WASHINGTON REPORT: The Deutsche Treatment

...To be sure, Mr...

...Nixon even managed to make peace with the country he formerly denounced as Red China and, more significantly, to endorse, through his Secretary of State, the permanent Soviet occupation of those former rollback countries as making for stability in Europe...

...Two, the Soviet would not invade because Yugoslavia was never part of the Russian European Empire the Soviets were reconstituting...

...Nixon managed to get through both the vice-presidency and the presidency without rolling anything back a kilometer, let alone a country...

...Acheson was dead by then and unable to appreciate his vindication...

...Whether they would or not, would the Soviet Union invade and conquer a Europe not defended by the United States army on the spot...

...That Soviet immobility can be interpreted in two ways, both promising for the fate of a Europe without American troops...

...The German gifts for hostility and aggression were turned around and, under the invincible direction of the Americans, pointed toward the East...

...The latest variation was presented during the recent visit to this city of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who announced unilaterally that his country was not going to pay any more marks for the privilege of being protected from the Bolsheviks by the American troops stationed there...

...That interesting figure, on his first venture into foreign policy, denounced what he called "Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment," and advocated a different policy called "rollback," which envisioned pushing the Soviet forces out of the Eastern and Central European nations they had occupied during and after World War II...

...Neither, of course, was Germany...

...In it the Germans killed everyone they could get their hands on, especially Jews and Slavs of all kinds...

...The motivation of the German soldiers for their turnaround army was simply that Bolshevism was a loathsome, unnatural political disease whereas Nazism was the berries and should be attacked by any thinking people, even Americans...

...Since, whether from such motivation or from ancient pieties about the Motherland, the Russians did indeed occupy the old Empire's former European vassal states plus some lands formerly occupied by the Empire's imperial rivals, Germany and Austria, not to mention the Ottoman Turks, it seemed at least not unreasonable to assume in the West that the Red Army intended to keep going in the direction it had embarked on and take the rest of Europe...

...FRANK GETLEIN (Frank Getlein, who took over the Washington Report column on a temporary basis during the illness of Sisyphus, since deceased, will continue as Commonweal's regular Washington columnist...

...The declaration and its domestic reception were the more remarkable because such a few years earlier Berliners were here regarded as beasts of a more ferocious, dangerous and treacherous kind than dogs of any temperature...

...They had fought the Nazis, while the French were cheerfully exploring life in the New Order...

...President Ford, exhibiting the same hypnotic glaze his predecessors have uniformly exhibited when confronted by the dream of the turn-around army, said that was fine with him, after all they were our troops, why should the Germans pay for them...

...Can they defend themselves...

...Do we need our Army in Germany...

...In the late 1940s, the Russians prepared to add Yugoslavia to the collection of dependencies it was solidifying...

...Acheson as a font of wisdom and strength, not a coward after all...

...His famed declaration, Ich bin ein Berliner, while actually the equivalent in local idiomatic speech of saying that he was a hot dog, was received with unalloyed enthusiasm in his own country, a nation, to be sure, of hot dog lovers...

...The most flamboyant was Richard Nixon's...

...As a last-ditch pipe dream of defeated men-at-arms taught to regard themselves as the world's finest, the turn-around army notion was not without interest, comparable in its way to the contemporary dream of Amanda Wingfield that a gentleman caller would shortly solve all her problems, the earlier dream of Wilkins Micawber that something would turn up...

...They meant it, they were seen as meaning it and the Soviets did not move...

...The Schmidt variation is, of course, only the latest in a long line...

...Their industrial technology is incomparably better than the Russians', the general contentment of citizens with their society similarly higher...

...WASHINGTON REPORT THE DEUTSCHE TREATMENT In the spring of 1945, as a boy-soldier, I was briefly in the business, along with all my friends, of accepting the surrenders of individuals and groups of German soldiers in northern Italy...

...I was there to frustrate that attempt...

...Getlein, a long-time contributor to the magazine, is critic-at-large of the Washington Star-News...

...The Chancellor has in effect called the bluff of senators as differing in their general approach to foreign policy as Mansfield and Jackson, both of whom have called for either reductions in force in Germany or for total German assumption of the costs we have now totally assumed ourselves...

...They have not moved since...

...Immediately the dream of the German soldiers came true...

...Those German soldiers I ran into between the Po and the Alps should feel particularly happy, for now it is the Americans doing the spearheading, the Germans the direction, if only, for now, the financial direction...

...Would they defend themselves...

...The standstill can, however, be interpreted differently: The rascals haven't moved, maybe we were wrong and didn't have to send the troops...

...An answer at least to the last question can perhaps be glimpsed in Yugoslavia, in so many ways the most significant Communist country in the world...

...It would be a shame to pass up the chance to get out of Germany at what amounts to an invitation to do so from Chancellor Schmidt...

...In short, there was something called World War II...

...The actualization of their dream proceeded on somewhat more complicated premises...

...If ever a foreign policy issue called for electoral campaign debate, this one does...

...If they cannot or will not defend themselves, they probably cannot be defended by anyone else...

...The Russians were doing the same thing I was doing...

...Although many occasions presented themselves in every capital of the occupiedl territory, Mr...

...Since then, the Soviets have not taken another piece of real estate in Europe or anywhere else, although from time to time they have shot up one capital or another in their Eastern Marches, presumably "to encourage the others" or out of their own profound sense of insecurity, or both...

...In that context it was not unreasonable to imagine that the Germans would do it again if they got the chance and therefore not unreasonable for Russia to reequip itself with the anti-German buffer zone it had so long relied on...

...The gentleman caller, when you think of it, is supposed to pick up the tab and here we've been playing it Dutch treat all these years...

...One, the Soviets would not invade if they thought the locals would fight, since assuredly Yugoslavia was not then and is not now an American military dependency...

...The way seemed clear for the next variation on the dream-theme, when Schmidt's successor shall demand and receive American payments for the privilege of defending West Germany...

...In the first place, the dream of those simple soldiers, if retailed to me in Italy, was assuredly retailed also to the Russians in Eastern Europe and in Germany, giving them added motivation, if any were needed, to retake the Eastern Marches buffer provinces that the Czars had held as protection from Western invasions...

...Nixon, of course, was perceived as a conservative, even a reactionary, although in truth he seems to have been a kind of anarchist...

...Do the Germans, for that matter...

...Kennedy, on the other hand, was perceived as a liberal and he, too, made a memorable contribution to the prolongation of that dream...

...Did we ever...

...And he, and his successor, have done all this without retreating an inch from the dream-theme of those German soldiers...

...What has amazed me ever since, however, about that dream of those kaput krauts is that it has all come true and, in an apparently endless series of variations, has dominated European politics and what the Americans imagine is statecraft from those days to these...

...Of those I talked to at any length, there was hardly one who did not assure me that the German army was about to be "turned around" and, under the direction of the now demonstrably invincible Americans, spearhead a new and this time final invasion of Bolshevist Russia...

...There are 200 million Europeans...

...Eventually, he even came to hail Mr...

...they would fight the Soviets...

...The fundamental point we seem to have forgotten somewhere around 1946 is that the reason I was having those chats with the turn-around crowd in rustic settings from Bologna to Trento was that they were there as the last tattered wave of the last serious attempt to conquer Europe and hold it...

...This standstill record can be of course, and no doubt usually is, interpreted as the vindication of the American military presence in Germany and elsewhere: We sent the troops, the rascals have been contained...

...The Yugoslavs said simply that if the Russians invaded through Hungary, Roumania and Bulgaria, the Yugoslavs would retreat to the mountains and would fight...