Progress (?) Report

TIME Correspondent Sam Welles has just returned from a tour that included 17 countries. His report on Germany follows:

The elegant oak-paneled office had paintings and a Persian rug. In it sat a German official of the Soviet zone, and I congratulated him on the handsomest surroundings I had seen in ruined Dresden.

"Yes," he said. "This was a Luftwaffe headquarters before we took it over for the Saxon state administration. Goering looked well after his own."

"That Was War." To travel round Germany now is to realize how strongly, even fiercely, that trait of looking after their own is re-emerging among the Germans. Last year they would not have dared protest as vehemently as they did last week over the revised Anglo-American list of factories to be removed for reparations--though the new list has only 682 plants compared to the original figure of 1,636.

Very few Germans have any real remorse for 1939-45. "That was war," they say, and wave a hand to dismiss even the atrocities. They flock to Berchtesgaden by the thousand for pilgrimage climbs over Hitler's favorite mountain. You meet them even on the slopes--marked Verboten to Germans--around his chalet and eagle's nest eyrie. They turn stony faces to foreigners on the mountain as though the latter's mere presence on the sacred soil were sacrilege.

Elsewhere, the German attitude toward outsiders is a curious combination of bitterness and self-centered smugness. German after German told me solemnly that Hitler's only mistake lay in trying to do the right things the wrong way. They actually believe that nobody ever suffered as they have suffered. They want to tell their troubles and, like a girl I met in Munich, are not interested in hearing the troubles of others. This girl had lamented at length over Munich's overcrowding.

"What are the most crowded living conditions you have here?" I asked.

"Some people have to live four and five in a room," she replied.

"In Stalingrad and Warsaw, which the Germans destroyed, I often saw eight and ten people living in a single small room."

"Ach," she said, with an impatient toss of her head. "Slavs will tell you any lie that suits them."

After one day that was full of such dirges, I asked a Dane who has been dealing with Germans ever since the surrender, "Don't these people realize they lost the war?"

"Yes," he answered, "but they still don't know why."

"Was Schiebst Du?" It is nearly two and a half years since V-E day, and anyone who wants to realize how long a time that is need only listen to Germans. In May 1945 the Germans, humbly incoherent, thought the conquerors would impose their will on Germany, and that their will would be a German democracy. Instead, in each zone, the occupying power tried to set up a German administration in its own image. Not even the Russians succeeded.

From Aachen to the Erz Gebirge, Germans are now growing ever more defiantly German in their concerns. At the first postwar German writers' congress, held in Berlin Oct. 4-6, the single sentence that drew most deafening applause was: "We Germans from all zones must work together."

Despite all difficulties and zonal barriers, Germans talk and think remarkably alike. Throughout Germany, they share similar conditions.

They have a common shortage of food and coal. The daily ration hovers around 1,500 calories in Anglo-American Bizonia, and is even lower in the once food-surplus Soviet zone. Nobody is actually starving, but there is much malnutrition. Cold and poor food will kill many of the very old and very young this winter. The toll is especially high among babies.

In all zones, most window displays of clothing, leather goods, etc. have little signs that read:"We make high quality articles from our own models with your materials." Few Germans have the materials.

In some senses, Germans are discouraged and drifting. Before the war, Germans very seldom used the verb schieben, meaning "to swindle." Now the black market is such a normal pursuit that schieben is part of a common daily greeting. Staid Berliners often salute each other with Was schiebst du heute? (What are you swindling today?).

"True Kultur?" In other senses, Germans are again pulling purposefully in tandem. They are not running Germany, though a lot of the lesser administration is already in their hands. But the occupying forces feel the growing power naturally wielded by 65,000,000 stubborn, resilient people set in the strategic heart of Europe.

Even in the coming winter, which Germans fear will be the worst yet, after the summer's drought and the continued coal shortages, that power will keep on growing with the slow, steady force of a rising tide. Britain's financial crisis is causing a cut in the British control staff from 16,000 to 5,000, which will give the Germans more responsibility in key areas, including the Ruhr.

Germans would prefer to lean neither East nor West, though cynically willing to use either to their own advantage. "If America has a true Kultur" a winegrower in the French zone told me, "it will fight Russia and rid the world of Communism. We will help and then you in turn can help rid us of these French swine who take all my hock at their absurdly low prices." Like the winegrower, a great many Germans would welcome war as a chance to improve their lot, though many dread it.

If the November meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers at London ends in stalemate, as almost everyone in Germany expects, there may be two Germanys: one consisting of the 20,000,000 people in the Soviet zone, the other of the 45,000,000 in the West. But such a split will be of Big Four, not German making, and every German political party will put the necessity of a reunited Germany as the first plank in its platform.

"You Can't Buy Any." Meanwhile, each of the four zones is clearly German, and yet each has taken its tone from its occupying power. Most interesting is the Soviet zone, which on a smaller and less severe scale reminded me of the Russia I had recently visited. Despite the most consciously thorough indoctrination any power is using in Germany, the Soviet authorities have had little success in converting their zone to Communist doctrine. There are far more Communists in the Ruhr, where the Communists are not in control, than in Eastern Germany, where they are.

The Russians have had more success in introducing Soviet living standards. Said a Meissen baker bitterly when asked what he thought of Germany's future: "They are lowering us to the Russian level. They want workers here to have 150 marks a month and one suit of clothes, as in Russia. Germans are used to better than that." A Meissen housewife, asked about her city's famed china, put it still more succinctly: "You can't buy any."

The Gleaners. Prewar, the Soviet zone was always a food-surplus area, which the three Western zones were not. But now Russian-zone Germans are as hungry as those in the West. Near Bitterfeld, townfolk were using their Sunday off to glean the few stray wheat stalks left in the stubble of a wheatfield. They grind the grain by hand and make a sort of bread. Some, unable to wait, were eagerly breaking the stalk heads open and eating as they gleaned. It left a grayish paste of kernel shell around their lips.

Last spring the grain collections from German farmers in the British and U.S. zones were only 32% of quota. The Russians, who know how to exact grain from Soviet collective farms, have used their time-tried techniques much more successfully. At the village of Mildensee, near Dessau, a lad of 16, so small that he looked only ten, told me: "The Russians take 80% of our food." His father interrupted: "No, no, they take only half or a little more."

Another Mildensee farmer said: "If a cow dies, I still have to deliver her quota of milk. We are fined if we do not. Four peasants in this village have been fined--but none have yet been put in jail. If you lack money to pay the fine, then you must pay in animals. In villages near Mildensee some peasants last year were jailed for up to six months for not meeting their grain delivery quotas in full. But we in Mildensee were able to meet our quotas. So they gave us bigger quotas this year. Now we have had drought, and I do not know how we can live."

"The American Way." The U.S. zone has far fewer Americans than the Soviet zone has Russians. Most of the Americans, though not the most important ones, are downy-cheeked G.I.s in their late teens. They have no real notion of why !hey are there. At Passau in Bavaria one of their officers told me: "We aren't making any impression on the Germans that I can see. There are only 300 Americans in this whole area of some 700,000 Germans. Our number is being further cut. Very few of us are interested in Germany. Few of us know the language. So the Germans pretty much run things themselves. So far as I've been able to find out, this area has no program whatever for German re-education or democratization."

A top U.S. official in Germany was somewhat more hopeful: "Economically we have made little progress, but at least in the American zone we have created a sense of freedom in a people unaccustomed to it. There is no fear of arbitrary police action. This is not true in the Soviet zone." A British observer was sarcastic: "Germans in the American zone now understand that, by & large, their first and only duty is to cause no trouble, feed themselves without a riot, and get on with the business of living any way they can. The other term for that is, I suppose, 'the American way of life.' "

U.S. economic policy on Germany, though more specific than its political policy, has suffered from a basic contradiction. In the U.S. zone, Germans have been given no real opportunity for free enterprise, which is the pride of the U.S. system. The Nazi totalitarian system of economic controls and central checkups has been retained. We are not even showing the Germans what the American-type economy is like, or removing barriers so they could learn its advantages for themselves.

The U.S. zone's central economic planning is not as well administered as the Nazis' was. OMGUS drew up a central plan for allocation, supply and production for the U.S. zone. Then it allowed so many exceptions that scores of individual, unrelated factories make products not called for in the original plan, using a lot of hard-to-get, expensive raw materials. This leaves little foreign exchange to buy the imports which the central plan called for. The central plan has now largely collapsed.

"To the Squash Courts." Though the U.S. and British zones have been merged since last winter, there has not been time enough to erase national idiosyncrasies. In some aspects the British zone is as British as Weston super Mare. Approaching the medieval city gate of Luebeck, one can scarcely see the gate for the sign on it: TO THE SQUASH COURTS.

British achievements in Germany have been overshadowed by their great failure: to get a Ruhr coal production anywhere near normal. Steel production is less than 20% of the prewar peak.

The French zone is the" smallest and worst run of the four. "The French have cut more wood in two years than the Germans cut in 50," said a German forester. A businessman in Coblenz told me: "The French had a wonderful opportunity here. We had had our noses full of Hitler. They wanted the Rhineland, and we wanted something different from what we had. They could have won us. But their tactics have lost us completely."

"Sooner or Later." To sum it up, the Russians have got the most out of Germany, but they have not been able to put in their ideology. If the Marshall Plan goes through, Western Germany will be included, because Western Europe cannot recover without the Ruhr and its related industries. If Germany does not get some such U.S. aid, chaos and then Communism are almost sure to follow. If the aid does bring German recovery, the not too pressing threat of German Communism will subside and Germans may have a fair chance to choose, as sooner or later every people must, their own form of government.

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