COLD WAR: The Problem Is Germany

The biggest issue in the cold war is Germany—whether to rearm it, how to unite it. For a month or more, Western diplomacy had been becalmed by inertia and irresolution, while the loosening lines of Soviet control in the East offered opportunity and threat. Last week the West stirred, and with some success.

Acting on the week-old advice of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, President Eisenhower dramatically offered $15 million worth of food to hungry Easy Germany, and gave the Reds a chance to refuse it. They did, calling the offer an “insult,” and thereby stood convicted of condemning East Germans to hunger. U.S. food supplies would still be shipped to Germany, and pictures of U.S. freighters, Hamburg-bound with milk, lard and flour, blazed in Europe’s newspapers.

Sensing its advantage, the West took other confident steps:

Politics. When the East-German puppet government proposed a discussion of all-German elections, Konrad Adenauer’s government (to the applause of even its Socialist opponents) dismissed the bid in a single blistering sentence: “One does not negotiate with marionettes.”

Economics. The West German Industrie Institut made East German mouths water by publishing the facts & figures of West Germany’s boom. Bonn’s gold and foreign-currency reserves are at an alltime high ($1.4 billion), at least twice those of France. West Germans are eating better, building more homes (440,000 last year) than at any other time since the war.

Diplomacy. At their foreign ministers’ conference in Washington (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), the Big Three got Chancellor Adenauer off an embarrassing hook. Communist propaganda has stressed one magic word: Einheit (unity). The West’s (and Adenauer’s) answer was more complicated to explain and less attractive to sell: unification only after integration, i.e., after West Germany is safely armed inside the European Defense Community, the cumbrous French plan for a six-nation European Army. In effect, this seemed to be putting second what most Germans wanted put first. The only issue likely to defeat Adenauer at the Sept. 6 elections is German unity, a cause that his Socialist opponents have tried to monopolize.

Recognizing the “unanimous desire of the German people for unity in freedom,” the foreign ministers invited the Soviet Union to a short four-power conference “about the end of September.” The timing was perfect. With a Big Four conference slated to meet a few weeks after the election, Adenauer can campaign on the unity ticket without abandoning his endorsement of EDC. This should win him votes. But because the conference would not meet until after the polls are closed, Adenauer is less likely to be subjected to embarrassing Soviet “offers,” whose rejection might lose him votes.

Adenauer was delighted. Pundits agreed that his chances had soared overnight.