WEST GERMANY: The Sacrifice

With all the world talking about the urgent importance of granting economic aid to developing countries, the quiet man off in the corner has been the Federal Republic of West Germany. West German gold and foreign-exchange reserves have shot up to a whacking $6.5 billion (British holdings: $2.8 billion), and West German exports now top those of every other European country. Yet since 1956 the Germans have spent just $60 million altogether in technical aid. Last week when the nine-nation Development Assistance Group met in Bonn, the U.S.’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury T. Graydon Upton bluntly told his German hosts that it was time that West Germany shouldered a full share of foreign aid.

The Germans had been expecting the blast. A few days before the meeting, the government introduced a new $500 million, five-year aid plan, largely drawn from counterpart funds set up as part of the Marshall Plan aid. Said Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard: “The German people should not forget that after their country’s collapse they received help through the sacrifices of other nations. We shall be prepared to recognize our obligations and make a deliberate sacrifice to help other peoples.” Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano added that “development policy must be given equal status with our Eastern policy and our European policy.” Said Socialist Deputy Heinrich Deist: “We, in our economic wonderland with its booming business, should be ashamed of the fact that we are still using the revenues of American [Marshall Plan] aid for internal purposes. A courageous decision is necessary.”

A more far-reaching plan is to levy a special tax, the proceeds of which would be earmarked for an aid program. But as a German delegate hastily explained to his Development Assistance Group colleagues, this is a pre-election year in West Germany—”a bad time for burdening the German public with new taxes.”