Tragic Victory

It made sense; yet it meant the world was losing the peace. It was a triumph of intelligent, forceful U.S. diplomacy; yet it was certainly not what Americans had expected or wanted in the postwar world. The agreement to merge the U.S. and British zones of Germany overshadowed the Paris Conference and every other political event since the war's end. As its meaning began to sink in last week the West could take heart because it had called a brilliant Russian bluff; at the same time West and East could take solemn notice that the conflict between them had reached a point where they were openly competing for the favor of the Germans.

Faces to the West. At last week's meeting of the Allied Control Council for Germany, Marshal Vassily Sokolovsky, the Russian representative, said he feared the proposal for economic unity would have the effect of continuing the division of Germany among the great powers. He implied that Anglo-U.S. unity was an agreement against Russia--as in a sense it was. Not that the Western powers wanted to exclude Russia. Last month U.S. Secretary of State Byrnes had offered to merge the economic administration of the U.S. zone with all or any of the other zones. Byrnes understood why the Russians did not want unified administration. The Russian reasons were: 1) Russian booty hunger, which would be curbed by unified administration, and 2) the Russians' realization that they were losing their campaign to woo the Germans into siding with them against the Western powers.

The second reason was more important. Since most Germans preferred the West, the Russians chose to hang on to their zone, which they could control, rather than enter a Germany-wide administration.

Berlin had taught a lesson which the Russians applied to all Germany. In the capital, which was the one place in Germany where goods, ideas, people and publications pass freely back & forth among zones, the Western Powers had proved themselves stronger. A secret poll in Greater Berlin last week showed that only 18% of Berliners were more friendly to Russia than to the Western Powers.

John Scott, head of TIME's Berlin Bureau, summed up one result of 13 months of occupation: "In spite of the well-planned, well-executed maneuvers of Germany's powerful Communist Party, in spite of the vacillations and muddiness of Anglo-American policy, the people of Germany and Central Europe are looking westward, not eastward, for their future."

Intake & Outgo. The Russians lost for basic economic and ideological reasons. For over a year the wealth of the West has poured into western Germany. Around $200 million worth of food was shipped in to feed the Germans cut off from normal food supplies by the Russian boundary. Nearly a million well-paid, well-fed British and U.S. troops aroused the envy (if sometimes the dislike) of the Germans.

Meanwhile Russian troops lived off the land as they had in wartime. They continued to send back to Russia bicycles, threadbare clothing, other poor possessions of the masses of poor Germans. In twelve months they took more than half of their zone's current industrial production as reparations. Americans took things too, but what they did was illegal and what they took was mostly luxury articles like Crown jewels, Mercedes-Benz cars, yachts. After a year most Germans felt under the British and Americans they could eventually work back to a normal life, and that under the Russians they could not.

The Soviet ideology reminded most Germans of the ideology that had led them to ruin. "For twelve years," said a German, "we were regimented and disciplined. One party, one leader, one ideology. The Russians have changed the names, but there is still one party, one leader, one ideology."

The Russians beat mightily on the drum of German unity, especially after Molotov delivered his July 10 stump speech at Paris. "Without the Ruhr and Rhineland Germany cannot live," the Reds said, and the cry was echoed by their German friends. "What are they shouting about?" said most Germans, "they have already had their pound of flesh from Silesia and East Prussia.

Perhaps in November. Hitler's ghost might wake the Hoerselberg with sardonic laughter at the competition between the victors for Germany's favor. Yet so long as the Big Power conflict existed, competition for control of the most important nation in Europe was inevitable. If the game had to be played, why should the West, which held better cards, lose it?

In November the Big Four Foreign Ministers will hold the first high-level discussion of policy on Germany since the ill-fated Potsdam conference. By then the democracies may have learned that their cause is by no means lost in Europe, that panic fear of Russia is unjustified; and the Russians may have learned that expansionist maneuvering is not the path to their cherished goal of "security."

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