What Is to Be Done?

With complicated move and countermove, the four occupying powers settled down last week to the task of ruling conquered Germany. A few picked units of British and U.S. troops packed their gear and took off for Berlin, where they would help the Russians garrison the city.

Bulldozers and sweating U.S. engineers finished a bridge across the Mulde. Over it rumbled the Berlin-bound U.S. troops. Soon Russians would cross it in the other direction to take over territory vacated by the Americans. On the Autobahnen of Saxony and Thuringia U.S. vehicles rumbled west and south, making way for the Russians. At the roadside crowds of German civilians, fleeing the Russians, trudged in the same direction.

Four Way Partition. The partition of Germany into occupation zones, long both a problem and a mystery, was a mystery no longer. In Berlin the Russians would control the central city plus the industrial northern and eastern sections. Britain would control the western and northwestern suburbs, the U.S. the south and southeastern suburbs. In western and southern Germany the U.S., Britain and France would occupy zones comprising about half of the country's area, more than half its. population, less than half its food resources.

SHAEF, the long wartime partnership of U.S. and British armed forces, was dissolving, to be replaced by the joint control plan, wherein each power would govern its own occupation zone in its own way.

Unity by Default. But if their formal union was gone, the British and Americans were still united by a common lack of policy: long-range policies were still either undecided or secret. Ordinary soldiers of the occupation armies were beginning to ask: what's going to be done with Germany? Will it be permanently divided into small states? With political activity banned, how can a democratic Germany develop?

Beyond the movement of Russian prisoners of war from west to east, there was still no apparent coordination of policy between the western allies and Russia. While the Russians were winning friends and influencing Germans in the east, Germans in the west were beginning to show open hostility to the occupying armies. In Nurnberg German women turned their backs on U.S. soldiers, sometimes openly sneered.

New York Times Correspondent Raymond Daniell visited a prominent German farming family in Thuringia, which soon was to be taken over by the Russians. The 20-year-old daughter of the family was indignant over "the betrayal of Germany to the Bolsheviks." She complained of a U.S. Army unit that had been briefly billeted on the farm, but was even more alarmed by the approaching Russian control.

"Why don't you fight them?" she asked Daniell. "Why must you let them come? ... It is hideous what you are doing."

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