http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38027.htm

John Kerry’s rhetoric is divorced from the reality on the ground, where life goes on – even at the barricades

By Mark Weisbrot

14/3/2014

Via: http://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/Statement-of-Press-Office-of-the-CC-of-the-KKE-on-the-Ukraine-and-the-referendum-in-the-Crimea/

The KKE from the very first moment denounced the imperialist intervention of the USA-NATO-EU in Ukraine and the coup carried out by reactionary forces, with the participation of Nazis, which creates major dangers for the Ukrainian people. The stance of these forces and their criticism in relation to the developments in Ukraine and the referendum in the Crimea are a monument of hypocrisy. As these are the same forces that played the leading role in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, in the secession of Kosovo, in the imperialist interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, in the organizations of coups against governments that are not to their liking. They attempted to do the same in Syria as they are doing now in Ukraine.

Having as our criterion the interests of the people, we consider that the assimilation of the Crimea into Russia does not deal with this intervention effectively, nor does it solve in essence any of the real problems of the Crimean people, nor does it mean any normalization of the situation or long-term solution of peace and cooperation for the peoples of the region with prosperity and progress. The majority of the people are suffering both in Russia and Ukraine, living inside conditions of capitalist barbarity, which were brought about by the counterrevolutionary changes in 1991.

We understand that the people of the Crimea, who to a great extent are of Russian and Tatar background, are worried about the acquisition of governmental power by nationalist and fascist forces, which amongst their first acts was the targeting of minorities and communists, abolishing with a law the “regional languages” and destroying anti-fascist monuments. Nevertheless, the withdrawal of Crimea for the Ukraine and its assimilation into Russia will not solve the problem of changing the correlation of forces against the reactionary and fascist forces.

It would be different if Russia was a socialist country and the people of the Crimea had made the choice and demanded accession to a socialist union together with Russia, as occurred with the accession of countries to the USSR.

The secession of the Crimea and its assimilation in Russia will further strengthen the nationalist current, both in Ukraine and in Russia. It will entrap millions of workers in a confrontation on the basis of nationality, concealing the real causes of the conflict, as well as the only alternative solution, which exists for the workers and is found on another path of development, socialism.

There is also the danger of opening “Pandora’s Box” in other regions as well, especially in the Balkans, leading to other regions being assimilated e.g. the assimilation of Kosovo into the so-called “Greater Albania” which is linked to the annexations of the territories of neighbouring countries. There are in any case examples from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia which, in the name of the self-determination of the peoples, paved the way for border changes.

The developments confirm the superiority of socialism in dealing with related problems. All the administrative changes in the Crimea, from its declaration as an autonomous republic in 1921, in the framework of the USSR, until its administrative assimilation in Ukraine in the 1950s, occurred smoothly and peacefully, because socialist relations of production were prevalent and consequently the criterion was the interests of the working class and people.

The Crimean people, the Ukrainian people, the Russian people have historical memories and positive experiences from the years of socialism, which are not erased even if over 20 years have passed since the overthrows. The Crimean people have intense memories of the anti-fascist struggle of the Soviet people, who wrote history in the siege of Sevastopol. The fact that in various regions that are seeking union with Russia they are demonstrating with, amongst other things, red flags expresses such a memory or expectation, despite the fact that such an expectation is not realistically based on today’s reality and development. Because today Russia is a capitalist country, which is in competition with the other imperialist centres, and its people are also suffering.

The historical experience teaches that in the conditions of socialism is that the peoples and the nationalities in the USSR lived fraternally and progressed with peace, while now the nationalist-divisive poison is being spread. These peoples, all the peoples, must follow this path today.

Weekend Edition March 21-23, 2014

Ukraine and Yugoslavia

by DIANA JOHNSTONE

Via: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/ukraine-and-yugoslavia/

“I sometimes get the feeling that somewhere across that huge puddle, in America, people sit in a lab and conduct experiments, as if with rats, without actually understanding the consequences of what they are doing.”
– Vladimir Putin, 4 March 2014

Paris.

Five years ago, I wrote a paper for a Belgrade conference commemorating the tenth anniversary of the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. In that paper I stressed that the disintegration of Yugoslavia had been used as an experimental laboratory to perfect various techniques that would subsequently be used in so-called “color revolutions” or other “regime change” operations directed against leaders considered undesirable by the United States government.
At that time, I specifically pointed to the similarities between the Krajina region of former Yugoslavia and Ukraine. Here is what I wrote at the time:

Where did the wars of Yugoslav disintegration break out most violently? In a region called the Krajina. Krajina means borderland. So does Ukraine – it is a variant of the same Slavic root. Both Krajina and Ukraine are borderlands between Catholic Christians in the West and Orthodox Christians in the East. The population is divided between those in the East who want to remain tied to Russia, and those in the West who are drawn toward Catholic lands. But in Ukraine as a whole, polls show that some seventy percent of the population is against joining NATO. Yet the US and its satellites keep speaking of Ukraine’s “right” to join NATO. Nobody’s right not to join NATO is ever mentioned.

The condition for Ukraine to join NATO would be the expulsion of foreign military bases from Ukrainian territory. That would mean expelling Russia from its historic naval base at Sebastopol, essential for Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Sebastopol is on the Crimean peninsula, inhabited by patriotic Russians, which was only made an administrative part of Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian.

Rather the way Tito, a Croat, gave almost the whole Adriatic coastline of Yugoslavia to Croatia, and generally enforced administrative borders detrimental to the Serbs.

As the same causes may have the same effects, US insistence on “liberating” Ukraine from Russian influence may have the same effect as the West’s insistence on “liberating” the Catholic Croats from the Orthodox Serbs. That effect is war. But instead of a small war, against the Serbs, who had neither the means nor even the will to fight the West (since they largely thought they were part of it), a war in Ukraine would mean a war with Russia. A nuclear superpower. And one that will not stand idly by while the United States continues to move its fleet and its air bases to the edges of Russian territory, both in the Black Sea and in the Baltic, on land, sea and air.

Every day, the United States is busy expanding NATO, training forces, building bases, making deals. This goes on constantly but is scarcely reported by the media. The citizens of NATO countries have no idea what they are being led into. (…)
War was easy when it meant the destruction of a helpless and harmless Serbia, with no casualties among the NATO aggressors. But war with Russia – a fierce superpower with a nuclear arsenal – would not be so much fun.

So, now here we are five years later, and I am about to attend another commemoration in Belgrade, this time of the fifteenth anniversary of the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. And this time, I really have nothing to say. I have already said it, over and over. Others are saying similar things, with more authority, from Professor Stephen Cohen to Paul Craig Roberts. Many of us have warned against the dangerous folly of seeking endlessly to provoke Russia by enlisting her neighbors in a military alliance whose enemy could only be… Russia. Of all Russia’s neighbors, none is more organically linked to Russia by language, history, geopolitical reality, religion and powerful emotions. The U.S. Undersecretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, has openly boasted that the United States has spent five billion dollars to gain influence in Ukraine – in reality, in order to draw Ukraine away from Russia and into the U.S. military alliance. It is now no secret that Ms Nuland intrigued even against America’s European allies – who had a less brutal compromise in mind – in order to replace the elected President with the American protégé she calls “Yats”, who indeed was soon installed in a far right government resulting from violent actions by one of the very few violent fascist movements still surviving in Europe.

True, Western media do not report all the facts at their disposal. But the internet is there, and the facts are on the internet. And despite all this, European governments do not protest, there are no demonstrations in the streets, much of public opinion seems to accept the notion that the villain of this story is the Russian president, who is accused of engaging in unprovoked aggression against Crimea – even though he was responding to one of the most blatant provocations in history.
The facts are there. The facts are eloquent. What can I say that are not said by the facts?

So up to now, I have remained speechless in the face of what appears to me to be utter madness. However, on the eve of my trip to Belgrade, I agreed to answer questions from journalist Dragan Vukotic for the Serbian daily newspaper Politika. Here is that interview.

Q. In your book Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions, you have brought a different stance about NATO bombing of Yugoslavia than many of your intellectual colleagues in the West. What prompted you to make such an unpopular conclusion?

A. Long ago, as a student of Russia area studies, I spent several months in Yugoslavia living in a student dormitory in Belgrade and made friends there. I turned to such old friends for viewpoints rather than to the sources consulted by Western reporters. And I have a lifelong interest in US foreign policy. I began my inquiry into Yugoslav conflicts by reading key documents, such as speeches of Milosevic, the Serbian Academy memorandum and works by Alija Izetbegovic, noting the inaccuracy of the way they were represented in Western media. I was never under instructions from editors, and indeed my editors soon refused to publish my articles. I was not the only experienced observer to be excluded from Western media coverage.

Q. Although subsequent events have confirmed that the operation of illegal bombing of one country without permission of the Security Council was completely wrong, the mainstream western media and politicians still refer to successful „Kosovo model“. Can you please comment on this matter?

A. For them, it was a success, since it set a precedent for NATO intervention. They will never admit that they were mistaken.

Q. When it came to the preparation of the “humanitarian intervention” against Syria, Obama administration reported they were studying “the NATO air war in Kosovo as a possible blueprint for acting without a mandate from the United Nations”. (Please comment on this)

A. This is not surprising, since setting such a precedent was one of the motives for that air war.

Q. In one of your articles you asked the question about what the ICC stood for in the case of Libya. You recalled the “familiar pattern” with the case of ICTY and Yugoslavia. What do you really think of those instruments of international justice and their role in international relations?

A. In the context of the present world relationship of forces, the ICC like the ad hoc tribunals can only serve as instruments of United States hegemony. Those criminal tribunals are used only to stigmatize adversaries of the United States, while the main role of the ICC so far is to justify the ideological assumption that there exists an unbiased “international justice” that ignores national boundaries and serves to enforce human rights. As John Laughland has pointed out, a proper court must be the expression of a particular community that agrees to judge its own members. Moreover, these courts have no police of their own but must rely on the armed force of the United States, NATO and their client states, who as a result are automatically exempt from prosecution by these supposedly “international” courts.

Q. What is, in your opinion, the main purpose of declaring the so-called humanitarian intervention? Does it have more to do with the domestic public opinion or with the international partners?

A. The ideology of Human Rights (a dubious concept, incidentally, since “rights” should be grounded in concrete political arrangements, not on abstract concepts alone) serves both domestic and global purposes. For the European Union, it suggests a “soft” European nationalism based on social virtue. The United States, which is more forthright than today’s Europe in proclaiming its national interest, the ideology of Human Rights serves to endow foreign interventions with a crusading purpose that can appeal to European allies and above all to their domestic opinion, as well as to the English-speaking world in general (Canada and Australia in particular). It is the tribute vice pays to virtue, to echo LaRochefoucauld.

Q. You often use the term “US and its European satellites“. Please explain.

A. “Satellites” was the term used for members of the Warsaw Pact, and today the governments of the NATO member states follow Washington as obediently as the former followed Moscow, even when, as in the case of Ukraine, the United States goes against European interests.

Q. How do you see current goings on in Ukraine and Crimea, especially in terms of US-Russia relations?

A. US-Russian relations are determined primarily by an ongoing U.S. geostrategic hostility to Russia which is partly a matter of habit or inertia, partly a realization of the Brzezinski strategy of dividing Eurasia in order to maintain US world hegemony, and partly a reflection of Israeli-dominated Middle East policy toward Syria and Iran. Between the two major nuclear powers, there is clearly an aggressor and an aggressed. It is up to the aggressor to change course if relations are to be normal.

Simply compare. Is Russia urging Quebec to secede from Canada so that the province can join a military alliance led by Moscow? Evidently not. That would be comparable, and yet mild compared to the recent U.S. gambit led by Victoria Nuland aimed at bringing Ukraine, including the main Russian naval base at Sebastopol, into the Western orbit. The material reality of this political orbit is NATO, which since the end of the Soviet Union has systematically expanded toward Russia, which stations missiles whose only strategic function would be to provide the United States with a hypothetical nuclear first strike capacity against Russia, and which regularly holds military manoeuvers along Russian borders. Russia has done nothing against the United States, and recently provided President Obama with a face-saving way to avoid being voted down in Congress in regard to military action against Syria – action which was not desired by the Pentagon but only by the fraction of Israeli-oriented policy makers called “neocons”. Russia professes no hostile ideology, and only seeks normal relations with the West. What more can it do? It is up to Americans to come to their senses.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

Editor’s note: Although this was written in 1959, it is highly relevant to any discussion of the historical context of the current situation in the Ukraine today.

The German Question

Toward war or peace?

By Herbert Aptheker

About the Author

HERBERT APTHEKER is widely known as a scholar, historian and educator, and is presently the editor of the Marxist monthly, Political Affairs. He is the author of several major works including American Negro Slave Revolts, Essays in the History of the American Negro, History and Reality, The Truth about Hungary, and A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. His latest book, The Colonial Era, published in the spring of 1959, is the first in a multi volume history of the formation, growth and development of the United States.

Dr. Aptheker served in the Field Artillery for over four years in the Second World War, rising through the ranks from private to major. In 1939, he was awarded a prize in history by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1946-1947, and is presently director of the Faculty of Social Science, in New York.

Originally published by New Century Publishers, June, 1959.

“How does it become a man to behave towards this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it”-Henry David Thoreau, 1849.

The foreign policy of the United States Government, especially since 1945, has been geared towards establishing hegemony over the world by the American ruling class. Therefore, the policy has been thoroughly reactionary, militaristic, and aggressive; it is a policy which pauperizes the impoverished and chains the enslaved; it is a policy which has bulwarked monstrous tyrants-defunct and de facto-from Bao Dai to Batista, from Franco to Rhee, from Jimenez to Nuri Said, from Trujillo to Chiang. It is a policy that opposes democracy, national liberation, and Socialism; it is a policy-to quote from the recent penetrating critique by Prof. Williams-that “has now become a denial of the spirit of man.” (William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Cleveland, World Publishing Company, 1959, p. 183)

Naturally, such a policy, being pursued in a country with the political and religious traditions of the United States, must be enveloped in hypocritical terminology and demagogic trappings perhaps unparalleled in the terribly long history of hypocrisy and demagogy. The hypocrisy and demagogy will be most blatant where that policy impinges upon areas central to its implementation. Such an area is Germany-the country in Europe’s heart, with the largest population, the most highly developed industry and the richest resources on that continent-the Soviet Union excepted, of course. Here the issues are not peripheral and stakes are not simply high; here the issues are fundamental and stakes are basic. Let us seek to break through the obstacles of prevarication and deception on this question of Germany-this question of questions-and get at the facts.

US POLICY: THEN AND NOW

On January 7, 1959, the Department of State issued a Memorandum entitled: “The Soviet Note on Berlin-An Analysis.” There the Department summarizes what it alleges to be the purposes and commitments entered into by the United States vis-à-vis Germany during World War II, in these words:

“In wartime agreements the Allied nations stated two fundamental policies: they pledged to defeat the enemy, and they declared they would strive for recovery from the war, continuing wartime cooperation.”

This presentation of alleged wartime commitments was made by the State Department in reply to Soviet insistence that they required an anti-fascist and anti-militarist policy, that this had not been pursued by the United States and that, therefore, arrangements entered into on the basis of those commitments needed thorough re-examination.

These versions contradict each other; while neither need to be true, it is certain that both cannot be true. What are the facts concerning World War II and agreements relative to Germany and the purposes for which the war was being fought in Europe?

In August, 1947, the State Department issued an official Memorandum entitled: “Occupation of Germany: Policy and Progress.” That Memorandum, then, began with this sentence:

“The guiding objectives of the Government with respect to Germany were: 1) the total destruction of the Nazi regime, and 2) insurance against the reappearance in the future of a regime or ideology calculated to disturb the general peace and security.”

The reader is invited to compare this 1947 summary with the 1959 summary quoted earlier. On what is the 1947 summary based? The Memorandum itself tells us by quoting from the major policy statements made by the President of the United States, and his Message to Congress, dated September 17, 1943. On that occasion, President Roosevelt stated:

“There is one thing I want to make perfectly clear: When Hitler and the Nazis go out, the Prussian military clique must go with them. The war-breeding gangs of militarists must be rooted out of Germany-and out of Japan-if we are to have any real assurance of future peace….We shall not be able to claim that we have gained total victory in this war if any vestige of Fascism in any of its malignant forms is permitted to survive anywhere in the world.”

These words anticipate not only in substance but in detail the solemn wartime agreements entered into by the Allied Coalition; the agreements that gave meaning to the indescribable suffering brought on by that war and that lifted the hearts and steeled the arms of millions and millions of men and women who fought on through everything for years with the single-minded purpose of making those agreements come into being. If the present Administration believes that it can get away with an effort to wipe out the memory of those agreements and the reality of those commitments by a couple of lines concocted by their Madison-Avenue boys about “defeating the enemy” and “recovering from the war,” then it is clear that the ailments of this Administration, while indubitably severe in the physical sphere, are even more critical in the mental.

In a treaty signed at Yalta, February, 1945, the Governments of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union unequivocally agreed:

“Our inexorable purpose [is] to destroy German militarism and nazism… To disarm and disband all German Armed Forces; break up for all time the German military equipment; eliminate or control all German industry that could be used for military production; bring all war criminals to justice and swift punishment and exact reparation in-kind for the destruction wrought by the Germans; wipe out the Nazi party, Nazi laws, organizations and institutions, remove all Nazi and militarist influences from public office and from the cultural and economic life of the German people… Enable the liberated peoples to destroy the vast vestiges of Nazism and Fascism…”

In April, 1945, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered the Commander in Europe-Gen. Eisenhower-to implement this Treaty in the American zone of Germany, and to undertake the complete destruction of Nazism and Nazi organizations, overt or covert, and to eliminate from all spheres of German public, corporate or cultural life all supporters of fascism, militarism or Nazism.

After the surrender of Germany, the three great powers at Potsdam, in August, 1945, reiterated, and, if anything, made more explicit, their agreement, and “permanently to prevent the revival or reorganization of German militarism and Nazism… To prevent all Nazi and militarist activity or propaganda… German education shall be so controlled as completely to eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines…”

The facts concerning the agreements of World War II refute, then, the State Department assertion of January, 1959 that the USSR is an error when it insists that those agreements had at their heart an anti-Nazi and anti-militarist commitment, and that those agreements call for nothing more than the enemy’s defeat and recovery from the damages of the war through united effort. On this matter of historical fact, the government of the Soviet Union is right, and the government of the United States is wrong.

WHY IS THE RECORD FALSIFIED?

The US government falsifies the nature of the World War II agreements because she has failed to abide by them. This policy has been to renazify, not denazify; to cartelize, not to decartelize; to remilitarize, not to demilitarize. Let the record speak:

On denazification: James Stewart Martin, for a year and a half immediately after the war, chief of the Decartelization Branch of the American Military Government in Germany, wrote that, beginning in 1946: “Top Nazis and Nazi supporters who think democracy ridiculous moved into key positions in the economic and administrative life of Germany or were never thrown out.” (All Honorable Men, Boston, 1950, p. 168). In March, 1946, Gen. Clay, US Military Governor in Germany, turned over to German authorities the task of denazification. Early in 1948, this general issued a directive that the process was to be completed by the summer of that year.

The overall official figures, to June, 1948, show that in Western Germany nearly 13,000,000 persons were registered for investigation, of whom over 9 millions were dismissed immediately. Of the remainder, almost 2 1/2 million were given amnesty without trial; about 800,000 were tried. Nearly 40% of those tried were exonerated; 50% were classified as only “followers”; and about 1/10 of 1% were classified as “major offenders.” These are the figures for the lower courts; on appeal less than 30% of the classifications and punishments were confirmed. Of those convicted, the vast majority-80%-were fined less than 1000 marks; and as of December, 1949 there was throughout West Germany a total of 250 persons in jail for Nazi activities and atrocities!

Who were the people exonerated, likely find, or jailed for a few months? In addition to such relatively well-publicized figures as Hans Schacht, Ilse Koch and Alfred Krupp, the names include: Simpfendorffer, Nazi Minister of Education-freed; Hildebrandt, chief of the foreign labor branch of the Nazi Labor Ministry-fined 250 marks; SS Maj. Gen. Klepfor-classified a “minor offender” and unpunished; SS Lieut. Gen. Wolff, chief of all Gestapo activities in Italy-given a four-year sentence and released four days later because of prior commitment. People like Ernst Bohle, chief of the Nazi party’s Foreign Office, and Josef Altstoetter, Gestapo representative in Hitler’s Ministry of Justice, were freed after serving two years. Exonerated were such figures as the former Dean at Bonn University, a member of the Gestapo and an informer for Himmler; a Director of the Interior Ministry under Hitler from 1933 to 1943. The police chief of Nuremberg who organized the 1938 pogrom there; the Mayor of occupied Vienna; the physician in charge of enforcing the Nazi sterilization law-these men were fined less than 1000 marks.

Hence, as early as 1948 Prof. John H. Herz entitled an article in the Political Science Quarterly, “The Fiasco of Denazification,” a fiasco which, he concluded “opened the way toward renewed control of German public, social, economic and cultural life by forces which only partially and temporarily had been deprived of the influence they had exerted under the Nazi regime.” Hence, by February, 1949, Bernard Taper, a former official of AMG in Germany, was writing in Harper’s of “the return of Nazis to office.” Already, under US control, said Taper, “they are coming back not only into high office, but into all the nooks and crannies of German bureaucracy.” By the next year, as the United Press reported from Munich (February 23, 1950), the denazification offices were being shut throughout Western Germany. The story explained: “Ministry officials said the closing was necessary because no funds for denazification had been included in the 1950-1951 budget.”

Koppel S. Pinson, a professor at Queens College in New York City, is author of an eminently conservative and heatedly anti-Communist study of Modern Germany: Its History And Civilization (New York, 1954, Macmillan). This respectable gentleman writes on American occupation policy in Germany immediately after the war:

Few as the anti-Nazis were, they should have been given enthusiastic support by military government. This was usually not the case. While it was not always apparent whether Nazism paid or not, it became all too evident from the start that anti-Nazis and did not pay.

As the months passed, matters deteriorated. Thus, continues Prof. Pinson, “the years after 1947 saw the huge rehiring of former Nazis for important places in the administrative machinery of the new German states.” In fact, he states that matters reached the point where those Germans who had been anti-Nazis or had participated in the denazification effort, “began to find it increasingly difficult to find employment, and have come to form a new class of political and economic outcasts.”

Presently, this is a “cause for serious alarm.” No wonder, since for members of Adenauer’s own cabinet had been important members of the Nazi party, and two of them had been Gestapo members! And the Chancellor was forced to admit in 1951 that of the 383 senior officials in his Foreign Office, 134 had been Nazi party members. Of these, Professor Pinson writes:

They are not only nominal party members. They include among others the author of the official legal commentary to the [racist] Nuremberg laws, the organizer of the activities of the Grand Mufti in the Near East, the director of the East European Division of the Nazi Foreign Office, the active leader in the deportation of the Jews of Amsterdam, and the man who ordered the extermination of Jews deported from Rumania.

And, “the police force is staffed with numerous SS [Gestapo] officers.” Generally, “open admiration for the top Nazi leaders has also begun to reappear… Revived Nazi sentiment has been utilized to form various political groups, political parties, and veterans’ organizations.” Anti-Semitism again is rampant, writes this professor in 1954, but, “much more serious than the open and crude manifestations of Nazism are the more subtle and deeper aspects of authoritarian nationalist sentiment.” All this-plus the adoption by the West German government for its official anthem of-once more-the anthem of Bismarck’s Germany-Deutschland uber Alles! And 600 judges, who administered the law under Hitler, now sit under Adenauer. As Dulles said-he wanted a free Germany, and he knew a free Germany when he saw it.

The institutionalizing and legalizing of renazification occurred with the passage in 1951 by the West German government of a law which gave all ousted civil-service employees a vested right to their former positions, regardless of their relationship with the Nazi party. The only exception been made-since repealed-was to bar former Gestapo members from civil-service reinstatement as a matter of right. In a quite recent critical study of Democracy in Western Germany (Oxford University Press, New York, 1958), Richard Hiscocks refers to the “enormity” of this 1951 law which actually favored collaborator and Nazi civil servants at the expense of the heroic minority opposed to Hitlerism.

Lately, Prof. John H. Herz, whose earlier writing on the subject we have already cited, prepared a study of “Political Views of the West German Civil-Service” for the RAND Corporation, (this forms a chapter in Hans Speier and W. P. Davison, eds., West German Leadership and Foreign Policy (Row, Peterson and Company, White Plains, New York, 1957)) actually a nonmilitary agency serving the U.S. Air Force in an informational capacity. The West German bureaucracy, as one might expect, bows to none in terms of members; Prof. Herz estimates that in it are about 1 1/2 million employees. He concludes that the great majority prefer to forget the “trouble” before 1945, or to blame “others” for its occurrence. A considerable minority are outright Nazis, he states, but most adopt an attitude of utter cynicism and eschew all systems and all values. He finds that “today’s service is made up largely of the service that existed under the Nazis…”

The politically reactionary majority in Adenauer’s civil-service, writes Herz, “object to almost everything an earlier American policies: democratization, denazification, demilitarization, and so forth. By the same token, they expressed great satisfaction with the more recent change in American policy in all these fields.” The small minority, however, which has some pro-democratic feelings, “are profoundly apprehensive.” This minority of pro-democrats in West Germany, “are disturbed not only about the international implications but above all about the internal impact of a policy which, so they say, tends to encourage the militarist, ultranationalist, anti-democratic forces in Germany.” As a result, “German democrats, so these officials complained, have thus been discredited.”

ON DEMOCRATIZATION

Of course, renazification means a repudiation of democratization-one of the undertakings explicitly pledged that both Yalta and Potsdam. In addition to the material presented above, however, there is much evidence confirming a US governmental policy of hindering, rather than assisting, the development of democratic organization, action and thought in Germany.

Thus, clearly, any serious effort to undo Hitlerite reaction would have to undertake a remodeling of the educational system, both in terms of undoing its caste nature and its elitist, racist, militarist, and jingoist content. In fact, however, nothing like this was done, and higher education remains the privilege of the offspring of the rich and West Germany, while the autocratic and aristocratic nature of the universities, notorious since Bismarck, characterized them under Adenauer.

By 1947, Saul K. Padover, the well-known historian-during the war, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare section, assigned to educational work in the American Zone-was already reporting “The Failure of Reeducation of Germany.” (Published in: Education in Transition, 34th Annual Schoolmen’s Proceedings, 1947, University of Pennsylvania) He explained that while the straight-out Nazi textbooks were removed, “it was not easy to cleanse those that contain subtle militaristic propaganda or an indirect nationalist slant glorifying German heroes.” Dr. Padover then gave to actual examples of what he thought were “subtle” and “indirect” militaristic and nationalistic inculcation:

“Take, for example, the sentence from the grammar school textbook, Deutscher Lesebuch, IV, which ends the story of Alfred Krupp-“His work remains as a blessing for hundreds of thousands of diligent hands, and enlightening example of national labor and a proud glory of our German fatherland.” This seems innocent enough, except for the fact that Alfred Krupp built Germany’s largest armament works. The question is, should such sentences be left in or cut out? This has been left in. Or take this example from the history text book, Lehrbuch der Geschichte, III, which, speaking of the Prussian defeat of 1807, says: “the successors of Frederick the Great were weak sovereigns and they missed the right moment for the inevitable war.” Is this legitimate history or propaganda designed to keep alive the militaristic spirit? The answer is obviously not easy.

What is not easy, is to understand Padover’s naïveté. And these were the standards back in 1946, when the ink on the Potsdam Treaty was hardly dry. No wonder Padover concluded: “Unfortunately the superintendence of education, like that of political affairs in general, is not infrequently in the hands of ultranationalist Germans whose aim is to revive the nationalist spirit and keep fresh the military tradition.” And he offered to instances of such superintendence of which he had personal knowledge: the person in charge of education in the Aachen area “was an old militarist clerical,” who despised the French and loathed the British, and “naturally defended Hitler’s war”; the Minister of Culture in Bavaria was “a violent reactionary and fanatical militarist… Who personally supervises the revision of textbooks, one of which contains a notorious glorification of war.”

These, we repeat, where the personnel selected by the American Military Government, back in 1946, to implement the reeducation of the German people so that the last vestiges of Nazism might be extirpated and militarism might never rise again. No wonder that by 1949 the New York Times (April 27) reported there were “more Nazis in German schools today than in 1945.”

Bernard Taper, the AMG official whose article in Harper’s (February, 1949) has already been cited, was charged specifically with supervising elections in West Germany. His conclusions are indicated in the article’s title: “Heil Free Elections!”; they are spelled out more fully in the sentence: “It cannot be seriously contended that the Germans have developed any feelings for democracy or have made any basic changes in a way of life whose social and cultural institutions remain thoroughly anti-democratic.”

By 1950, the propaganda line of the US government was to promise to deal only “with any serious resurgence of German Fascism”-to quote High Commissioner John J. McCloy (New York Herald Tribune, January 26). Men like Gen. Clay and Henry Byroade (then Director of the Bureau of German Affairs in the State Department) stressed the need for the gradual elimination of Nazism, insisted that this process could not be legislated or “forced,” and began to argue that it was “undemocratic” to repress fascism-i.e., to do what was pledged at Potsdam.

Now there are two main elements to government propaganda on this matter, depending on the level of the media being used. One, employed especially in the mass media, presents, as we have seen, a complete falsification of the actual nature of the wartime obligations and agreements; the other, more commonly used for academic and sophisticated audiences, insist that those obligations and agreements are so “vague” as to be in fact meaningless, that they were agreed to as matters of wartime propaganda and that, therefore, they carry no real weight.

The latter argument, for example, is developed at length in Herald Zink’s The United States in Germany: 1944-1955 (Van Nostrand, New York, 1957). This is of particular interest, for the author, now a professor at Ohio State University, was Chief Historian for several years in the office of the US High Commissioner for Germany. Professor Zink begins his argument by remarking that “there is little convincing evidence that democracy can be imposed by one country or a group of countries on another.” He thinks that the fact that the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain all jointly agreed on the Potsdam commitment itself tends to demonstrate “the faith or perhaps meaningless character of this objective.” The experience of fighting World War I in order to “make the world safe for democracy” should have shown all concerned, writes Prof. Zink, that the undertakings at Potsdam represented “a futile proposition.” In any case, this author wonders how it was possible for anyone to think that the “generally negative provisions” of the Potsdam agreement and of the directive issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for its implementation “could be regarded as any real ‘preparation’ for such democratic reconstruction.” Considering the question a rhetorical one, he concludes that, at any rate, “the tendency [of Military Government] was to leave the problem of democratic reconstruction in abeyance.”

The question is not rhetorical at all, and it poses the fundamental problem relative to Germany. The “negative provisions” of the Potsdam Treaty required the elimination of all vestiges of Nazism from German politics, culture and society; there is nothing vague about this, though the method of its implementation and the degree to which it is done or need be done might be subjects for debate. But surely such provisions were not enforced by a policy of renazification! And, alas, the “problem of democratic reconstruction” was not left “in abeyance”; for social development does not wait on any particular person, whether he is High Commissioner or Chief Historian. Post-war Germany was a living, albeit devastated, organism; therefore, it was in process of change, and this change could be either progressive or retrogressive.

One thing would not happen; things would not be left in abeyance. And as we have seen, they were not; rather a policy was instituted by the US government of reneging on its anti-fascist commitments and this carried with it a policy of restoring to authority Nazi, militarist, reactionary figures. The “problem of democratic reconstruction” was answered by the US government by the adoption of a policy of anti-democratic reconstruction.

Before concluding this discussion of democratization, a brief notes should be added concerning Chancellor Adenauer himself. This extremely conservative and very old man is a typical product of European Catholic hierarchical political training, educated in the law and holding political office ever since the days of World War I. His personal arrogance and fierce bureaucratism have in them the qualities and traditions of the Germany of the Kaiser. Richard Hiscocks, and the book previously cited, has this in mind when he refers to West Germany as having a “Chancellor-Democracy.” Prof. Gordon A. Craig, of Princeton, in a not unfriendly study, (G.A. Craig, From Bismarck to Adenauer (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1959). It is relevant to point out that Adenauer, through his wife, is related to the whites of the financier John J. McCloy, former High Commissioner, of Lewis W. Douglas, former Ambassador to Great Britain and a Morgan partner, and of John Sharman Zinsser, president of the pharmaceutical trust, Sharp & Dohme, and a Morgan director) nevertheless refers to Adenauer’s “peremptory manner,” his tendency to offer “gratuitous affronts,” his extreme rigidity, and his habit of secrecy, so that, for example, while he offered to supply several German divisions to the Allied High Commission in a memorandum of August, 1950, he did not feel it necessary to inform the Bundestag of this offer until February, 1952, and then did so “almost by chance.”

ON ANTI-SEMITISM

Renazification and anti-democracy mean, in Germany, revived anti-Semitism. The latter ornament most certainly adorns the Dulles-Adenauer version of a free Germany. The matter is tricky for them, somewhat in the way that the Jim Crow system in the United States annoys the Eisenhower-Dulles team. Of course, both men are staunch Anglo-Saxon supremacists and have conducted their lives in full accordance with the “restrictive” and “exclusive” nature of such supremacist, but both men, operating in a world most of whose people are colored and are on the march, and both posing as champions of freedom, find this question of Jim Crow most distressing-in the words of C. L. Sulzberger, “the jury, tormented racial problem most acutely embarrasses our policymakers” (What’s Wrong with US Foreign Policy, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1859, p. 20).

Flagrant anti-Semitism, especially since the horror of Hitlerism and the fact that half the remaining Jews in the world live in the United States, and in view of Wall Street’s Mideast policy and its line in connection with the Ben Gurion administration in Israel, does not sit well with the State Department’s demagogy relative to present-day West Germany. On the other hand, the Adenauer government, being a renazified one, is naturally staffed by and permeated with anti-Semitism; furthermore, being what it is, it nurtures as it needs anti-Semitic ideas and provocations. The “solution” in the face of these contradictory conditions has been a “free” press that tends to play down the realities of anti-Semitism in West Germany; with this has gone an effort at reparations to the Ben Gurion government that it is hoped may gloss over that angle and possibly neutralize if not win over certain of the upper-class components of American Jewish leadership.

Yet, the anti-Semitism in Adenauer’s land is so gross and persistent, the memory of Hitlerism is so keen and widespread, and portions of the Jewish populations and press do stand on guard; therefore something of the mounting pressures upon the 25,000 to 30,000 Jews still living in West Germany has reached public notice.

By June, 1947, the Bavarian Minister of Economics, Dr. Rudolph Zorn, had found the “courage” to remark, in the presence of US Military authorities, that the Jews then in the displaced persons camps “can be compared to the most vicious of the insects that infest the German body.” Wolfgang Hedler, a deputy in the Bonn Parliament, in 1949, publicly declared “that the sending of Jews to the gas chamber may have been the right course”; for this he was arrested and tried, but acquitted early in 1950, earning him a telegram from the Deutsche Recht Party: “Congratulations on your acquittal under which the Right holds its own against the pressure of the street” (New York Herald Tribune, February 16, 1950). Drew Middleton reported in the New York Times (October 15, 1951):

“Six years after the end of the war, most Allied observers agree that anti-Semitism continues to exist in Germany. It often reveals itself in crude vandalism against Jewish cemeteries or brutal attacks in speech and in print by extremists.”

The persistence of anti-Semitic feelings in Germany is not to be wondered at, especially in view of its history, and the intensity with which backward ideas tend to endure. But here the point is that the policy of renazification and anti-democracy encouraged this persistence and its display, and assumed a position of helplessness if not quite benevolence in the face of such persistence and such display.

A typical in very recent example is the Nieland case which broke late in 1958. This involves a lumber merchant of Hamburg, one Friedrich Nieland, and a printer named Adolf Heimberg. These men produced and distributed a pamphlet entitled “How Many World Wars Do Nations Have To Lose?” The pamphlet holds that the murder of 6 million Jews during Nazism was a work of “secret representatives of international Jewry”; its main point is that Germany was deceived and betrayed by this international Jewry into losing the second world war. It demands a reaffirmation, officially, of a policy of anti-Semitism and specifically that Jews be barred by law from any position of consequence in government, political parties, banking “or elsewhere.”

The author and publisher were arrested and charged with acting to the detriment of the State and libeling a whole people. The case was dismissed by a lower Hamburg court in November, 1958. When the public prosecutor filed a request for a rehearing, the Hamburg State Supreme Court, on January 6, 1959, rejected it. This Supreme Court, in rejecting at, said it did so because the pamphlet did not call for a fight against Jews as such, but rather “only” against “international Jewry” and, “The pamphlet showed clearly that the author had separated the Jewish people from ‘international Jewry’ and any measures suggested in the pamphlet were directed against the latter.” The pamphlet, with this official blessing, is now circulating in West Germany, in defense of whose freedom, free men everywhere are supposed to mobilize. Characteristically, the New York Times story giving these details was headlined: “Adenauer Piqued by Anti-Semitism” (January 10, 1959)!

A one inch item in the New York Times from Bonn (January 30, 1959) told of the arrest of 12 people who had damaged a coffee shop, owned by a Jew; the owner was called a “Jewish paid” that the Nazis somehow had “forgotten to gas.” The same day’s paper, and a half inch item from Freiburg, said that the town had offered a reward of 1000 marks (about $230) for the apprehension of those responsible for the painting of red swastikas over tombstones in a nearby Jewish cemetery.

The same paper, on February 26, 1959, gave 2 inches to another story from Bonn involving a woman named Jeanette Wolf, who had been an inmate of a concentration camp, had lost two daughters there and whose husband had been murdered by the Gestapo. The woman has brought charges against a tax collector and another man identified simply as “a former Gestapo leader.” Mrs. Wolf said:

That the tax official had said concentration camps were desirable and too few Jews had been killed in them. She said also that the former SS leader had publicly threatened to use a riding whip in the same way as he said he had done before on naked Jewish women.

As I write, the New York Times (March 16, 1959) notes that “Bias Issue Stirs Germany’s Jews,” that “perplexity and terror” was expressed by many; nevertheless, keeping to the pattern of restraint, the correspondent comments: “the acts of anti-Semitism here seem no more numerous than those in other democratic countries”! (As West German capitalists undertake once again the “penetration” of Africa they adopt the white supremacy conventional in “democratic countries.” Bonn’s food minister, Heinrich Luebke, on an official visit to the Union of South Africa, in March, complemented that country on its strict segregation and urged the system be applied throughout Africa.-Frankfurter Rundschau, March 18, 1959)

ON REMILITARIZATION

The repudiation of Potsdam carried with it the rearming of Western Germany. The movement towards the sand has been guarded, for the results of German militarism stretched stark and terrible in 1000 devastated cities and millions upon millions of graves. Nevertheless, the aim has been pursued with great persistence and has achieved notable success: today at West Germany is a major military force.

An early trial balloon in favor of German remilitarization occurred in a column by Hanson Baldwin, military expert for the New York Times (September 29, 1948). 11 years ago, Mr. Baldwin wrote: “sooner or later we must come to grips-whether we like it or not-with the utilization of German manpower for defense of the West and to help to restore the balance of power in Europe.” A year later, Sen. Elmer Thomas, of the Appropriations Committee, announced himself as ready to consider the organization of “a certain number of German divisions,” and Newsweek announced that Germany would have to be “the main source of continental manpower.”

By December, 1949, Field Marshal Montgomery, then Chief of the British General Staff, said, in a speech at West Point: “if you tell me to rearm Germany, I will do it in a way that is safe.” The way? “Western Germany must be rearmed for defensive warfare under Allied command.” A day later, Adenauer said in Bonn: “if the Allies demanded that we should take part in the defense of Western Europe, I should be in favor, not of an independent Wehrmacht, but a German contingent in the European force.” By January 14, 1950, the New York Times was announcing the formation in West Germany of a staff of general officers in the former Wehrmacht for the purpose of advising Adenauer; the next month the U.S. Army announced the employment of former Nazi General Guderian as an advisor for itself. And Gen. Clay, when asked by Life (February 20, 1950): “Do you think Germany should again have a standing army?” Replied: “Two facts seem plain enough: the West German people are entitled to some security against aggression. Two: the military occupation that now provides that security cannot be expected to endure for all time.”

Observe that in all of this, for a full two years, there was no mention of remilitarization as being necessary in Western Germany in reply to such moves in the Eastern zone; this was because there were no such moves in that zone, and the United States and Adenauer did not even try to justify their policy of rearming West Germany on any such specious grounds at that time.

In August, 1950, as we have shown above, Adenauer secretly offered the Western powers several divisions of German troops. This places in its proper context a dispatch from London, dated October 20, 1950 in the New York Times: “the Soviet government today accused the Big Three Western Powers of contemplating the revival of the regular German Army and warned that Russia ‘will not tolerate such measures.’”

The first open and official pronouncement looking towards the remilitarization of West Germany-still camouflaged in terms of subordination to an Allied Command-came in an AP release from Bonn, September 24, 1951: “The Allied High Commissioners formally invited Western Germany to raise an army for the West.” From then on it has been a matter of steadily increasing the number of men, ships, and planes, of shifting their control to West German authority, of fully integrating them-as equals-within the whole military apparatus of NATO, of placing German officers in leading positions within NATO and of providing for the arming of the West German forces themselves with nuclear weapons.

This policy of the rearming of West Germany-highlighted by the Brussels pact of 1953 bringing her into NATO formally, and the Paris Treaty of 1954 granting the West German government almost absolute and full sovereignty-reached a climax in November, 1958. But before we turn to the 1958 climax, we must pause briefly to look into the London and Paris agreements of October, 1954. These agreements were forced by a furious US government after the French Assembly, in August, 1954, had voted down the proposal of making West Germany a full member of the European Defense Community. They represented a method of achieving the same and through diplomacy rather than the less reliable parliamentary method.

In these agreements, the sovereignty of West Germany was formally recognized, and it was allowed its own army-to be integrated within the Western military system-to begin with of 12 fully mechanized divisions, plus an air force and a Navy-a total of about 500,000 men in the armed forces. On this event, the Times correspondent, M. S. Handler wrote (October 24, 1954):

“The sense of the Paris agreements was to create a sovereign West German state based on a national army integrated with other European forces at such a high level as to leave no doubt as to which military establishment would ultimately become the most important in the Western alliance. The basic 12 divisions, mechanized and motorized, would have a firepower and mobility far greater than anything known in the last war.”

One last point on this 1954 agreement. In it West Germany agreed not to arm itself with atomic, bacteriological or chemical weapons, but absolutely no system of inspection, no method of guaranteeing the enforcement of this commitment was undertaken. Adenauer’s word was given; that is all.

Del Vayo, the former Foreign Minister of the late Spanish Republic, wrote of his astonishment at the “optimism” displayed by the Allied statesman and they’re asking for no guarantees. And he commented:

“The story of Germany’s rearmament in violation of the Versailles Treaty, of the complete collapse of the Allied effort to halt the rebirth of German militarism, is a story not from history books, but of our own generation. The very statesman who today speak so glibly and confidently of “guarantees” and “controls” were only yesterday fulminating against the inadequacy of either to halt the growing German military menace. It is as if the whole period between the two world wars has been expunged from time. There can be only one explanation for this astounding amnesia: the current anti-Communist of session, the hatred of Russia and the fear of Communist China, has proved stronger than memory or reason. (The Nation, October 23, 1954).”

And now for the November, 1958 climax. On November 24, Jack Raymond reported from Washington in the New York Times, that the United States had decided to press for the elimination of the last remaining curbs on the sovereignty of West Germany, especially so far as her right to militarize were concerned. This dispatch went on to say that the main purpose behind the United States decision to lift the last limitations included a desire “to reinforce West German forces in the Baltic with anti-submarine vessels,” to provide Adenauer’s government with a greater role in the Atlantic Ocean, and to see that it had significant reinforcements for its ground forces “with tanks and other weapons.”

“The ‘other weapons’ involved are spelled out in this paragraph:
The United States has also scheduled for delivery to West Germany’s month several missiles that can be fitted with conventional or nuclear warheads. The West Germans will get only the conventional type of missiles, but the United States will hold in reserve the nuclear warheads, as in arrangements with other members of the North Atlantic alliance.”

The reader is to observe that this has reference only to arms to be supplied to West German forces; of course, US forces in West Germany are supplied with all the latest nuclear weapons and weapons launching devices. Included in the weapons to be turned over to the West German government and army, said the Raymond dispatch, were not only the 15 mile range artillery rocket, but also the 600 mile range jet driven winged missile, the so-called Matador. Bonn, said this dispatch, had ordered about 300 of these Matadors; moreover, West German troops have been training in the servicing of missiles, here in the United States, “for several months” and specifically they have been training on the use of the Matador, in West Germany “for many months.”

The reader is to bear in mind that the distance from Hamburg to Prague is about 350 miles; from Hamburg to Warsaw, less than 500 miles; from Munich to Budapest about 350 miles; to Prague about 220 miles; and to the borders of the Soviet Union about 500 miles.

We repeat that the point had been reached in November, 1958, where the New York Times was pending the fact that the West German government had ordered about 300 Matadors-with a range of 600 miles-for delivery to their own armed forces; that the delivery was being made, and that West German troops had been training for many months on how to fire this weapon, which may be armed with thermonuclear weapons having enormous, devastating force. And all this ensconced in a story about how the United States was going to insist on the removal of the last of the limitations on re-militarizing West Germany.

A few days after all this became a matter of public record-though surely weeks, if not months, after these arrangements and plans must have been known in all the capital offices of the world-the Soviet Union presented, November 27, 1958, its note relative to the Berlin situation and made its proposals for the resolution of the altogether unnatural condition existing in that city and in the German nation. Yet repeatedly, these proposals are dealt with as though they were sheer bolts out of the blue, the result of the capricious whim of the unaccountable Mr. Khrushchev.

Further announcements relative to the intensified drive to make of West Germany an area teeming with military potential followed, all of them clearly the result of many weeks of earlier preparation. On December 4, 1958, the Defense Ministry of the West German government announced that its Army was to be equipped at once with three battalions (144 launching pads) of rockets, one of which will have the potential of firing atomic weapons. These, however, remain under the control of the Supreme Commander of NATO, the US General Norstad.

In connection with the latter fact it is at least sobering to notice that Paul-Henri Spaak, Sec. Gen. of NATO, has raised the point that he thinks the responsibility for the use of atomic weapons must not be confined to the United States. He writes:

“Of late, however, the situation has been changing as European armies, or at least some of them, have been receiving tactical and, more recently, strategic nuclear weapons. Continental Europe’s ability to play an effective part in atomic retaliation is now a fact. Would it not be legitimate, then, to give Europe some share of the responsibility for the conduct of this kind of warfare? Common sense [!] Dictates an affirmative reply. (Foreign Affairs, April, 1959).”

At the same time, and in the same publication, Franz-Joseph Strauss, Adenauer’s Minister of Defense, makes the point that, coming from him at this time, is more than sobering; it is a real cause for alarm. Strauss urges that the West remember that the strategy of deterrence requires three things: 1) the necessary weapons; 2) the determination to use them; 3) a cause strong enough to justify their use in the eyes of world public opinion. Of the three, only the third worries the West German Defense Minister, especially since as he writes: “… We can expect that the justification for our employing thermonuclear weapons will be made as obscure as possible by a Communist aggressor.”

We feel compelled to remind the reader that Hitler also faced this problem; and when, soon after his attack upon the USSR he felt it necessary that a Southern front be opened up through Hungary, he arranged, with Horthy, as the latter tells in his Memoirs, for the Luftwaffe to bomb some Hungarian villages, and to have the Hungarian government announced proof of a Red Air Force attack, and then to declare war.

Two “little” items tucked away in recent dispatches add some color to the story of remilitarization. An AP dispatch from Bonn, January 28, 1959, announced that the West German government has indicted Pastor Martin Niemoeller-the renowned anti-Nazi-on a charge of “criminally slandering its Army.” Condition could mean a two-year prison sentence for the minister who had dared to suggest that the purposes of remilitarization of West Germany were not necessarily of the purist or calculated to promote the welfare of mankind. The other item was reported by Waverley Root in a story on SHAPE, the military headquarters of NATO; it seems that only recently German officers attached to this headquarters have taken to wearing their battle ribbons, but out of deference for their Allies, they where only “those one on the Eastern front” (The Reporter, March 19, 1959). The armies they led, however, did march West, too; in fact, they did somewhat better in the West than they did in the East, and it is not likely that the present-day wearers of highly selective decorations have forgotten that fact.

Defense Minister Strauss continues busy-at least as busy as he was when serving as a political education officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht-for his office announced from Bonn on March 18 The Signing of a Contract with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and the General Electric Company for the purchase, at the cost of $357 millions, of 300 F – 104 jet fighters, capable of supersonic speeds, very fast takeoffs, and use in all weather.

All this preparation is, of course, quite apart from what the American, British and French forces situated in West Germany are doing, and the Americans adding rocket launchers and missiles like mad, are restrained by no one and nothing from arming them right now with nuclear weapons.

Hans Speier, founder of the social science division of RAND, and a consultant for the State Department and the US Chiefs of Staff, in a recent study of German Rearmament and Atomic War (Row, Peterson, White Plains, New York, 1958), accepts as an established fact the complete remilitarization of West Germany. He notes that most of the Army and Navy officers there are strongly anti-democratic, and are convinced that it was Hitler’s amateurishness that lost Germany the last war. He adds that many German officers now are serving in the Bundestag, and that a great many of the former officers in Hitler’s Army today hold leading positions in West German industry. He also observes a bitter resentment against US domination, and particularly US control over atomic weapons; most of the officers, also, feel that such weapons have not replaced the need for conventional arms and so propagandize actively for larger and larger ground forces.

Finally, all the newly constituted West German divisions are commanded by officers who held analogous positions under Hitler and he fought on the Eastern front. The General Staff is reconstituted and is actively participating in the plans of the Adenauer government and of NATO.

ON DECARTELIZATION

While Potsdam called for the breaking up of the intense monopolistic structure of the German economy and the limitation of its industrial capacity so that it could never again support a major progressive undertaking, developments in West Germany under Allied and especially US control have gone in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of decartelization, there has been recartelization until today West German industry is more highly monopolistic than it was under Hitler; instead of a reduction in the capacity of German industry to wage war, that capacity, particularly in the Ruhr, has been enhanced.

On June 3, 1942, Assistant Attorney General Gen. Thurman Arnold warned:

“The secret influence of the international cartel is going to be thrown in favor of peace without victory when the first opportunity arises-just as it was thrown in that direction at Munich….The small group of American businessman who are parties to these international ratings still think of the war as a temporary recess from business as usual with a strong Germany. They expect to begin the game all over again after the war.”

As the fighting approached an end, the Department of State, in April, 1945, announced that: “Nazi Party members, German industrialists, realizing that victory can no longer be attained, are now developing postwar commercial projects, are endeavoring to renew and cement friendships and foreign commercial circles and are planning for renewals of prewar cartel agreements.”

How potent these “friendships” were became apparent very soon. The US chief counsel for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, General Telford Taylor, was told as early as July, 1946 by Secretary of State Byrnes, that the US did not favor the trial of leading Nazi businessmen. Yet the distinguished freedom fighter from South Carolina remarked that, “The United States cannot afford to appear to be in the position of obstructing another trial.” Still, he added-to the prosecutor!-that should “the plans for a second trial breakdown” that would be “well and good.” At the same time, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, chief US prosecutor at the first Nuremberg trial, favored Pres. Truman with this private memo: “I have also some misgivings as to whether a long public attack concentrated on private industry would not tend to discourage industrial cooperation with our government in maintaining its defenses in the future while not at all weakening the Soviet position, since they do not rely upon private enterprise.”

Dr. Schacht, Hitler’s chief financial advisor, do of what he was speaking when he lovingly declared, in October, 1946, upon his release by the International Military Tribunal, over Soviet protests: “If you want to indict industrialists who helped Germany rearmed, he will have to indict your own, too.”

From the beginning the decartelization program was doomed by the very personnel placed in charge of economic affairs in the American Zone. The first High Commissioner, John J. McCloy, was a member of two leading Wall Street law firms-Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft, and Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood-the latter having represented I.G. Farben and its affiliates in the US. McCloy’s Chief Counsel as High Commissioner was Chester McClain, a fellow partner in the Cravath law firm, and formally Chief Counsel for Bethlehem Steel. The Marshall Plan representative for West Germany was Normal Collison, an attorney for United States Steel.

From 1945-46 there were five American members of the Economics Directorate of the Allied Control Council. They were: William F. Draper of Dillon, Read; R. J. Wisor, formerly president of Republic Steel; E. S. Zdunek, in charge of the Antwerp division of General Motors; Philip Gaethke, prewar manager for Anaconda of its copper interests in Upper Silesia; and P. P. Clover, an executive of the Socony-Vacuum oil Corporation. The five US members of the Steel Commission, handling, with Great Britain, the Ruhr complex, consisted of four executives from US steel and one from Inland Steel.

The German administrators and officials serving with these American millionaires were fitting companies. Thus, associated with the last named steel tycoons in running the great Ruhr concentration were 12 Germans, typical of her more: Herman J. Abs, director under Hitler of the Deutsche Bank; Guenther Sohl, director under Hitler of Krupp and Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works); and Heinrich Linkelbach, another director of the United Steel Works, described by the New York Times (February 26, 1949) as “sponsor and financial contributor to the Nazi SS.”

The interlocking of personnel reflected the interlocking of business and financial interests; such interlocking with German finance and industry was especially marked for DuPont, Standard Oil, General Electric, International Harvester, General Motors, Ford, International Telephone and Telegraph, Anaconda Copper. Important financiers for United Steel Works, Siemens Electrical Works and the Dresdner Bank were Dillon, Read, and Brown Brothers & Harriman-of the latter firm, Harriman, Draper, Forrestal, Lovett were all in Truman’s Cabinet!

By 1947, James S. Martin, already noted as originally the Chief of the Decartelization Branch of Military Government, was writing:

“What has happened is that within a period of two years US policies for the treatment of Germany have changed their course by 180 degrees. Now in all important respects they coincide with what the German financiers, industrialists and politico-militarists have wanted us to do ever since they surrendered (New Republic, October 6, 1947).”

Naturally, today, as even the New York Times (January 7, 1959) admits, “The tendency throughout West German industry is toward reconcentration rather than deconcentration.” In steel, coal and auto, an interconnected Big Eight dominate production-and these include all the old Kaiser and Hitler names-Krupp, Thyssen, Mannesmann, Flick, in all cases with significant US interpenetration; Marquis Childs recently noted (New York Post, February 5, 1959) that just from 1946 to 1951 4 billion American dollars were invested in West Germany. (Outright merger of US and German corporations has begun. The Armco Steel Corporation formed a partnership with Thyssen-Huette in 1955, and a new plant in Dinslaken, West Germany, jointly-owned, was opened in November, 1958 (New York Times, December 1, 1958). In November an international finance Corporation, called Intercontinental, was formed; in it are Krupp and Siemens, Charles Allen, chairman of Colorado Fuel and Iron, and Bruno Pagliai, a Mexican millionaire. The headquarters of this firm are in Mexico City and the intention is to concentrate on Latin America.-New York Times, November 29, 1958). And once again German financiers controlled, as during Hitler, by three great banking concentrations-the same three: Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and the Dresdner Bank. The point has been reached where Chancellor Adenauer himself-between world wars, a director of the Deutsche Bank-and sounding for all the world like Theodore Roosevelt, permitted himself to say:

“There is great future danger that a handful of economic structures will control the German economy to such a degree that government will be forced to take drastic steps against them (Time magazine, March 5, 1959).”

For present purposes these data will be considered sufficient to establish the main point: while Potsdam required the breaking up of the monopolistic structure of the German economy-which had been of basic consequence in the creation and the sustaining of Nazism-the policy of the United States government from the very beginning, and with increased boldness as the years passed, was to undermine such a program and, on the contrary, to assure the recartelization of the economy of West Germany. That economy today is more concentrated than it was when Hitler lived.

There is one additional piece of history, in connection with this movement that is not nearly as well-known as it should be. It is told by Kenneth Ingram in his History of the Cold War.

A Labor government ruled England right after the war. That government officially announced, late in 1945, that the coal mines, chemical and engineering industries in the British Zone would be socialized. For a year, however, nothing was done. At the Cologne Convention of the German Social Democrats of the three Western Zones, held in 1946, it was unanimously voted that the British be urged to fulfill their promise of socialization. And later the Ruhr German government passed a Resolution towards the same end, but Great Britain rejected both demands. The final crusher on the Labor Government’s promises came when in December, 1946, Wright threatened agreed to US proposals for the merging of their two zones-the beginning of the US-dominated drive towards the creation of the German Federal Republic.

This may be chalked up as another service by the leadership of international Social Democracy on behalf of monopoly capitalism.

Such is the record of performance by the Government of the United States in implementing the obligations undertaken with the signing of the Potsdam Treaty. That Treaty crystallized the purposes for which-in terms of public affirmation by all the Allies-World War II had been fought in Europe; these purposes and the sacrifices that went into their execution have been repudiated by the actions of the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations.

WHY WAS POTSDAM REPUDIATED?

This explains why the records concerning publicly avowed war aims was falsified. But why is it that these aims were betrayed; why has the US Government followed practices the opposite of those required if the aims were to be fulfilled? It is because those aims were avowed when the kind of war which the dominant elements in the US ruling class wanted had not materialized. Those dominant elements-in Great Britain and France, as well as here-wanted a war between the Berlin-Tokyo-Rome Axis and the Soviet Union, in which the contestants would inflict fearful damages upon each other, and as a result of which the movements for Socialism and national liberation, as symbolized by the USSR, would be dealt shattering blows, and the hegemony of the world would fall to Anglo-American imperialism, with the English suffered to be junior partners in The American Century, as Henry Luce put it.

This was the point of the Munich policy, but that policy was shattered by the Axis’ hesitancy and then final refusal to serve as “fall guy”; by the strength of the Left throughout the world, which exposed the nature of the policy and organize millions in opposition to it; by the divisions among the rulers of Western capitalism; and by the strength of the Soviet Union which, in both diplomacy and war, emerged triumphant from the ultimate ordeal.

The reality about that Munich policy cannot be reiterated too often, especially in view of the fact that Pres. Eisenhower has taken it upon himself to remind the Premier of the Soviet Union of its alleged “lessons.” And Adlai Stevenson, in a speech delivered March 5, 1959, also invoked Munich and “pleaded with the Russian leaders to remember their own terrible experience with appeasement of Hitler”; and the New York Herald Tribune (April 5, 1959) editorializing on “The Lesson of Munich” held that:

What Munich taught us was that to surrender a key point under threat of war, in the hope that thereby the flow will be “appeased,” is dangerous folly.

This bipartisan interpretation of Munich is false. At Munich the Prime Ministers of England and France were not yielding to a foe; they were rewarding a friend. Chamberlain and Daladier were not grudgingly giving up the living body of Czechoslovakia in the hope that the beast would thus be satiated; they gladly gave him Czechoslovakia with its magnificent fortifications and its enormous armaments-producing capacity and its strategic geographical location in order further to beguile him into attacking the Soviet Union, and to assure him that now-with Czechoslovakia-he had the means for doing this successfully, and he had the assurance of no Second Front, if he stuck to the bargain.

The Czechs, as a contemporaneous observer noted, (Hubert Ripka, Munich: Before and After, London, 1939), pp. 14-15) “were not only deserted [by England and France] but ordered to conform to the German wishes by their former friends.” The Czechs were told not only that if they failed to yield they would find themselves in “complete international isolation,” but that “they would alone be responsible for the outbreak of war”; i.e., the Czechs would be considered enemies of England and France, if she “forced” Germany to wage war upon her! And the fact that, in the face of this, the Soviet Union repeatedly assured Czechoslovakia-privately and publicly-that she would stand by her commitments and defend Czechoslovakia if she were attacked (even if France did not do so, as required by Treaty), made even more urgent the betrayal of Czechoslovakia so far as the dominant bourgeoisie of France and England (and Poland and Czechoslovakia, too) were concerned.

G.E.R. Gedye, in his Betrayal in Central Europe, published in 1939 (New York, Harper) summarize the views of those responsible for Munich, using the device of quoting an unnamed English official, in this way:

“Probably Chamberlain and his friends hope that if Germany destroys Czechoslovakia, she will go on down through the Balkans and extend eastwards in preparation for an attack on Russia. But by the time she is ready for this, the trust, we and France will be so strong that we shall be able to say to her: ‘If you attack us, you will attack a strong opponent, and you know that Russia will attack you from the rear, whereas if you attack Russia, we can promise not to attack you, and to wish you luck.’ (p. 356).”

The Communist Parties of the world correctly analyzed the Munich developments while they were proceeding, and warned that they presaged world war. For example, the Communist Party of France, several months before Munich-commenting on a Foreign Ministers’meeting involving France and Great Britain and held in London where in the line of Munich was announced-warned:

Obeying the injunctions of Hitler, Mr. Chamberlain has got the British and French Ministers to agree to a dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the integrity of which is inseparable from France’s security and the peace of Europe. Repudiating the treaties bearing the signature of France and the undertakings they solemnly renewed only a few days ago, the Daladier Government have agreed to this new capitulation to international fascism.

Compare this with the comment made at the same time, and concerning the same event, by Leon Blum, leader of the French Socialist Party:

Whatever happens, the consequences of the London plan will be far-reaching both for Europe and France. War has probably been averted. But it has been averted in such conditions that I cannot feel any joy, and am merely filled with mixed feelings of cowardly relief and shame. (Quoted in, Alexander Werth, France and Munich (New York, 1939, Harper), p. 264. As of this writing I have not yet had the benefit of reading The Munich Conspiracy, a new book by the English Marxist scholar, Andrew Rothstein (Lawrence & Wishart, London)).

Well, if war was to be averted, one should bear up under Blum’s feeling of cowardice and shame! But, if France’s security and peace of Europe were at stake, were “mixed feelings” appropriate? With hindsight, vouchsafed by history, all may see who was right and who is wrong. But shall not this lesson sharpen our vision for the present and for the future? Shall not the truth about Munich lead us to beware of the of the falsified set history seeking to peddle a new Munich 20 years after the original one ended in catastrophe?

All right, then, the war went wrong. But perhaps not all was lost? The Soviet Union was set back a decade; the threat of hegemony reverting to Berlin-Rome-Tokyo was undone; the domination of the US ruling class and what remains of world imperialism is clear. Now, on that basis, perhaps we can start all over again? And there remains as constant as the North Star, ever since that fearful 1917 Winter, the two fundamental and interlocking aims: 1) destroy Socialism, particularly as this draws essential strength from the existence of the USSR; 2) reestablish imperialist domination of the world, with the United States ruling class as the kingpin of that kind of a world.

Potsdam symbolizes the “war that went wrong”; Munich heralds the “war that might have been.” Therefore, Potsdam is repudiated, as we have seen, in spirit and letter; and the policy of Munich, in the name of anti-Munich, is refurbished. However, if 20 years ago the strength of anti-imperialism was great enough to force upon monopoly capitalism the “wrong war,” today the strength of anti-imperialism is great enough to force upon monopoly capitalism competitive and peaceful coexistence.

THE TWO-BLOC CONCEPT

But perhaps there is no “lesson of Munich” at all? Perhaps, it is sometimes argued-as by C. Wright Mills in his The Causes of World War III (Simon & Schuster, 1958)-scientific and technological changes have been so fast and thorough going in the past two decades that our era is characterized by complete discontinuity of history, rather than a continuity of history? And perhaps, no matter what may have been true of the diplomacy and foreign policies of the past era, in our own day, given the qualitative changes that allegedly have occurred, what we are actually faced with our two behemoths, to the vast concentrations of strength, really more alike than different? Therefore, perhaps, the danger of war in the present day world arises out of the existence of the Two-Blocs; and out of the enormous concentration of power thus polarized? This is, essentially, the position of the present leadership of Yugoslavia; it is the position of Prof. Mills; it is conveyed in the image offered by Prof. J. Robert Oppenheimer, of two scorpions in a bottle with each able to kill the other, and, therefore, the danger of the mortal conflict coming equally from both creatures.

But this view is not valid. There are leaps in history, but continuity, not discontinuity characterizes history. Imperialism produced World War I and World War II and it is imperialism which threatens World War III. Today there are two major constellations of power are grouped around the United States and the Soviet Union respectively and there are other areas of more or less uncommitted strength-greater than is generally conceded by the “two power” school. But the policies of these two constellations are not to be compared to two scorpions, for the policies of the two are contradictory; that is why one and only one finds its allies in figures like Franco, Salazar, Rhee, Chiang, Hussein, Trujillo and depends for support upon multimillionaires, shoot a landlord, compradores, and slaveowners. These two constellations are two because the social system is basic to them are decisively different; therefore, one stands for imperialism and colonialism, for racism and war making; the other stands for socialism and national liberation, and for equality and peace.

These truths are dicisive for a comprehension of the world today. They apply to the whole area of foreign policy and to any specific zone for the implementation of foreign policy. They apply specifically to the German question; indeed, an examination of that question illustrates their validity.

CHRONOLOGY AND HISTORY

We have seen that the betrayal of the denazification, demilitarization and decartelization requirements of the Potsdam Agreement began, on the part of the Western Powers, within a matter of months after the last shot was fired in Europe. Simultaneous with that, there began to develop a move, led by the United States, for the separation of the Western part of Germany from the Eastern; this was necessary because in the East denazification, demilitarization and decartelization were pressed forward vigorously. This transformation had to be stopped in the Western zone, not only because it heralded the end of capitalism in the heart of Europe, but also because it heralded the end of the possibility of effectively waging war upon the Lands of Socialism (plural, now) at least from the European side. This is true because if Germany were to become an anti-fascist, anti-militarist state, with its location, its productive potential, and its 75 million people, it would be impossible, physically, to mount a war upon the USSR. When, after World War II, it appeared likely that the Soviet Union’s Asia neighbor would rid itself of reaction and imperialism, and when this happened with finality in 1949, then keeping capitalism, reaction, and militarism alive and as much of Germany as was possible became a matter of top priority for US imperialism.

Let us trace something of the chronology and history of this process of dismembering Germany and setting up a separate Western entity. Of the four zones into which Germany was divided after the fighting, it was the US zone which made the first separate administrative move. This occurred in May, 1946 when the United States announced that reparations to the Soviet Union would no longer be paid out of the German zone under its control. Soon thereafter, prodded-as we saw in earlier pages of this pamphlet-by English promises to socialize basic industry in its zone-the United States urged the merging of Allied zones of control. The Soviet Union denounced the move at the time, and France announced itself as opposed; but Great Britain-it’s Labor Government anxious to renege on its promise-agreed. The result was the Washington Agreement of December 2, 1946, under which a Bizone was established; thus was consummated, as early as 1946, the first organizational crack in the Four Power unity for the administration of defeated Germany, and thus was begun the process which was to culminate in less than three years in a formal setting up of West Germany.

The United States then concentrated on overcoming French resistance to the policy of separatism. This was accomplished in the early part of 1948 by the use of economic and political pressure and by detaching the Saar, economically, from Germany and attaching it to France. In March, 1948, the Three Powers announced the London Recommendations, which, among other things, proposed a separate currency for the area under Anglo-French-US control, and suggested the possibility of the creation of a separate West German State.

This move aroused protests again from the Soviet Union, and from many Germans, especially within the Social-Democratic Party and the Communist Party. In Fact, the Ministers-Pres. of the Lander in the Western Zones addressed a letter to the Western Powers, in July, 1948, pleading that “everything should be avoided that would give the character of a state to the organization that is established.” (K.P. Pinson, Modern Germany (New York, 1957, Mcmillan), p. 545)

But that which the authors of this letter feared was exactly that which was intended. The new currency was introduced-unilaterally, without the approval of the USSR-and was even introduced into the Western-administered part of Berlin, creating financial chaos there and precipitating the so-called Berlin Blockade.

At the same time, under the lead of the United States, the three Western powers were preparing the launching of a Western Union alliance, the predecessor of NATO, and were contemplating the incorporation of a separate West German state within the military potential of such an alliance. The Soviet Union, in a Note sent to the Three Powers, January 29, 1949, warned that it could not look with equanimity upon the creation of the Western Union, especially since the Three Powers were:

“striving to enlist and utilize for the furtherance of their plans, Western Germany where, chiefly with the help of the British and American authorities, the old pro-Hitler and militaristic elements of Germany are entrenching themselves more and more securely in all departments of administration.”

On April 4, 1949, the NATO was formally launched; on April 8, the Three Powers announced the merger of their Zones and the establishment of the German Federal Republic, whose Constitution was approved in May, 1949. And by the close of 1949, Chancellor Adenauer was announcing, publicly, that he would insist upon the building of a West German Army as a part of the European force projected in NATO.

With the actual creation of the German Federal Republic, the destruction of a single overall Germany subject to the cooperative administration of Four Allies was accomplished. As a result, and several months after that deed-in October, 1949-there was announced, with Soviet approval, the creation of the German Democratic Republic. Similarly, several months after the creation of NATO, and the moves to incorporate therein a renazified West Germany, the socialist countries formed, and the Warsaw Pact, a defensive military alliance.

Efforts on the part of the socialist countries to halt the developing remilitarization of West Germany and to make possible the creation of a united, anti-militarist Germany continued. In 1950 there was held in Prague a Foreign Ministers’ meeting of all the European People’s Democracies (including East Germany) and of the Soviet Union. Here was proposed, reported the Associated Press on October 22: “‘the undelayed conclusion of a peace treaty with Germany,’ creation of a unified German state and withdrawal of all occupation forces a year after signature of the treaty.” The next day from Frankfurt, William H. Stoneham, correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, reported that Western officials received news of this proposal with “something approaching consternation” because:

“A unified Germany hasn’t been figuring in the plans of Western nations for a long time and would present the West with a multitude of problems. It would and suggestions for German participation in a Western European defense force.”

This, of course, was what the proposal was meant to do; for once a separate German entity had been created and rearmed and integrated within a military alliance avowedly aimed against the USSR, then-unless this were undone-the unification of Germany and the termination of the Cold War became impossible. So, in the same period, Premier Grotewohl of the German Democratic Republic made a personal appeal to Chancellor Adenauer for all-German talks looking towards unification, and though the New York Times reported (October 10, 1951) that the 6 million member Federation of West German Trade Unions favored such talks, and, a little later (November 5, 1951) that “a large number of politicians outside Dr. Adenauer’s immediate circle and the lay and clerical leaders of the Protestant Church advocate discussions on unity.” Adenauer rejected all appeals for such discussions. (Of course, throughout this. Even the Bundestag, let alone the general public, did not know that Chancellor Adenauer secretly had offered the Western Powers several German divisions in August, 1950-something he did not tell his own legislature until February, 1952!)

On March 10, 1952, the Soviet Union tried again. This time it sent in an identical Note to the United States, Great Britain and France. In this Note the USSR proposed in all German government to be chosen in elections supervised by the Four Powers. The resulting government was to be independent, but it was not to join any military alliance; it was to have severely limited defensive forces for purposes of internal police only; it was to ban all Nazi or quasi-Nazi organizations; it was to guarantee full civil liberties for all individuals and organizations that were not fascist or militarist.

This Note was not made public in the United States for 10 days; its first publication, in English, appeared in the London press. When it was made public, it was summarily rejected by the US government, the State Department affirming it “contained nothing new.” Dorothy Thompson, incensed, wrote in her column dated March 21, 1952:

“Our administration misrepresented the contents of the note, saying it contained nothing new. That is not a fact. The fact is that in 30 years of journalism I have never known such pressure for conformity, such withholding of basic historical knowledge, such ready-made interpretations and apologies for policies and so much official propaganda as exists today.”

Russell Hill, New York Times correspondent, wrote from Berlin (March 23, 1952) that “the United States does not want free elections and Germany now because they would upset the apple cart. The apples are the Schuman plan and the European army, including 12 German divisions….” The State Department sought, at all costs, agreed Walter Lippmann (in his column of March 27, 1952), “to avert and all German election during the next 16 months-that is to say before the Adenauer government has signed up with the West.” Lippmann got his figure of 16 months because the next Gen. election and West Germany was scheduled for August, 1953, and:

“The foreign policy of the Adenauer government… Is to consummate the legal integration of Western Germany [in the NATO] before the 1953 elections….The theory of the policy is that while there is not now a popular majority in western Germany for rearmament with the Atlantic Alliance, the West Germans can be persuaded to acquiesce on that if it is an accomplished fact before they have a chance to vote. (This rejection of free elections by the US seven years ago, when real issues were still unresolved-especially the full remilitarization of West Germany and its integration within NATO-is significant in view of this government’s insistence very recently that all it really wants is “free elections”! This reminds one of US refusal to permit elections in Vietnam last year, as required by international agreement. The US government apparently wants in West Germany the kind of “free elections” that it used to run and supervise in Latin America some 30 and 40 years ago. John Foster Dulles, himself, was the US “supervisor” of one such “free election,” in Costa Rica in 1917. On this, see the valuable article by T. P. Right, Jr., “Free Elections in the Latin American Policy of the US,” in Political Science Quarterly, March, 1959.)”

The Washington correspondent of the Wall Street Journal wrote in that newspaper (March 26, 1952) that the Soviet Union’s

“move to offer Germany a peace treaty has Pres. Truman’s defense and diplomatic advisors really scared….The US worry is based on Germany’s deep in earnest hope for being a united country. That hope spreads politically from the Left to the Right, and from the young to the old….There’s also a split between the Americans, the British and the French on this Russian move. The British and the French are inclined to take it as a chance of a deal with the Russians that could lead away from war.”

The summary rejection of this Soviet move in 1952 was too much for two former Ministers In Adenauer’s Cabinet; both publicly accuse the Chancellor of deliberately sabotaging the possibility of German unification on the altar of rearmament and adherence to NATO. In May, 1952 a contractual agreement was signed between the United States, France, Great Britain and West Germany, integrating the latter within the framework of the European Defense Community. But efforts to get this agreement ratified by the Parliaments concerned were fruitless, though they extended over a two-year period. As we noted, in the first part of this article, parliamentary failure led to diplomatic effort, and the result was the London and Paris Pacts of October, 1954, recognizing the sovereignty of the German Federal Republic, integrating it within the Western military system, and allotting to at an ultimate total of 500,000 men under arms, including, to begin with, 12 fully mechanized divisions.

On October 23, 1954, the Soviet Union sent another Note to the Three Western Allies, urging the holding of a Four Power Foreign Ministers’ Conference for the purpose of creating a system of collective security in Europe. This Note was ignored. On November 13, 1954, the USSR sent another Note to the major Powers, again urging the holding of an All-European Conference, plus the United States, to meet, if convenient, in Moscow, and as early as possible, with November 29 suggested as a target date. This time a reply came: the date set was too early. The USSR replied: set your own date. The reply came: rejection. On November 29, 1954, their convened in Moscow representatives from the Socialist countries of Europe; now the agenda of this conference was how best to secure their own mutual defense.

The Paris and London Agreements went into force in May, 1955 and West Germany became officially and fully a part of NATO; shortly thereafter, the Bonn government placed orders in the United States for $700 million worth of armaments; in 1956 the Bonn government introduced military conscription; in 1957 General Hans Speidel-Hitler’s General in command of occupied Paris-became the commander of NATO ground forces in Europe; in March, 1958, the Bonn legislature agreed to nuclear armament, and in the ensuing months hundreds of German specialists and millions upon millions of dollars were being devoted to implementing that agreement.

Jakob Altmeier, a member of the Bundestag of the German Federal Republic, writing in The Nation, January 24, 1959, states that many people in West Germany are convinced that “the authoritarian-minded Rhenish Catholic, Dr. Adenauer,” in his insistence upon remilitarization and integration within the Western military system has demonstrated that for him “Germany’s reunification is no more than lip service, that his heart has never been in it.” Then followed to exceedingly important paragraphs from the pen of a West German legislator:

It is now a year ago-January 23, 1958, to be exact-that this complaint was turned into an open and direct accusation. Dr. Dehler and Dr. Heinemann, two of his former cabinet ministers….Told him to his face that they were resigning from their posts because they had come to the conclusion that his policy had prevented Germany’s reunification. Twice, in 1952 in 1954, Soviet Russia offered reunification. Bonn had disregarded these offers and influenced the Western powers to do likewise. Adenauer had chosen the “policy of strength” to bring Russia to its knees.

Silent and pale, the Chancellor sat facing his accusers. Neither he nor any of his supporters dared to voice a denial. If anything is at all certain, it is that the “policy of strength” has ended and fiasco. Russia has not been weakened throughout the Cold War; on the contrary.

The fact is that West Germany constitutes a key instrument in the double-pronged nature of the US-dominated anti-Soviet policy; she is, first of all, the main component of NATO, itself the fundamental power for the frankly military assaults upon the Soviet Union; she is, secondly-and here West Berlin in particular is decisive-the symbol of the whole policy of “liberation,” as this policy expresses itself in attempts at counterrevolution.

It is on these bases that the present leadership of West Germany has flung itself into the State Department-Pentagon plans. Walter Lippmann correctly pointed out, back in December 6, 1950, that the West German military contribution had to be based “only on an all out American strategic commitment not only to defend Western Europe but to liberate Eastern Europe”; two days earlier, even more sharply, pointing to French fears anent the rearming of West Germany, he noted that these sprang from the “realization that a German army would wish to march, and to drag along with it all the rest of us, against Koenigsberg and Warsaw….The idea that the Germans could or would dedicate themselves to the defense of the West is an allusion that is entertained only in Washington, and perhaps in London.”

Richard Lowenthal, a leading advisor of the State Department on its anti-Soviet crusade, writing from Berlin in The New Leader (March 16, 1959), emphasized that the presence of Allied troops in West Berlin “only makes sense as part of a continuing concern for the freedom of East Germans and Poles, Hungarians and Czechs.” And, he concluded, “in West Berlin the circumstances of the postwar military arrangements have left us an obvious way to discharge these obligations.” (italics added.)

Once again, however, it is necessary to repeat that no army yet has been created that could march only east, and could not march west; or in the language of General Telford Taylor, chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, “an army, mighty when marching east but feeble when marching west, does not and never will exist” (Harper’s Magazine, March, 1950).

THE NATURE OF THE TWO GERMANYS

The US press has presented the nature of the Two Germanys in this way: in West Germany is a magnificent democratic society, where tremendous economic advances have been made because of the superior quality of “free enterprise”; in East Germany is a somber, impoverished, tyrannical land where economic stagnation is characteristic because of the stultifying effects of “totalitarianism.” This presentation is as distorted as is everything else touching on significant social problems in the monopoly press of the United States.

In West Germany, as we demonstrated in the first half of this article, there has been a resurgence of nazism, anti-Semitism, contempt for democracy, militarism, and an intensification of the domination of the economy by cartels, with a generous dose of US capital involvement. Recovery of productive capacity has occurred, to a large degree on the basis of the pumping into West Germany of billions of dollars by American sources, in return for a considerable share in the ownership of the economy by those sources; at the same time, the recovery and expansion have been spotty-the first three months of 1959, for example, showed a decline in big iron and steel production-and all the “normal” accoutrements of capitalism have been present, including chronic can considerable unemployment ranging from 5 to 9% of the total labor force.

In East Germany, on the other hand, Nazism has been extirpated and anti-Semitism decisively and consistently combated; the junkers and capitalists have been eliminated; the economy has been fundamentally socialized; the society has been transformed in favor of the workers and the peasants; Prussian militarism has been uprooted; and the productive capacity and the standard of living have been enormously enhanced. This latter accomplishment is the more remarkable since East Germany is much the poorer from the viewpoint of natural resources and original industrial capacity, and since she could not depend upon billions being pumped into her by a country enriched and not devastated by World War II, but rather faced, in common with the whole socialist sector, the brutal policy of blockade instituted by the United States from 1947 on.

From the United Nations studies, World Economic Survey, 1956 and Economic Survey of Europe in 1957, and in 1958, one learns that real wages in East Germany rose 115% from 1950 through 1955, so that while real wages were in 1950 about 42% below the prewar level, they were, by 1955, 24% above prewar level; savings deposits that totaled 3.7 billion marks in 1954, stood at 9.0 billions in 1957-with no inflation. Retail trade turnover in 1957 was 17% above 1954; production of electric power in 1957 was 68% higher than 1950; the production of meat, milk, eggs was considerably higher in 1957 than in 1955; industrial production in 1957 was 33% higher than it had been in 1953; and in 1958 it was another 11% higher than it had been in 1957. Overall, while the index of industrial production in West Germany grew from 100 in 1952 to 204 in 1957-certainly a rapid growth; the comparable figures in East Germany were even higher-from 100 in 1952 to 217 and 1957.

Indeed, recently the more sober among Western correspondents have begun to admit very notable advances in standards of living in East Germany, with those for working-class elements more than equal to West Germany. This has been true in the writings of Denis Healy, a British MP, and in the most recent columns of Walter Lippmann.

Meanwhile, in West Germany, whose neo-Nazi parties and organizations flourish, the Communist Party is outlawed, various peace organizations have been banned, and harassment of trade union organizations has increased. Perhaps the most dramatic exemplification of the basic differences between the two States will appear in a brief contrasting of the cabinet level personnel of both:

(East) German Democratic Republic

Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl: printer, former Social Democratic Member of Reichstag, anti-Nazi underground, twice arrested.

First Deputy Prime Minister: Walter Ulbricht, Carpenter, anti-Nazi underground, forced exile in Soviet Union.

Foreign Minister: Lothar Bolz, lawyer, stricken from rolls by Nazis in 1933; forced exile in Poland in Soviet Union.                                                                                        

Chairman of Planning Commission: Bruno Leuschner, office worker, anti-Nazi underground, nine years in Nazi jails and concentration camps.

Defense Minister: Willi Stoph, bricklayer, anti-Nazi underground throughout Hitler era.

External Trade Minister: Heinrich Rau, metalworker, member, International Brigade, Spain, in Nazi concentration camps.

Finance Minister: Willy Rumpf, office worker, anti-Nazi underground, 5 years in concentration camps.

Justice Minister: Hilde Benjamin, lawyer, anti-Nazi underground, husband killed in concentration camp.

Housing Minister: Ernst Scholz, painter, International Brigade, Spain, with French Maquis during World War II.

(West) German Federal Republic

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer: lawyer, Director Deutsche Bank, received full pension throughout Hitler era.

Foreign Minister: Heinrich von Brentano, lawyer, practiced law throughout Hitler era.

State Secretary, and Adenauer’s personal assistant: Hans Globke, chief “racial questions department,” Nazi Interior Ministry.

Minister of Interior: Gerhard Schoeder, lawyer, SA member during Hitler era.

Defense Minister: Franz-Joseph Strauss, teacher; political indoctrination officer, Nazi Wehrmacht.

Economics Minister: Ludwig Erhard, professor of economics during Hitler era.

Finance Minister: Franz Etzel, lawyer, officer in Nazi Wehrmacht.

Justice Minister: Fritz Schaeffer, lawyer, Nazi party leader, fired by US in 1945 as “notorious Nazi.”

Housing Minister: Paul Luecke, industrialist, officer in Nazi Wehrmacht.

THE CITY OF BERLIN

Berlin is the capital of the German Democratic Republic. It is located 110 miles east of the border of the German Federal Republic. It is split into two halves, with the western half the seat of the tripartite administrative and military machinery of France, England and the United States. This itself is the rump left from the original Four-Power administrative center established for the purpose of governing all of occupied Germany. This was in accordance with the original intent-stated in the Potsdam Treaty-of keeping Germany together as a single unit, and finally making a peace treaty with all of Germany, once that country was demilitarized and denazified. It is because of this origin that the provisions were made in the original agreement for the securing of transportation and communication from Berlin, or any sector thereof and any other part of Germany. This is not in “oversight” as it has been called in the US press; this is indicative of the original conception of the Berlin occupation.

This arrangement was made increasingly anachronistic as the Western powers, led by the United States, as we have seen, moved toward the separation of the Western parts of Germany from the Eastern, and finally toward the establishment of a sovereign West Germany. These moves, months later and after repeated protests, were followed by analogous moves by the East Germans and the Soviet Union. Finally, the present situation was reached of two German states, each with a full apparatus for government, each with diplomatic missions in many parts of the world, and both recognized as such by the USSR and both receiving and sending ministers to the Soviet Union.

West Berlin itself exists as a disembodied Stadt; it is not actually part of the German federal republic, so that, for example, it prints its own postage stamps, and while it sends a delegate to the Federal Bundesrat, that delegate may not vote.

Passage from and to the Eastern and Western zones of the city is perfectly uninhibited and requires a more than a little walk or a subway ride. All civilian transportation and communication from the rest of the world into the western sector of Berlin is now handled and has been handled for some time by the authorities of the German Democratic Republic. The only portion of this traffic which is not so handled, constituting less than 5% of the total, is that required to service the military installations of the Western Powers: and it was the announcement of the Soviet Union that it desired to withdraw its personnel from East Berlin and turned over to the German Democratic Republic the handling of traffic for the Western military personnel that started the recent furor. It’s concocted nature is perfectly manifest, for even Adenauer’s government has reconciled itself to the fact that 95% of all traffic into and out of West Berlin is handled and approved by the authorities of the German Democratic Republic.

There are in fact today three political entities in Germany-the two Republics and the West Berlin concoction. Any objection to legalizing the recognition, internationally, of that which is a fact, and any objection to placing such legalization under the aegis of the United Nations, with exit and entrance guaranteed, can only be an objection by those who desire to keep West Berlin as a stimulant of the Cold War and as a center for espionage and counterrevolutionary propaganda. Its use for the latter purpose is notorious: one needs but mention the Gehlen organization and the Crusade for Freedom and its Radio Free Europe. (For these, see the present writer’s The Truth about Hungry (New York, 1957),pp. 69-110; and R. T. Holt, Radio Free Europe (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota press, 1958).) Recently, fairly full documentation has been offered of the frankly terroristic and reactionary work of the so-called National Alliance of Russians Solidarists, whose members fought with the Nazis during World War II and whose Director of Foreign Affairs is the son of the Czarist Minister, Stolypin, notorious, even in Czarist history, for his pogromist, Russifying, and ultra-reactionary policies. This organization, with plenty of money-most of it from American sources-operates with Adenauer’s permission in West Germany, with headquarters in Frankfurt and branches elsewhere, including West Berlin. It conducts radio stations, prints newspapers and magazines and sends agents into the USSR, for all the avowed purpose of forcibly overthrowing it. (A glowing account of this fascist like movement, called The House of Secrets, by Gordon Young, has just been published by Duell, Sloan, Pearce, New York, with an admiring foreword by C. W. Mendell, Dean Emeritus of Yale. Charles Poore in the New York Times (April 4, 1959) commended the work that “forgot” to mention the Nazi alliance and the Stolypin brand.) One hundred percent “freedom fighters”!

THE PROBLEM TODAY

The present problem is to force a liquidation of the Cold War. It is to reverse the U.S. policy, of “liberation” and massive coercion, whose bankruptcy is convulsing the “Free World.” That U.S. policy, upon which Adenauer has staked his political life, cannot work, for its implementation has resulted not in the relative weakening of the USSR, but its strengthening; not in the unifying of the Western Alliance, but in its near shattering.

For the immediate future, a détente is needed in Central Europe, and this still can be achieved without the United States Government appearing to suffer a shattering blow to its prestige. The longer that Government resists, the more a shattering blow to its prestige. The longer that Government resists, the more devastating to itself will be the accommodation that must in any case come. The accommodation must come because of the growing splits among the Allies; France insists that West Germany be content with the present borders of Germany, but Adenauer refuses; West Germany and France unite economically to oust Great Britain from important European markets and to compete more effectively in Africa, and Great Britain seeks means of effective retaliation, especially together with the Scandinavian countries. West German coal barons cut off imports of U.S. coal, and U.S. coal-mining and railroad corporations howl in rage; U.S. investors buy out whole English industries-as aluminium and others-and the British bourgeoisie seek to retaliate with Commonwealth restrictions.

And within each of the major “Free World” powers, dissension grows. Here space remains but to indicate some of the recent highlights of this development. First, the Left, led by the Communist Parties, continues to represent the largest single segment of public opinion-and to absolutely predominate among the working classes-in Italy and France, with the Left-ward swing of the voters in the March municipal elections in the latter country a decisive demonstration of this strength.

In Great Britain, opposition to the Washington-Bonn policy is sweeping the country; it is shaking the Conservative Party, pushing the Labour Party into more and more critical statements, and invigorating the valiant and growing Communist Party. The Aldermaston March in England, late in March, in protest against nuclear weapons, was several times the size of last years, and this time the British press had to feature news of it. The London Observer, for example, reported: “The line of marchers was so long… That, unlike last year, few marchers could feel that they were part of a small and illicit band of near-martyrs. Those not marching seemed the outsiders.” (italics added.)

OPPOSITION IN WEST GERMANY

In West Germany itself there is tremendous mass sentiment against the Adenauer line, which increasingly is viewed as one which not only poses the threat of war, but also makes impossible the unification of an independent and peaceful Germany. This manifests itself, for example, in the decisions of the leadership of the Social-Democratic Party to confer with Premier Khrushchev, and in the proposal from that leadership for a settlement of the German question which, in any case, recognizes the real existence of the German Democratic Republic, accepts the sincerity of the Soviet Union’s expressed desire for a settlement, and urges serious negotiation. Even Willy Brandt, Right-wing Social-Democratic Mayor of West Berlin-according to an AP dispatch dated April 21-said: “I would have liked that the West would have paid more attention to the Rapacki Plan [put forward by Poland’s Foreign Minister for a demilitarized zone in central Europe] as the basis of discussion.”

To indicate something of what is seething among tens of thousands in West Germany, note is to be taken of the demonstration in January involving 500,000 residents of the Ruhr in opposition to the stationing of atomic missile bases in Dortmund; in March, in the same city, there assembled 700 delegates from West Germany representing the Congress of Opponents of Atomic Armament. Rector Mochalski, of Hamburg University, struck the keynote of this Congress: “atomic rearmament, anti-Semitism, and anti-Communism belong together. They must all be eliminated at once, so as to prevent a catastrophe.”

At even greater consequence than the splits among the allies and the mounting political dissension within West Europe-and related to both-is the magnificent recovery of the USSR from the devastation of World War II, the success of the Socialist revolution in China and in several Central and East European countries since that War, and, particularly since 1956, the enormous leap forward taken by the Socialist sector in productivity and standards of living. This has tipped the scales, weighing the relative weight of the Socialist and capitalist sectors, in favor of the former. And now with the Seven-Year Plan of the USSR, the tipping of the scales will proceed at the constantly accelerating rate. This will, in turn, help to diminish further the already shrinking: real world of imperialism, and further discredit capitalism in its main centers.

This development is of fundamental consequence in exposing the idiocy of the Washington-Bonn line of “liberation” and “massive strength.” It does lead to the intensification of plants and desires for “preventive” war among the most fanatical of the Cold War criminals. This is dangerous to the highest degree; it is, however, a response of desperation born of accumulating weakness. With vigilance, organization and struggle, especially on specific questions as they arise, this danger also can be overcome.

OPPOSITION IN THE US

All the developments sketched above, plus our own national experiences, have been converging for months to produce here at home what now exists: the most widespread and intense opposition to official government foreign policy in the history of the United States. To do justice to this and to analyze it, would require a major study of its own and this is not the place for that. We wish, however, to repeat that the width and depth of this mounting suspicion and opposition is unprecedented; I have the feeling that many of us, especially of the Left, are too close to it, to really appreciate its enormous range and it’s great significance.

While a few years ago, those in the United States opposed to the dominant line of foreign policy were relatively few, today those who really favor that policy are the few. As the London Observer said of this year’s March Against Nuclear Weapons in England, that now “does not marching seemed the outsiders,” said today in the United States, those in favor of “liberation,” “policy of strength,” “brinkmanship,” etc., Are outside the mainstream of public feeling. American public opinion is becoming disgusted with the Eisenhower-Adenauer-Chiang-Rhee policy of futility and senility.

All these forces, pressures and changes together have compelled Eisenhower to accept the Summit Meeting. True, his belated acceptance is still hedged on the outcome of the May Form Ministers’ Conference; and the Administration will seek to have that Conference fail and then to beg off going to the Summit. But the odds are against Eisenhower’s making it this time. The Gen. has been dragged almost to the top; with enough pressure he can be forced to go over.

A SUGGESTED PROGRAM

The Cold War, founded as it is upon basic divergences of interest and ideology, will take much time to really thaw out. That time must be spent in cracking the ice field at specific points where the biggest blocks can be chipped away. Right now it is Germany, and that is the biggest block of all. How much of it can be chipped away this May, and that the ensuing Summit Meeting, and at the Summit Meetings that may follow, cannot be said with any assurance. I would suggest, however, the following as having nothing but salutary possibilities and as being realizable-given sufficient demand-through negotiation in the nearest future:

1. There must be mutual recognition of the existence today of two German states, the German Democratic Republic and the German Federal Republic.
2. The atomic and nuclear arming of West Germany must cease at once.
3. The German Democratic Republic should withdraw from the Warsaw Pact; at the same time, the German Federal Republic should withdraw from NATO.
4. The Warsaw Pact Organization and NATO should sign a mutual security agreement, pledging that neither would war upon the other.
5. All foreign troops should be withdrawn, within a specified, brief period, from all parts of both German states.
6. The German Federal Republic must formally agreed to the present boundaries of both German states, and forswear a policy of territorial aggrandizement by any means.
7. An “atom-free zone” of as wide an extent as possible, should be established, with proper guarantees, in Central Europe, comprising at least both German states, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
8. The unification of Germany-with full acceptance of the substantive Potsdam agreements-is to proceed, and is to be in the hands of the German people themselves.
9. Pending such settlement, West Berlin-with no interference from outside with its social system, and with guarantees for its supply requirements-should the declared a neutral zone, preferably under United Nations protection. As the knowledge and counter-revolutionary centers must be liquidated.
10. A final peace treaty with Germany should be negotiated by all the powers participating in the late war against her.

This program-for-coexistence, focussed upon the problems of Germany, will go far, if achieved, to end the Cold War. It is realizable and it is necessary. Given sufficient effort, especially in our own country, agreements of this nature could be reached by the 1960 elections.

A neutral, demilitarized Germany makes war in Europe impossible. Surely that is a goal requiring and meriting the wholehearted devotion of all friends of humanity, and lovers of our country.

APPENDIX

Since writing the above-in March and April, 1959-additional data has become available in certain very important developments have appeared.

ADDITIONAL DATA

The continued growth of anti-Semitism in West Germany finally broke through with major coverage in a really mass-circulated US publication. Reference is made to the article, “Hitlerism in 1959: A Jew’s Fate in Germany,” by Edward M. Korry, in Look Magazine, May 26, 1959. While the title does not make clear that the story has reference to West Germany, the text itself, of course, does. And while the magazine covers itself by references to this West Germany as a “democratic” nation and to Adenauer as a “humanitarian leader,” the content of the story depicts the development of a neo-Nazism with all its natural concomitants of officially approved and violently displayed anti-Semitism.

The New York Times (June 23, 1959) gave its customary one-inch to a significant piece of news out of West Germany on anti-Semitism. This told of the meeting the previous day in Düsseldorf of the quite conservative German Jewish Council, which “deplored what it called an increase in evidence of anti-Semitism in West Germany.” The Council noted that “anti-Jewish sentiments were being expressed more often and ‘the appearance of former Nazis in key positions of the state have contributed to this.'”

The mis-education of West German youth was uncovered a new in May, 1959, when the results of inquiries made in scores of classrooms in five different regions of that land was televised in the State of Hesse. It was found that the vast majority of the German youth question, from the ages of 14 to 18, had received only the briefest and vaguest instruction in German history from 1933 through 1945; that most of them thought very highly of Hitler and the Nazism; that these sentiments reflected the ideas of their parents; and that the authorities “didn’t know” what to do about it.

The Bonn correspondent for the London New Statesman commented (May 16):

“With so many Germans in high places in the civil service and various branches of public life who were in some way connected with Nazism and who today, either out of shame or for opportunistic reasons, avoid all reference to the years 1933 to 1945, none of this is very surprising.”

Flora Lewis, writing of this television program in the New York Times (June 7, 1959), remarked that similar results were produced by other inquirers in West Germany in 1957 and 1958. She also found these results to be expected given the general neo-Nazi resurgence; she added, quite properly, that the Cold War was important in explaining both this resurgence and the mis-education that went with it.

On militarization, it may be added to the material given in the body of this pamphlet, that every one of the scores of generals and admirals of the present Army, Navy and Air Force of West Germany held the position of Col. (or its naval equivalent) or above in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. On the other hand, in the Army of the German Democratic Republic there are exactly 3 officers above the rank of captain who served as officers in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and all three of them were involved in the anti-Hitler movement towards the end of World War II. Furthermore, only 1% of the lieutenants and captains of the East German Army served in the old Wehrmacht. We offered in the main text of the pamphlet itself a companion between the careers of the Defense Ministers of the two German governments. We may add to that the careers of the two top ranking Generals of the armies of the two governments. Adenauer’s senior Gen. is Adolf Heusinger, officially Inspector General and Chief of the Leadership Staff; this is the same Lieut. Gen. Heusinger under Hitler who was head of the Operational Staff of the German Gen. Staff, and he planned the invasions of Yugoslavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Karl Heinz-Hoffman is First Deputy Minister of National Defense of the German Democratic Republic, with the rank of Lieut.-Gen. Hoffman, in the Hitler days, was a fitter by trade; he fought with the 11th International Brigade against Franco in defense of the Spanish Republic, and was an active member of the anti-Nazi underground in Germany for several years.

SOME IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS

Space permits mention of three major developments in the very recent past connection with the German question. One was the resurgence of open revanchism in West Germany, culminating in the two-day long rally, held in Vienna, May 16-17, by the Sudeten German organization. About 300,000 Sudeten Germans participated, most of them coming to the enough for the occasion from West Germany on specially chartered buses and trains and planes. Here speeches were made lobbying the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and demanding the return to the Hitler-sympathizers of the lands in western Czechoslovakia. The meetings were attended by the Austrian Chancellor and by high officials of the West German government. At the same moment, the West German government let it be known (dispatch by Sidney Gruson, New York Times, May 17, 1959) that while it did not intend to alter the borders of Germany by force, it could not agree to consider as settled the Oder-Neisse frontier, nor could it agree to the legality or the finality of the Allied and doing of the Munich territorial awards given to Hitler!

In the midst of the Geneva Foreign Ministers’ Conference, Adenauer dropped a bombshell by withdrawing his previous decision to retire as Chancellor and seek election as president. The original decision to retire was wrong from a very unhappy Adenauer and reflected his own Party’s feeling that his rigidity and fanatically anti-Soviet position were hurting their own political chances. Reneging on his promise, in the absence of his chief inner-Party competitor, Erhard, Adenauer precipitated a major scandal and crisis. It made public the deepest personal and policy cleavages in the ruling Party; and it reflected Adenauer’s profound contempt for democratic government. It intensifies the cleavages within the West German bourgeoisie and within NATO; at the same time it underscores-as did de Gaulle’s coup-the ever-present danger of a neo-fascism in the imperialist camp.

Of the greatest consequence, of course, was the actual holding of the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Geneva during May and June. The intransigence of the Western powers-least present in Great Britain-reflected itself in the grudging manner in which the United States participated, in the shockingly slanted and hostile press given the Conference by the main US newspapers, and in the repeated interventions by Eisenhower to affirm that “nothing” would come of the Conference and that, therefore, he could see no use in a Summit meeting. Pressures of public opinion in Western Europe and in our own country persist, however, for some real easing of the Cold War; these pressures are particularly important to the politicians of England and West Germany. Moreover, the insistence of the USSR that the conference be held, that a summit conference must follow, and that positive results can be found has served to make very difficult the kind of break that the dominant wing of the Republic Party wants. Hence, the Foreign Ministers’ Conference was adjourned to mid-July. It seems to me still likely that a Summit Meeting will be held, and given enough public pressure, especially in our country, such a Meeting can be but the first in a series that will really come to grips with the liquidation of the Cold War, and the start of a prolonged period of peaceful and active co-existence.

by James Thompson

There has been much discussion of the crisis in the Ukraine in the press across the world. The recent coup d’état in the Ukraine has been characterized by the U.S. Press in general and Secretary of State John Kerry in particular as being an orderly, democratic process being conducted by the “freedom loving” people of the Ukraine. Russia Today has played images of Kerry speaking alternated with videos of the destructive coup d’état in the Ukraine and which many people were hurt or killed and there was much destruction of property. These clips may be called Russian propaganda by the Western media, but they clearly illustrate and instruct us on the gross hypocrisy of US propaganda.

Stench of fascism detected in the US.

As it turns out, the mendacity of this outrageous propaganda is starting to stink. The stink we are all smelling is the stench of fascism.

The BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957  and other news sources http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37599.htm  have exposed the lies and prevarications of US government officials and their sordid support of the open fascists who now control the government of Ukraine. Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State, openly announced that the US has invested $5 billion to support the fascists. This is, of course, an outrageous expenditure of precious taxpayer money that is not in the interest of the working people of the United States of America.

What is Fascism?

Before this article goes any further, “fascism” should be clearly defined since it is often used and poorly understood. George Dimitrov in his book “Against Fascism and War” clearly defined fascism on page 2: “Fascism in power was correctly described by the 13th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” He continues on page 7 “But whatever the masks that fascism adopts, whatever the forms in which it presents itself, whatever the ways by which it comes to power–
Fascism is a most ferocious attack by capital on the mass of the working people;
Fascism is unbridled chauvinism and predatory war;
Fascism is rabid reaction and counterrevolution;
Fascism is the most vicious enemy of the working class and of all working people.”

Dimitrov should know. He was a Bulgarian in Germany who was accused by the Nazis of firebombing the Reichstag. He defended himself in a Nazi trial and won.

What is the USA doing?

Supporting fascists is what the US government, the best cheerleaders for capitalism that money can buy, is doing. The US government has and is supporting, encouraging, defending and funding fascists in the Ukraine.

Marxists generally believe that fascism is a political tool of capitalism that is used during times of economic crises especially when there is a threat from the left. The world capitalist system has been in a state of acute crisis since 2008. The crisis has been extreme in the Ukraine and many have noted that the country is near economic collapse.

Ushering in and cavorting with the fascists is none other than Communist fighting Sen. John McCain. He has been photographed in meetings with the fascists, but even president Obama has met with the fascist leader of the Ukraine who is also the head of the Ukrainian Fatherland Party.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is holding its nose in disgust.

What is the history of the US support of fascism?

Here is one article that details a list of 35 countries where the USA has supported fascists and other degenerates to further the interests of the wealthy, capitalist class: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/ukraine-is-latest-of-35-countries-where-the-united-states-has-supported-fascists-drug-lords-and-terrorists#.UyZOPRROVFI

How has NATO been involved in the spread of capitalism?

It must be remembered that NATO was founded in 1949 and its first Secretary-General, Lord Ismay, stated that the organization’s goal was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” NATO’s foundation initiated a long series of imperialist wars during the Cold War and has continued since the end of the Soviet Union. NATO has intervened in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Kosovo from 1992 until 1999. Those interventions started as the Soviet Union ended and resulted in the destruction of the Yugoslavian socialist state which was a former ally of the USSR. NATO intervened in Afghanistan in 2001 and this still continues. This intervention which was preceded by the US support of the Mujahideen and Osama bin Laden who succeeded in bringing down the socialist government of Afghanistan, which was an ally of the USSR. NATO has been involved in the Iraq war and Iraq has been a traditional ally of Russia. NATO intervened in Libya and provoked a coup d’état against Moammar Gadhafi which ultimately resulted in his death. Gadhafi had supported socialism in Libya and revolutionary movements around the world. Libya was at one time an ally of the USSR.

Starting on March 12, 1999 membership in NATO has been granted to many former socialist countries, former allies of the Soviet Union and former republics of the Soviet Union to include the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania and Croatia.

What is the relationship of the Russian Federation with the Ukrainian crisis?

Lenin taught us that the definition of a revolution is the passing of state power from one class to another. The Russian counterrevolution of 1991 resulted in the passing of state power from the working class to the capitalist class. The current Russian government is clearly a capitalist controlled government. Before the coup d’état in the Ukraine, the democratically elected government headed by Victor Yanukovich was clearly a capitalist government. So, by this definition, the crisis in the Ukraine is not a revolution or counterrevolution. State power has remained in the hands of the capitalists. The fascists who head the current Ukrainian government are still cheerleaders for capitalism. They are merely the more extreme sectors of the population in the Ukraine and represent a tiny minority of the Ukrainian people. Apparently, they are espousing anti-Semitic, anti-communist and anti-Russian laws which would give members of certain groups a different set of rights from “real Ukrainians.” We all know that the German Nazis started this line of thinking and it ended in vicious wars of occupation and large segments of the German population being relegated to concentration camps and mass executions.

One can easily see that both the Russian capitalists and Russian working class in both Russia and the Ukraine have been backed into a corner of sorts by the Western capitalists. The Western capitalists are using their fascist puppets in the Ukraine to terrorize Russians.

It is important to consider the history of the relationship between Russia, the Ukraine and Germany. Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 21, 1941. German soldiers first entered the Ukraine during the invasion. Ultimately, they were defeated by the Soviets and were driven back to Berlin in defeat. This happened after millions of people were slaughtered. The goal of the German invasion was to exterminate Communists and seize the natural resources of the USSR and the neighboring region.

It should be remembered that the Ukraine has for a long time been considered “the bread basket of Russia.” Russian oil and gas is piped through the Ukraine to the EU. It is easy to see the importance of close economic ties between Russia and the Ukraine for their respective peoples. It is also easy to see why Russians would be sensitive to the presence of Western fascists on their borders.

Just after World War II, in 1954, Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian and leader of the Soviet Union, gave the Crimea to Ukraine. It had formerly been part of Russia. Recent research has discovered that Khrushchev propagated much of the anti-Communist lies about the Soviet Union which have become standard propaganda for US capitalists.

Why fascists must be stopped.

The people of the world know the history of global destruction and ruin brought to their doorsteps by fascists in the past. We remember the hateful ideology which led to genocide. We are hearing the same ideology espoused again and it is being openly supported by the government leaders of the United States.

Prior to World War II, if the Western nations and the Soviet Union had joined together and quashed the fascists in Germany and Italy, the world would be much more advanced today. Instead of vast resources being spent and destroyed in a vicious war, resources could have been spent on science, technology, healthcare and education and the world would be in a far better place than it is today. Millions of lives could have been saved. Families would not have been torn apart. Vast numbers of people would not have been tortured. Perhaps two cities in Japan would not have been incinerated by atomic blasts and a city in Germany would not have been reduced to ashes by firebombing. Many cities in the Soviet Union would not have been held in siege for years.

This is why working people across the globe must unite and fight the fascists both at home and abroad. There can be no excuse for people of conscience to support the use of fascism to oppress working people. The destruction that fascism brings affects people of all races, classes, sexes, political persuasion, etc. The fascists in Germany had horribly destructive weapons to use against the people of the countries that they invaded. However, what they had were mere slingshots compared to the nuclear weapons that are available today. As one famous antiwar song from the 60s proclaimed as sung by Pete Seeger “we can all be cremated equally.”

PHill1917@comcast.net

By James Thompson

HOUSTON-On December 14, 2013 there was a runoff election for the District 1 trustee position on the Houston Community College Board Of Trustees. Zeph Capo, who is Vice President and Legislative Director of the Houston Federation of Teachers, beat incumbent Yolanda Navarro-Flores 53 to 47%.

In the run-up to the runoff election, Navarro-Flores decided to take the low road and tried to brand Capo as a communist. According to an article by Jonathan McElvy on December 13, 2013 (which I just accidentally discovered in the last week), Navarro-Flores stuffed mailboxes with preposterous allegations against Capo “One of her mailers spotlighted that Capo had been ‘Arrested, Charged and Convicted’ for blocking a road during a Houston Communist Party and Occupy Houston rally. She even gave us the case number, in case we don’t believe her… That’s rich, but not as rich or odd is what one of her supporters and fellow HCC Trustee Elect Dave Wilson did. Apparently Wilson’s campaign coffers funded a letter to potential voters echoing that Capo was working with the Houston Communist Party. Then things got nasty, as the letter described Capo as a ‘homosexual Democrat that wants to make marriage between a man and a man legal in Texas.'”

Dave Wilson is an anti-gay, white Republican who won a seat on the Houston Community College Board of Trustees by campaigning as a black man. Apparently, his campaign literature led the people who read it to believe that he is black.

Navarro-Flores and Capo are both prominent members of the Harris County Democratic Party. Neither Navarro-Flores nor Capo are members of or have worked with the Houston Communist Party now or in the past. Navarro-Flores’ redbaiting tactics did not serve her well. Sen. Joseph McCarthy used similar tactics on a widescale basis in the 1950s and this earned him eternal infamy.

Redbaiting, anti-Communism and homophobia do not work in Houston, Texas. They are both forms of hate speech. Hate speech is a tactic frequently used by Nazis and fascists. We all know what happened to Hitler’s Nazi Germany. We also know the tragic loss of life of millions that Nazism and fascism caused before it was stopped.

PHill1917@comcast.net

– from Zoltan Zigedy is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

To paraphrase de Maistre, every political party has the leadership it deserves. It is confidence in the wisdom of this maxim that keeps me from commenting extensively on the continuing effort to retreat from Marxism-Leninism on the part of Chairman Sam Webb and the rest of the Communist Party USA top leadership. As the membership continues to shrink– discounting internet “friends” and “likes”– one can only marvel at the dogged loyalty of most of the remaining membership, a loyalty perhaps leftover from times when the Party was under attack from all sides. But the Party is under attack from no one today, especially since the Party’s entire body of work coincides with working selflessly for Democratic Party election victories while slavishly following (off-electoral season) the leadership of the AFL-CIO.

Apparently changes are afoot in the CPUSA as it approaches its June National Convention. There will be leadership change. Unfortunately, it does not promise to be accompanied by a shift in ideological perspective. Nonetheless, some will entertain an unfounded “hope” in a new direction, a hope that will immobilize dissent.

There is also talk of dropping references to “Communism,” the final barrier, if the Webbites are to be believed, to the CPUSA becoming a party with mass support.

For an honest, critical discussion of the latest musings of Sam Webb, go here: http://houstoncommunistparty.com/the-poverty-of-ideology/

Apart from its continual decline, the CPUSA counts as a small voice, but an authoritative voice, to the US left on matters pertaining to the World Communist Movement. Recently, Sue Webb, who represented the CPUSA at the International meeting of Communist and Workers Parties held in Lisbon in November of last year, gave a report of that meeting, highlighting the CPUSA’s and other parties’ assessments and views on the current situation and the way forward.

Much of Sue Webb’s commentary is a thinly-veiled attack upon the Greek Communist Party (KKE) under the guise of supporting diversity and independence in the world movement. At the same time, she exploits differences between Parties to justify the CPUSA’s exodus from Marxism-Leninism. To read more, please go to: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/