ARMS AND THE GERMANS

...The rumor that Nazism is again in the ascendancy in Germany is sheer fabrication...

...The national average monthly wage of skilled workers in Germany is 270 marks, or about $68...

...Yet when France objected to German rearmament, some of these same people were disappointed and said they would like to enlist under an American commander but not under their own discredited generals...

...Thus it is difficult to see what Minister Ehr-hardt's contribution can have been toward pulling the German workers "out of the dirt...

...Nor do they mean their changeable, contradictory reactions to the need for military defense...

...It is therefore not surprising that the immediate response of the German people to the vital need of defending their country is one of revulsion...

...The younger ones are struggling to get an education and a job so that they can marry and live a decent if modest life for the first time since they were born...

...The AGNES MEYER has just returned from a first-hand survey of conditions in Germany, where she interviewed leaders of government, labor, and industry...

...But the morale of an army composed of the unemployed and the rejected would scarcely be very trustworthy...

...II The reasons for this present mood —so dramatically confirmed in the mid-November provincial elections— are to be found in the social, political, and economic climate of Germany...

...But the good old prewar Ger-man authoritarianism is back once IPW^ ittft^saddk whether at Bonn or in the Ruhr...

...The will to defend their country is almost nonexistent...

...those of skilled women factory workers as low as $40 per month...

...the average for unskilled workers, 200 marks, or $50 per month...

...We couldn't be any worse off...

...But if the Ruhr magnates prove to be hard bargainers and threaten the rapid implementation of the Schuman Plan, the German people will feel themselves betrayed and will sweep the conservative Christian Democrats out of power...

...The whole social picture can be seen in all its dark seriousness if we consider that this low-pay and high-priced economy is extending itself to solve the hopeless task of assimilating nine million refugees and expellees from former German territory and from the Sudetenland...

...The Institute of Economic Research in Berlin estimated early this year that 12j/j million West Germans are living on some form of relief, pension, or insurance...

...Yet this appalling economic and social picture is so much brighter than the bleak starvation years before the currency reform in 1948 that Vice Chancellor Bluecher and Minister of Economy Ehrhardt think the workers should be "zufrieden," which means they should keep quiet and be glad they are alive...

...In fact, the recent state of mind of the Germans has been such that recruiting them for a Western army would have provoked dangerous repercussions which Communist propaganda could have exploited to good advantage...

...Above all, the men who returned from the battlefields and their families are permanently fed up with militarism...

...But if they had a choice between communism and another war, many of these war-weary people, in their present frame of mind, would prefer to accept communism...

...But they are a minority, and the old school still dominates the policies of the National Chamber of Commerce...

...Moreover, in the allotment of Marshall aid, we have not insisted on control of the wage scale...

...Thus it is actually a blessing in disguise that France objected to the immediate raising of German military units...

...The Germans are strongly anti-Communist...

...They suffer daily in a multitude of ways from the devastating results of the last war...

...When I said to Ehrhardt that the unrest among the workers was serious and that August Schmidt, head of the coal-miners unions, had assured me they would strike if they do not get the raise of two marks-day for which they are asking, In banged the table with his heavy fist and shouted: "It won't do them any good...

...They lack confidence in themselves because nobody in the past or present has ever tried to develop independent thinking among the mass of the population...

...Food prices have been rising since June, so that real wages are going down...

...III Especially deplorable is the desperate state of mind among young intellectuals...

...On these salaries the workers pay a total of 16% for social insurance and taxes...

...The educational system has always been used to encourage their obedience and subjection...

...The outward order and stability that now exist in Germany are all the more impressive because they follow closely upon years of utter chaos and universal despair...

...They realize that the fate of Germany depends upon raising the standard of living and increasing the buying power of the people as a whole...

...Many people—even some liberal officials—regret that the workers did not stage a revolution at that time in order to serve notice on their former leaders that the traditional humility and obedience of the German masses was a thing of the past...

...have only been in office just over a year, but the patient, enduring, hardworking average German citizen that pulled Germany out of the dirt...

...The ideal now is a united Europe in which the peoples of all nations can find their rights, their responsibilities, and a wider world of brotherhood among men...

...The economic recovery that Germany has made since the stabilization of its currency in April, 1948, is amazing...

...For there must never again be a German army...

...Then nothing can prevent the nationalization of the coal, steel and chemical industries by a triumphant Social Democratic Party...

...Out of 39 doctors at this hospital, only nine have salaries...

...The German people lack faith in their Government because their leaders have always betrayed them and it looks as if these same leaders are in a position to do it again...

...The employers also have high taxes, but they have many loopholes, whereas the worker has none...

...Berlin is the last brave outpost of civilization...

...If the Germans see your troops arriving, their own will to resistance will be revived...

...I found them indignant about the inepitude of our decartelization but unanimous in their acceptance of the Schuman Plan...

...Unless these younger, more flexible minds among the industrial leadership can save the day, Germany is bound to become a socialist state the moment we pull the props from under the present conservative government and its confederates, the old school industrialists and economists...

...For, on the whole, the Germans are still a sick people, only just keeping their heads above water in a sick economy...

...The Germans cannot live without an "ideal...

...There are thousands of doctors, chemists, physicists, and other white collar workers who are completely superfluous now that the vast research projects of industry, the army, and the navy have been disbanded...

...With no guidance in which they have any confidence, the vast majority, especially of the younger men and women, are confused, fearful, skeptical, rootless, and unhappy...

...It was his acute awareness of this difference which led him to say to me: "The remilitarization of Germany has to be educationally prepared...

...They are still so torn between the love of obedience and the desire for self-reliance that an emotional anarchy prevails, a kind of mass neurosis, which is kept in check only by the hard realities of everyday life...

...Five hundred thousand new housing units will be completed in 1950, the most ever built in Germany within a single year...

...And yet amidst social chaos, mental stress and general impoverishment, a new hope is dawning in the German breast...

...Now the truth of the matter is that it was not these federal officials who...

...The wife of Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post, she has written special articles for that paper, the Atlantic Monthly, and other publications which have won national acclaim...

...The Germans must become a part of a European army under a unified command...

...We have pulled these peopled out of the dirt, but are they satis-fied...

...The psychological repercussions of the Schuman Plan are just as important to the German masses as the economic possibilities for a bigger market and a better standard of living...

...They resent the occupation government...

...Pastor Niemoeller, who declared that Germans should never fight their brothers in the East Zone, is by no means the only one who yearns to remain neutral if the Allies are forced into a war with Russia...

...Fortunately there is a group of brilliant young industrialists who have more vision, efficiency, and social consciousness than the old group...

...The arrogance of the political and industrial leaders is all the more absurd because without the continued support of the Marshall Plan, the German Government and the whole German economic revival would collapse like a house of cards...

...The French demand, that the Schuman Plan for Franco-German integration of heavy industry be accepted before German armed forces become a part of the Atlantic defense system, is oddly enough exactly what the German people themselves have yearned for as the only method of controlling any nationalistic ambitions of the Ruhr steel, coal, and chemical magnates...

...Crime, stealing and youthful delinquencies were immediately reduced when the black market trade was eliminated...

...If these tv o important steps could soon be taken, they would act as a shock therapy upon the German people, especially German youth, and a renewed sense of living would bring about a healthier mental and emotional atmosphere than exists in that country at present...

...It is the worker who is paying for the war...

...It was no doubt necessary to get the employers' factory wheels moving again, but it is high time we stopped supporting only the possessing classes and tried to encourage genuinely democratic Institutions, the labor unions, and other organizations as well as many smalt industries if we don't want a revival of the former German Reich...

...But instead of creating a brave new world with the billions of Marshall Plan aid that we have poured into Germany, we have merely put back into power the old type of leadership that could not cope with mass unemployment and therefore made Hitler possible...

...we have made it look as if we were out to build up the big employers, in the hope that some of the gravy would trickle down to the workers...

...In short, the Germans are so oppressed by the immediate difficulties of life, by overcrowded living conditions, shortage of housing, low wages and unemployment, huge relief rolls and millions of refugees, most of whom lead pitiable existences, that they are introspective, self-centered, and scarcely know what they want...

...Over 14 million people are employed and the figure is rising every day...

...On the other hand, if German youth were forced back into military life in its present undecided, bewildered, and psychopathic frame of mind, they might well become a source of trouble and even of disloyalty to the Allied cause...

...Whatever the decision may be regarding the inclusion of Western Germany in the democratic defense force, it is clear that the postponement of German rearmament by the French, up to now, has not been without its fortunate aspects...

...The amounts the relief cases receive, $11 per month per individual and $18 per month for a couple, are commonly described as too little to live and too much to die...

...The workers are quiet, but they themselves call it the lull before the storm...

...All the things I have said about the German state of mind applies only to Western Germany...

...They hate communism more violently than any other people, for they saw the stark poverty in Russia during the invasion and the incredibly barbaric behavior of the Russian troops when they in turn invaded Germany...

...The others support themselves playing in Jazz bands at some cabaret until 2 a.m...

...It reminded me of the stockaded communities of our frontier days that endured incredible hardships and went about their business cheerfully under the daily menace of Indian attacks...

...Yet Ernest Reuter, Mayor of Berlin, whose calmness in the face of the Russian menace is the result of constant danger constantly defied, well knows the different mentality of the Western Zone...

...It is poorer, yet more democratic, more alive than any other German city...

...The concept of "free enterprise" held by Economics Minister Ehrhardt and his followers among the West German financial interests can only be described in American terms as pre-World War I. Nothing could be more dangerous than such outmoded thinking in a country of mass problems—of unemployment, housing shortage, low wages and high prices—and problems that can only be solved by careful planning and close cooperation between all the public and private agencies...

...or by any other job they can find...

...But if the German peace treaty is implemented and the Schuman Plan becomes more than a mere promise, a new self-respect will begin to heal the innumerable wounds from which the Germans are suffering...

...very thought of getting back into uniform arouses deep antagonism in these disturbed mentalities...

...As a result, wages in Germany are shockingly low...

...Of a Federal budget of 13 billion marks, 2.6 billions, or a fifth of the total, go exclusively to the solution of the refugee problem...

...Berlin is something all by itself...

...Actually they don't really mean this...

...I met young doctors who were working for nothing at the hospital of Munich University medical school, simply to have something to do...

...The moral and military strength of the American people must become a source of strength to the German people...

...If we started recruiting in Germany now, we could raise a huge army of volunteers from among the unemployed, especially the unemployed refugees and expellees who still hope to get back to their homelands...

...In fact, the hope that ECA can turn its back on Germany in two years is an illusion...

...Equally important to the German people is the immediate realization of the peace treaty, whereby the occupation laws and the heavy annual occupation cost of four billion marks can be revised, and the Germans can become once more a respected nation among nations, with more responsibility for their own political, economic and social development...

...It is what Presi-dent Heuss described to me as "an export article of American journal-ists...

...When I was in the Ruhr I interviewed a dozen or more of the leading steel, coal and chemical magnates, to evaluate their sincerity in regard to the Schuman Plan and their whole attitude toward the West as opposed to the East...

...Bomb-damaged factories and houses have been repaired...

...Its defiance of Communist aggression through sheer power of mind and spirit is an inspiration to all freedom-loving people...

...The older people yearn for security and peace...

...Yet many of the employed and unemployed said to me lethargically: "Let the Russians come...

...The number of unemployed youth between 20 and 25 years of age, most of whom have no prospect of vocational training, represents a fourth of all the unemployed, or about 300,000 individuals...

...When it looked as if the Big Three (the Prime Ministers of France, Great Britain, and the United States) were going to decide for the immediate recruitment of German military units, they reproached me as follows: "First you say we are a dangerous people who need to be demilitarized and now you want to put us back into a uniform because you need us...

...First, it will be necessary for America and Britain to send some of their best troops over here...

...Some of them have managed to increase their average wage rates as high as 350 marks per month...

...At the same time they are deeply suspicious of their own conservative political and industrial leadership...

...All Western Germany yearns for the speedy implementation of the Schuman Plan...

...While Germany lay prostrate after-its crushing defeat, Hans Bockler, head of the newly revived Gewerk-schaften (United Labor Unions), called upon the German workers to come to the rescue of their prostrate nation—to repair bridges and roads and clean up the rubble in the half-destroyed cities, although the mere business of getting something to eat was a day's job in itself...

...They lack faith in money because they have been through two inflations and now prices are rising sharply while wages are stationary...

...They abhor it...

...Social conditions have also improved...