Can the Kremlin Make a German Peace?
HOTTELET, RICHARD
Can the Kremlin Make Peace in Germany? By Richard C. Hottelet A dramatic Soviet offer to reunify Germany, which so many Westerners fear, is difficult for Moscow to make without creating new and...
...the arguments are as familiar as they are threadbare...
...They came to underscore the solidarity of the Soviet bloc, which, Molotov declared somewhat mysteriously, extended "from the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific...
...The rape of East Germany by the Red Army and the memory of what he saw of Soviet life in the Soviet Union will linger long...
...Four-power control, democracy and demilitarization were some of the fig leaves used to cover the extension of Soviet influence...
...German irredentism is not confined to the Soviet Zone of Germany, but extends to the lands beyond the Oder-Neisse within the boundaries of 1937...
...In the week that followed, Molotov made a demonstrative progress through East Germany...
...While Molotov spoke in Berlin, Georgi Malenkov led an august Government delegation to an anniversary reception in the DDR's Moscow Embassy...
...Basically, Germany remains for Russia an unsolved problem, an unexploited opportunity, a potential danger...
...How could Moscow be sure that the Germans would stay bought...
...Theoretically, the most effective and most likely move would be to abandon the Soviet Zone...
...East Germany must be retained as a buffer against Western influence and as a base for westward penetration...
...His words were received no less respectfully...
...The Communist press, radio and newsreels followed Molotov's every step and reported his doings in the fulsome manner of the Imperial Court...
...Nor is there enough to be squeezed out of the run-down industry and agriculture of the Soviet Zone to justify keeping it as a Soviet colony...
...In these years, literally hundreds of overtures have been made to the Government, the Parliament and the people of West Germany...
...Neutralist clubs like the Nauheimer Kreis have long since vanished...
...The Kremlin knows that whoever holds Germany holds the balance of power in Europe...
...Far from winning West Germans over by tossing them the DDR, Moscow would only whet their appetite...
...It will be many years before the average German is ready to overlook the millions of prisoners of war and civilian deportees who disappeared in the USSR...
...Yet, in all these fumbling years the West has never shed the fear that the Kremlin might still play trump cards of frightening power to win the prize of Germany...
...His rosy picture of the happiness and prosperity which had descended on East Germany contrasted properly with the misery and despair which "remilitarization" was bringing to the West...
...The uprising of June 17, 1953 has not only made it impossible to use the DDR as attractive bait but has left a permanent internal security problem for the Communist rulers...
...If Moscow has any trump cards, she could be expected to play them soon...
...Another interesting hypothesis is that the Soviet Union might throw the West into confusion by withdrawing its occupation forces from East Germany as it did from North Korea, and perhaps with the same ultimate aim in mind...
...The standard of living has been allowed to rise, and the Soviet Union has granted the DDR the formal trappings of full sovereignty...
...At a time when bewildered soldiers in the West wrestled with the pedantic vengeance of Occupation Directive JCS 1067, Stalin's military government was speckling East Germany with spindly billboards reassuring the bedraggled citizenry that "Hitlers come and go, but the German people, the German state remain...
...But there is no comparable demand in West Germany for the removal of Western forces...
...As a matter of fact, it would in some ways be an almost prudent move...
...Despite its incessant cry for security, the Soviet Union was not nearly as worried about a German revival as about the prospect of an American commitment to stay in Europe for 25 years...
...Spectacles like the election circus of October 17 in the DDR give even the woolliest innocents shrieking examples of what Communism means...
...There is no doubt that the existence of a peace-loving, democratic Germany beside a peace-loving Soviet Union will end war and bloodshed in Europe and make it impossible for world imperialists to enslave European countries...
...The motive is transparent...
...Not to mention other agencies through which the Kremlin would keep a tight though less visible grip on the DDR...
...1939 is gone forever and with it the possibility of a working partnership on a basis of equality...
...Pressure on the Kremlin to confound Western plans increases as Germany's full weight comes to rest on the Western side of the balance of power...
...Given the monumental cynicism of the Soviet rulers, this would be altogether possible...
...They would certainly remain for a considerable time after a Soviet evacuation...
...What the Soviet Union cannot change without revising its entire policy is the inviolability of the Oder-Neisse line...
...At best, the Soviet risk would be cosmic...
...From the President of the DDR down through patriotic and cultural committees, labor unions, political parties, women's groups, athletes and schoolchildren have come requests that the Bonn Republic and its people recognize the DDR and try reunification on the Soviet model...
...The 18 million people of the DDR, who rose on June 17, would see to that...
...As late as 1946, Molotov rejected the American proposal for a 25-year treaty to disarm and demilitarize Germany...
...100,000-odd Volkspolizei, armed to the teeth with tanks and artillery, would take their place...
...During this period, the Soviets appealed to the other powers in terms of Potsdam and the memory of the anti-Fascist alliance...
...There is not a shred of evidence to support such a venture...
...By Richard C. Hottelet A dramatic Soviet offer to reunify Germany, which so many Westerners fear, is difficult for Moscow to make without creating new and serious risks BONN WITH KOREA and Indo-China pushed aside to simmer, the Kremlin seems to be turning its full attention once again to Germany...
...He had in tow Secretary Pospelov of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party and such satellite dignitaries as Prime Minister Josef Cyrankiewicz of Poland and Zdenek Fierlinger of Czechoslovakia...
...The nine-power conference in London had just ended, and Molotov used his platform in East Berlin to attack the London agreements as roundly as he had opposed EDC...
...To be sure, German industry is panting to sell to the Soviet market...
...On the contrary, the best weapons in such encounters??demands for free elections in Germany, a peace treaty for Austria, genuine security and disarmament under the UN??are all in Western hands...
...If a Soviet withdrawal precipitated a Western withdrawal, the exchange would be most satisfactory to the Kremlin...
...The Drang nach Osten will always be a more natural German ambition than serving as a Russian spearhead in an attack on the West...
...All the satellites would see an alarming precedent...
...To envisage a Soviet-German alliance at this time, one must suppose either that the German people are willing to assume a satellite yoke and the rule of Moscow, or that the Soviet state is prepared to submit to German dictation...
...And, coming on the heels of recent events, this act could only reinforce the conviction that the Western policy of stubborn strength is the only way to wring concessions from the Soviet Union...
...What happened to Grotewohl and Ulbricht could happen to any of them...
...If the Kremlin wanted only security, things would be vastly different...
...Appeals, manifestos, offers and delegations have been dispatched in an unbroken stream...
...It would be a mistake to underestimate Soviet resourcefulness...
...There is little about the institution of the DDR which makes it worth the effort and peril of a cold war...
...Two-and-a-half years ago, the Soviet Union offered Bonn sovereignty, unity, armed forces and a war industry, as well as membership in the United Nations and free world trade, if West Germany would assume a position of neutrality under Soviet influence...
...In both respects, Germany's function was not so much to provide security for the new Soviet state as it was to aid the expansion of Soviet power...
...The consequences of Germany's historic admission to a Western coalition are certainly not lost on Moscow...
...no Soviet leader is likely to repeat his mistake...
...A Communist Germany would have crowned the Bolshevik Revolution...
...Germany has always had a special function in the logic of Soviet power...
...In 1949, when Stalin ordered the creation of the DDR, he came right to the point...
...Travel between East and West is today more normal than it has been since the war, moving equally freely in both directions...
...The experiences of the last war have shown that the German and the Soviet people have made the greatest sacrifice, that these two peoples in Europe possess the greatest powers to bring about great actions of worldwide significance...
...The question is: Just what could Moscow do...
...Nevertheless, the position of the Soviet Union has not exactly improved...
...Both contingencies are ridiculous and there is no third...
...Tactically, there can be no doubt that this latest burst of activity is designed to frustrate the initiative of London and Paris...
...The Kremlin's liveliest hope of broadening its field of maneuver lies in Western disunity...
...None of this sometimes frantic activity has borne fruit...
...The DDR and the satellites are ever-present reminders of what the Kremlin has in store for a German ally...
...The Leipzig Fair was dressed up in unprecedented splendor as the show window of great Eastern markets...
...The DDR is too shabby a fraud and Soviet intentions too transparent...
...Economically, they are an asset...
...Nor does the fact that, by pulling out, the Soviet Union would be giving up priceless strategic territory, limiting its military freedom of action, and exposing the Volkspolizei to the highly subversive influence of an independent West Germany just across a very porous boundary...
...Once the Paris treaties are ratified, the tide will clearly be moving against Soviet interests in Europe...
...Politically, they guarantee security and stability...
...On October 5, Foreign Minister Molotov turned up in East Berlin to help celebrate the fifth anniversary of the founding of the so-called German Democratic Republic (DDR...
...As for political recognition, or the closer cultural relations dangled by Molotov, concessions to West Germany in the fields of economics, culture, sports and the like could not easily overcome the serious handicaps under which the Soviet Union labors in Germany today...
...There could be no mistaking the formal emphasis which the rulers of Russia chose to give their association with their East German satellite...
...The DDR lives the unhappy life of a second-rate people's democracy, despised by its own population, distrusted by its Communist neighbors and exploited by its Russian masters...
...But there is no reason to fear a change in this area as long as German vital interests, economic, social and political, find reasonable satisfaction in the framework of the Western world...
...At first, it tried the strategy of chaos, sabotaging financial, economic and political measures designed to prevent the collapse of occupied Germany...
...On October 23, the Kremlin followed through with another note suggesting a four-power conference on the German problem in November...
...Whatever the occasional local friction, the average German considers the British, American and Canadian troops welcome proof of Western solidarity...
...In the past year, the Communist regime of the DDR has made some interesting gestures in support of German unity...
...There is no reason to believe that a unified Germany, even nominally neutral, would be less anti-Soviet than it is today...
...Pressing these demands while striding forward with its own purpose might give the West a psychological victory in the struggle of ideas...
...Since the end of the war, it has been seeking to bring Germany under its control...
...Again, however, the loss and risk are out of all proportion to the prospective gain...
...This act," he cabled from Moscow, "is a turning point in the history of Europe...
...Far from being moved by inspiration, the Kremlin would seem to have been goaded into this clumsy maneuver by nagging fear that events in Western Europe are going against it...
...He paid tribute to the memory of Goethe in Weimar and tiptoed around a kindergarten in Stalinstadt whispering "Schlafen, schlafen" to the children in their cribs...
...The DDR, he said, was the "bulwark of the peace-loving and democratic forces of the whole German people...
...Quite apart from the shock of such perfidy, the whole of the satellite buffer belt would be shaken by the eastward lunge of Western influence...
...Why should the West not begin to capitalize on the modest advantages it now enjoys...
...If it does not falter in building its alliance, there is no reason to shun new conferences with the Soviet Union...
...An unrequited withdrawal holds no attraction for the Kremlin...
...He called for a German peace treaty, offered to discuss free elections in all of Germany, and made what he termed the "new" proposal that all the Occupation powers agree to withdraw their troops without delay...
...Moscow began to offer a peace treaty, unity, free elections, limitless trade with the Soviet bloc and full recognition of national interests if the Germans would accept Communist terms...
...Conversely, unity is the root of Western strength...
...A commercial offensive and political negotiation to win West Germany are much more likely, yet hardly more glittering, prospects...
...The possible moves which have turned up most frequently in worried speculation are that the Soviets might simply abandon the DDR and turn it over to West Germany as the price of friendship, that the Soviet army of occupation might be withdrawn, or that Moscow might embark on an irresistible trade offensive...
...Exploring the theory further, suppose Russia were willing to sell out Poland in order to buy Germany once again...
...The fact that the DDR rests on Soviet bayonets need not rule out this possibility...
...But it shows little eagerness to put its head in a Soviet noose by canceling its ties with other customers or ignoring the political monopoly which Moscow represents...
...Stalin tried deflecting Hitler westward...
...Examination discloses that the scope of Soviet operations in Europe at the present time is severely restricted...
...In election after election, the people have turned away from the Communist party and its occasional bourgeois fronts...
...There was no mistaking this outright offer of a German-Soviet alliance...
...And, ideologies aside, in the turbulent Twenties the Kremlin saw a natural ally in the outcast Weimar Republic...
...The gamble would be warranted only if all Germany were thereby drawn into the Soviet orbit, if the loss of Poland and the Soviet Zone won West Germany as a satellite...
...The spectacular Protestant Church Congress in Leipzig this summer was meant to prove that religion is free in the DDR...
...After four or five years of exercising its rights as a conqueror, the Soviet Union decided that more could be gained by appealing to the Germans as a friend...
...The Kremlin has never needed reminders of Germany's political and strategic value...
...As long as Moscow thinks instead in terms of expansion, it must hang on to what it holds in Central Europe...
...In Leipzig, he visited the ponderous memorial to the Battle of Nations in 1813 and, lest anyone miss the obvious, recalled the success of that German-Russian alliance in driving out a foreign invader...
...It is true that all politics is human behavior, which can swiftly change...
...How would Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia feel behind their new German border...
...It is a time for dramatic intervention...
...In theory, then, the biggest bribe Moscow could offer West Germany is the return of lost territory...
...have to be maintained in power by the Soviet army of occupation...
...On the other hand, Soviet withdrawal from the Elbe line which it has held for so many years could not but appear as a confession of weakness in the eyes of the world...
...Official rebukes and public ridicule have been the only Western response...
...Yet, in fact this is the last move that the Soviets would make, for a variety of reasons...
...Wilhelm Pieck, Otto Grotewohl, Walter Ulbricht et al...
...But the riposte lacks both spirit and skill...
...He fraternized with workers and housewives in stores and factories, shook hands with people on the street, and allowed himself to be embraced by an exuberant activist in the uranium mines of Saxony...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 46
