Stalin's Germans

As the Big Three faced the supreme question--what to do with Germany?--Joseph Stalin had an ace which Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt could only look at and admire. They had nothing like it: a complete organization of German civilians and army officers, known to the German people and ready to move into the conquered Reich if Stalin so wills.

This organization is Moscow's National Committee of Free Germany and its Wehrmacht subsidiary, the Union of German Officers (TIME, Oct. 30). Its German brains probably are such Communist civilians as Wilhelm Pieck and Erich Weinert, who have been softening up captured German officers since the summer of 1943. But the spearheads of its appeal to the German people are two Wehrmacht aristocrats who surrendered at Stalingrad: General Walther von Seydlitz, Prussian founder of the Union of German Officers, and the union's highest-ranking member, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus.

The Boomerang. Paulus is the member who probably means most to Germans. In 1942 and early 1943, Goebbels plugged him as a staunch Nazi, the victor of Rostov, a man who outranked Heinz Guderian as a tank genius.

Allied correspondents have never forgotten their first view of Paulus at reconquered Stalingrad: a tall, forbidding figure emerging from a hut, holding himself disdainful, starch-stiff and aloof from his Russian captors. At that time the Russians had half a mind to hang him: they had found one of his orders consigning Stalingrad's population to slave labor in Germany.

For 18 months, while Seydlitz and others were calling on their countrymen to quit, Paulus was Junker-silent. But the Russians and his fellow officers labored to convince him that Hitler's Germany was lost.

That idea also fitted the Field Marshal's belief that Hitler's stubbornness and stupidity had doomed Paulus' mighty Sixth Army to a hopeless stand at Stalingrad. He was also outraged by Hitler's hanging of his fellow Field Marshal, Erwin von Witzleben. On Aug. 14, 1944, Friedrich von Paulus addressed an open letter to the German Army and people: "For Germany the war is lost. . . because of the political and military leadership 'of Adolf Hitler. . . . Germany must get rid of Adolf Hitler and establish a new state leadership which will bring the war to an end. . . ."

The Nazis denounced him as a traitor, reportedly put his family in a concentration camp. Grim Paulus stood firm. Last week he was still broadcasting to Germany for the Russians.

The Pawns. What use Stalin will actually make of Paulus & Co. in conquered Germany was uncertain last week. Originally, the committee was set up not to rule Germany after the defeat, but to persuade the German Army and people to overthrow Hitler. Paulus and his fellows failed in that effort, but they may still have a place--perhaps a big one--in Joseph Stalin's plans for conquered Germany.

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