Foreign News: Formula for Germany

For ten months the postwar world’s No. 1 problem—could the Allies agree about what to do with Europe—had been dramatized in miniature in the barnlike rooms of London’s Lancaster House. Could the U.S., Britain and Russia, in the persons of the three members of the European Advisory Commission,* agree about what to do with Germany when the military occupation was over? The details of some of their agreements had been unofficially reported. But later disagreements always delay publication of the Commission’s official plans.

From Washington last week came reports that the three Allied powers had at last agreed on a formula for ruling a defeated Germany. After a period of military occupancy, the formula embodied the chief Russian proposals.

No Joint Administration. In its compromises the reported agreement showed the extent to which the Allies had failed to agree. There would be no joint Allied administration for all of Germany (though there might be joint administration of Berlin and Austria). Russia opposed joint administration. There would be no joint U.S.-British administration of western Germany. Russia feared a U.S.-British bloc even for occupation.

According to the present formula:

¶ Russia would administer all Germany lying east of a line drawn from Lübeck to the Elbe.

¶ Britain would administer northwest Germany, including the North Sea ports and the industrial Rhineland.

¶ The U.S. would administer south Germany.

In each area the No. 1 power would be a High Commissioner named by the occupying power. He would be responsible not to the Allies as a whole, but to his own government in Washington, London or Moscow.

Tripartition. Two facts stuck out of this formula with bayonet sharpness: 1) the plan amounted to a partition of Germany—and the political and economic consequences for Europe might not be so apparent to Washington as they were to London and Moscow; 2) Russia’s slice of occupied Germany would consist chiefly of the Junker and a large docile peasant population—manpower for rebuilding Russia’s destroyed cities. Britain would receive the restless proletarian population of the ports and the industrial Ruhr and Rhine.

Said London’s Economist: the Three Powers “are apparently inclined to attempt an experiment which is new in the military annals of the Allies and has only once been attempted by the Germans—in Poland. They are to set up in Germany a system of government which in Poland was known as the Government General—the administration of Poland by the Germans with no assistance from a Central Polish government. . . . The decision not to have a German Government is probably one of the most momentous decisions for the postwar world that has yet been taken. It is singularly unsuitable that it has been taken almost as a by-product of military convenience so that none of its profound consequence has been properly weighed and openly discussed in advance.”

France’s Bid. Into this grave situation another factor obtruded itself last week. In Paris French Foreign Commissioner Georges Bidault claimed for General Charles de Gaulle’s Government the right to cooperate in the occupation of Germany “on a footing of full equality with other powers.”

His words stirred echoes of historical bitterness. France alone among the big Allies had had experience in a punitive occupation of Germany. Much of Europe’s subsequent grim history stemmed directly from France’s unsuccessful 1923 occupation of the Ruhr. Then the failure of Britain and the U.S. to support France militarily or morally showed the Germans how isolated France was, how divided the Allies were. There the Nazis achieved their first hero—Leo Schlageter—a German lieutenant whom the French shot for terroristic acts. There the new revolutionary forces—Naziism and Communism—collaborated when the Communist International’s Karl Radek negotiated with the Nazis for a united front against the French.

But Bidault’s words had a more current historical meaning. They meant that France was again aspiring to her traditional role as a road block to invasions from the east of Europe’s Atlantic seaboard. Her Army was embryonic, her Navy was all but destroyed, but armies and navies can be rebuilt. Above all, France was still the world’s No. 2 land empire. The power that supported her claims might gain a potentially valuable ally.