WESTERN EUROPE: The Fateful Hour

Night fell and lights were snapped on in the big, modernistic debating hall of West Germany’s Bundestag. Wearily and warily the Bundestag debated the most important decision in its brief history—a vote on the treaties which will end the occupation, in exchange for a West German promise to rearm.

From the rostrum spoke the dry, spare, 76-year-old Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Ordinarily icy and unemotional, Adenauer summoned up all the passion and eloquence he could muster. “It is the fateful hour of Germany!” he cried. “We are at the crossroads of slavery and freedom . . . A vote of ‘no’ on these treaties means ‘yes’ to Stalin . . . Germany’s position is more exposed than ever before in her history. Germany is divided and torn, disarmed and defenseless She is overshadowed by a colossus that is trying to enslave and swallow her.”

After Adenauer had spoken, the required “second reading” of the treaty bill, and the third and final vote of ratification, seemed mere formalities. Even opposition deputies conceded that the Chancellor had it in the bag.

Next day, to everyone’s surprise, Adenauer, the man who had appealed so urgently for fast action, discomfited his supporters and confused his opposition by announcing postponement of the final ratification vote. He wanted to wait, he said, until the Federal Constitutional Court can rule on the constitutionality of a simple majority vote on the treaties—a power the Socialist opposition has long challenged. The court’s deliberation will probably take about a month.

The maneuver threw the Bundestag into an uproar. Adenauer coldly demanded that the deputies proceed with the second reading and thus demonstrate their good faith to the Allies. After two stormy days, with the speaker’s brass handbell jangling almost constantly to bring order, the house obliged. Chubby Erich Ollenhauer, successor to the late Kurt Schumacher as leader of the Socialists, angrily urged the Chancellor to abandon his “teenage enthusiasm for European unity” and start working for the interests of Germany. The Chancellor listened to all of this stonily, and seemed to take as a matter of course the handsome 50-vote majority with which his treaty proposals passed their second reading.

Confident that West Germany had thereby made its “political decision” to rearm and join the Western Allies, Chancellor Adenauer sat back confidently to await what he assumed would be an equally approving court decision.