discovered him trying to teach a pack of great Danes to drill, he asked: “is it wise to be instructing foreign dogs—are you not a patriot?” Retorted Seydlitz: “No, sire, I am a general!”