Last Call for Europe

(See Cover)

Ernst Reuter, indomitable Mayor of Berlin, is one of the few authentically big figures in Western Europe, a fearless, consistent foe of Communism who meets the enemy without flinching or compromise. Long before other Western leaders, he saw his city in its true role, as Europe's outpost of freedom. He rallied his people in the critical months of the Red blockade. As an ally of the West, he looked good then. Now that Korea, like a lightning flash, has shown what may happen any time in Europe, his figure on the international scene bulks bigger than ever before.

The key to Europe is Germany. The key to Germany is Berlin, and not since the Russian blockade of 1948-49 has the outpost city seemed more menaced by the Red domain that surrounded it. Under the Kremlin's goad, East Germany is arming fast in the name of a united (i.e., Communist) Deutschland.

Berliners and West Germans know that only token defenses stand between them and the threat from the East. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that many Germans (and other Europeans) are profoundly discouraged and defeatist. West German morale soared during the Berlin airlift, plummeted when the West failed to take advantage of its moral victory. Morale flashed up again last June when the U.S. promptly and decisively accepted the Communist challenge in Korea. But it dropped again when U.S. battle defeats, added to appeasing statements from Washington, cast doubt on the U.S. determination to make a firm stand against Communism in Asia, however doughty might be its stand in Korea. The morale of Germany, and the rest of Europe, could only be revived by immediate European rearmament, with the U.S. as leader and Germany as one of the partners. Otherwise, soon, Berlin might go; the loss of Berlin would demoralize the West Germans and the Europeans; they might fight the advancing Russians, but they would have little hope of holding the Red army back from the Atlantic.

No Terrified Rabbit. Few men understood this danger so clearly as Berlin's Reuter. He did not need the Korean war to bring home to him the nature of the Kremlin's conspiracy against the world. He had once been a high official of the German Communist Party, a trusted friend of Lenin, an associate of Stalin. Reuter not only understood the danger, he knew what had to be done to meet it. Said he: "It is not my business to act like a terrified rabbit staring at a snake." For the past four years he had made it his business to rouse in his countrymen the love of freedom that all men have and to urge the free world to let the Germans have the means of defending themselves.

In last week's decision to send more U.S. troops to Germany (see above), Reuter's long campaign was beginning finally to bear fruit. But the Allied sense of urgency was still muffled by distrust of the Germans. Twice within a generation they had goose-stepped Europe, and the world, into war. Fellow Europeans had a saying: "The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet." Looking at the old enemy as a new friend, they could not help but ask: "The Germans to arms--again? And if not . . .?" The Western world was slowly coming to the realization that its choice was not between an armed and a disarmed Germany. Its choice was between a Germany armed by the West and willing to fight and a Germany armed by and made to fight for the Kremlin.

Dragging Feet. On paper, the nations of non-Communist Europe could overmatch the basic resources of Communist Europe. On each side of the Iron Curtain live about 250 million people. The Europeans to the west of the Curtain possess greatly superior technical know-how and industrial capacity. They can, for instance, make 50 million tons of steel a year against the 28 million-ton capacity of Russia and its satellites. Yet if West Germany's 50 million people and 15 million-ton steel capacity should pass into Red control, preponderance would pass to the Reds. Even with the German industrial capacity still in Western hands, there were calamitous dangers in the present situation of free Europe. The free nations had scarcely made a beginning at integrating their industrial efforts. France's bravest postwar gesture, the Schuman Plan to unite Western European coal and steel production, was bogging down in nationalist jealousies.

The military picture was even blacker.

Against Russia's 100 divisions the Western Allies had a mere 15, including two U.S. divisions in Germany. Only one of the U.S. divisions--the 1st Infantry--was organized for combat. The program to rearm Europe with U.S. aid had dragged through a year of staff conferences, then dragged through Congress and was last week dragging through more staff conferences. Europeans had the impression that, so far, rearmament was just talk. This impression was 99% correct.

Urgent Voices. The defeatism that arose from Europe's defenseless state was the Kremlin's greatest asset in Western Europe.

Like the rest of Europe, the Germans needed at least the chance of a successful stand against Communist power. A substantial U.S. military commitment in Berlin and on the Elbe would give them, and all Europeans, the feeling that "then everything would be different." Instead of a German and European Dunkirk and then a dreary war of liberation all over again, there would be at least the prospect of stopping the Communist push as soon as it started. And out of the common defense could rise a mighty, cohesive, free Atlantic community. This was the prospect for which West Germany's leaders were striving.

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had said: "The most important single thing that needs to be done right now is for America to send more divisions to Europe. That would give Europe the courage to arm."

The Socialists' Kurt Schumacher had seen the safe prerequisite for German rearmament in "monumental Western military might on the Elbe."

Last week Berlin's Reuter spoke most eloquently and bravely of all: "You can get the Germans to rearm themselves within a European framework only if you show them a national goal within Europe. The goal for Germany must be to defend itself in Berlin and Eastern Germany. The goal for Europe must be to defend itself in Warsaw and Prague. I don't mean preventive war. I mean that European rearmament must be conceived as a factor in a political offensive against the Soviets, to get them peacefully out of Europe. Why should only the Soviets say, 'Yank, go home! Why don't we all start saying, 'Ivan, scram.' "

On the Blacklist. Sad-eyed, tough-minded Ernst Reuter, 61, is Oberbuerger meister (Lord Mayor) of a beleaguered island city 120 miles inside the Iron Curtain, had long since become the symbol of postwar Berlin. He had also become No. 1 German on the Russian blacklist.

Reuter had been on blacklists before. A brilliant, inquisitive student at Marburg, Munich and Muenster, with a taste for Greek and Latin poets, he drifted into the Socialist Party before 1912. His father, a small-town Prussian of the old conservative school, promptly disowned him. His radical principles cost him a tutor's job. Undeterred, he entered the workers' movement. Then the antimilitarist Socialists, in one of history's memorable turnabouts, voted for the Kaiser's war of 1914. Reuter dissented, made propaganda for pacifism, but was clapped into the Hohenzollern army.

On the Galician front in 1916 he suffered a serious thigh wound, from which he still limps. The Russians took him prisoner and sent him to the coal mines near Tula, 100 miles south of Moscow.

On the Volga. Reuter learned the Russian language, welcomed the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, organized a soviet among his fellow P.W.s and thereby caught the eye of Nikolai Lenin, who made him Commissar of the German-speaking Volga German Republic.*The appointment put him directly under Joseph Stalin, then Commissar for Nationalities. Reuter had, and still has, deep contempt for Russia's Man of Steel--"a mere drill sergeant," he calls him.

When World War I ended in 1918, the gifted German went back to Berlin. Lenin sent along a shrewd letter of appraisal. "This young Reuter," it read, "has a clear and brilliant head, but he is a bit too independent." Within three years, Reuter's independence drove him from the party.

It was the critical time of Red insurrections in central Germany and their savage suppression. The party's Secretary General Paul Levi protested against the secret part played by Soviet Russian agents in fomenting the insurrections; he stressed the difference between Russia and the West, attacked Bolshevism for its Asiatic character. The party dropped him and Reuter succeeded him. A few months later, the new secretary general, with his knowledge of Russian, discovered that his predecessor's charges were true. In hot rebellion against Russian machinations, Reuter resigned his post and walked back into the Social Democratic Party.

Slowly he rebuilt socialist trust in himself. He became an editor of the party organ Vorwaerts, and a student of city management. He served as Berlin assemblyman and transport official, earning respect for solid work in improving the capital's trolley, bus and subway systems. He still calls himself a "town-planner at heart--I like to dream about the ideal city." Magdeburg recruited him as mayor in 1931. Two years later the Nazis, who had him on their blacklist too, hustled him off to concentration camp.

Flight & Return. British friends, including Labor members of the London County Council, helped obtain his release after a few months. But as he left prison camp, the Brownshirt commandant warned him, "Next time, I'll finish you off." Magdeburg welcomed him back so festively that he was soon arrested again. Once more, British intervention rescued him. He moved to Hannover to avoid the onus of another Magdeburg ovation. When a tip reached him that the Gestapo would pick him a third time, he slipped across the Dutch border, then took refuge among his friends in Britain, where he began to learn his fluent and colorful English.

In late 1935, the Turkish government invited him to Ankara to advise the Ministry of Economics and to teach city administration. He stayed in Turkey through the long years of the Nazi rise & fall. He mastered the language, had to scrape for a living when the war broke out and suspicion of all Germans sharpened. Somehow he eked along in a teaching job and as consultant to a shipping firm.

Rape & Resistance. It was not until late 1946 that Reuter could get Allied clearance for his return to Berlin. The Socialists elected him mayor and the Russians promptly vetoed the choice. They called Reuter antiCommunist, which was true, and also pro-Nazi, which was false; in the interests of Allied "unity," U.S. General Lucius Clay went along for a while with the Russian blackball. Though still a city councilor, Reuter did not assume the mayor's office.

The elements of resistance to Communism had already emerged in battered Berlin. It was as much abhorrence as resistance--an abhorrence created by the Red troops in their rape of the city in May 1945. This event was not reported at the time. No one was in a mood to hear a German's complaint against a Russian. But when the facts were laid down, it became clear that in Berlin the Red army had gotten out of hand.

Loot-laden Red soldiers had prowled Berlin's streets, drunk on alcohol and their first contact with a great city of the West. They had raped women in view of husbands and children; and they had slit the throats of those who did not yield at once.

The mark and memory of Ivan's bestiality had set Berliners apart from their fellow Germans in the West. Not having undergone the ordeal, West Germany could not find an anti-Communist passion equal to that of Berlin. But Reuter understood Berlin's feelings and put himself at the van of resistance. His leadership was popular among Berliners, but less appealing, at first, to the occupation Allies. A friend advised him: "The only possible way to be a politician in Berlin is to be on a good footing with all four powers." Since that meant kowtowing to Communism, Reuter would have none of it.

Blockade & Airlift. It was an uphill battle. But Reuter's position was sound in the light of subsequent events. His position today as one of the top three West Germans is the result of the clarity of his thinking and the staunchness of his principles.

In the critical days before the Russian blockade, he vowed: "We will defend ourselves with all our means against the attempt to make us slaves and helots." When the blockade was imposed, he cried: "People of Berlin! Go the straight road. Only if we are determined to run every risk can we win the life that alone is worth living--be it ever so poor--a life in freedom."

Such determination, and the determination of the Berliners that it typified and toughened, brought results. The U.S. and Britain mounted the huge and magnificent airlift effort. While the struggle raged in the air, it also crackled on the ground. In August 1948 Communist hooligans raided the City Hall, which was in the Soviet sector. As they burst in on Reuter, he waved them away: "Can't you see I've got work to do?" When the City Hall finally became untenable, Reuter led the municipal administration (minus the Communists) to Western Berlin. The split of the city into East and West was now final. In the December 1948 elections in the Western sectors, the Socialists racked up a big victory and Reuter at last became officially the Oberbuergermeister. This time there was no question of a Russian veto.

For all its privations and worries, the year of blockade was a glorious time in Berlin. The common struggle brought out the best in every man. It also brought hope to all Germans, west and east. It welded the non-German West into sufficient unity to create the Bonn government and the North Atlantic Treaty.

Grumble & Worry. The 18 months since the airlift victory have slowly tarnished Berlin's shining sense of strength and achievement. The Russians lifted the big blockade, but came back with nagging little ones. They staged nerve-racking blusters, such as last Whitsuntide's giant Red youth rally. They pushed an industrial speed-up and other possible war preparations in East Germany (see cut). Most ominous, they rapidly expanded the 50,000 men in the Bereitschaften, the tank-equipped "alert units" within East Germany's so-called police force that numbered well over 200,000.

By last week, Berlin's Western sector had five months' supply of coal on hand and a six months' supply of grain and cereals. Along the Kurfuerstendamm, against the grey bomb rubble, sidewalk cafes with flower-decked tables and shops with smart new chromium & glass fronts looked valiantly hopeful. But by & large, Berlin's economy was not healthy. It still had 294,000 jobless, a whopping 600 million-mark annual budgetary deficit. West Berlin was getting little aid from the Bonn government.

Work-relief projects, financed with U.S. Army funds, absorbed some of the idle. On warm days this summer, women of all classes were wielding picks and shovels. Men who had been clerks, plumbers, doctors or lawyers worked beside them. Often they grumbled. "The man in the street, he's always the one that's got to pay. Don't talk to me about the good life in West Berlin," said one. Another replied: "Why don't you go over to the East then?" This question, as always in Berlin, stopped the grumbler in his tracks. "You know why," he answered. "I can't keep my mouth shut--and don't want to."

Beyond the difficulties of everyday living, West Berliners resented particularly the Bonn government, which begrudged them money and would not press the Allies to allow Berlin as a full-fledged Land or state in the Federal Republic. They resented almost as much the stubborn French opposition to Berlin joining the Bonn regime. They worried about Allied flabbiness and the general state of Western strength. The Korean war had made Berliners ask: "If the Americans can't stop Communism there, how can they defend us?"

But Berliners did not seem afraid. "We're past fearing," said a taxi driver. "We made up our minds long ago. All we can do is work and wait."

Work & Wait. Along with his people, Ernst Reuter was working and waiting. In his modest home in the suburb of Zehlendorf, in the U.S. sector, he got up every morning at 7:30 and ate a modest breakfast. ("He has no time for exercise and he doesn't want to get fat," his petite, redheaded wife explained.) At 8:15, he set a black beret on his unruly grey hair, picked up his cane and went out to his official car, a black Mercedes sedan. At 8:30, he arrived at the great, grey Rathaus Schoneberg and walked to his high-ceilinged office on the second floor. There he started out on his null 6-hour day of reading reports, inspecting municipal installations, conferring with top German colleagues with such Allied officials as the U.S. Commander in Berlin, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, attending dinners or more conferences at night.

Reuter also had to make frequent trips to Western Germany, mostly to plead the city's case at Bonn, sometimes to meet with the Minister-Presidents of the eleven Western Laender (states), sometimes to confer with Socialist Party colleagues. Whenever time permitted, he traveled by car on the Autobahn through the Soviet zone, even though he was anathema to the Russians; he was determined to assert the Berliners' right of free access to their city.

What leisure time he had left over from this schedule, the mayor spent at home, with his wife Hanna, and their son Edzard, 22. (He has two other children by a previous marriage--son Harry, now a British subject, who is studying at Manchester University, and daughter Hella, who is ill and lives in Western Germany.) His leisure wants were simple: cigars to smoke and a library to browse in. "All we own," Frau Reuter said, "is a sofa, some armchairs and a few rugs. Everything else is rented. My husband is really only interested in his books, but they are all special ones. I don't think you will find a novel in the house. You will find all the Greek philosophers and just about everything of Goethe's."

Toward the Initiative. Ernst Reuter was not a man to concern himself unduly or exclusively with what the Communists might be brewing for his city and the rest of the Western camp. He preferred to think about a course of action for the free nations. Last week, in an interview with TIME'S Berlin Bureau Chief Enno Hobbing, Reuter, in simple and eloquent language, summed up a program for Germans --and for all free men. Said he:

"I hope my own people understand that they have only one choice and one chance to make a sensible life for themselves. The Germans know they lost the war and they want to do something decent. It should be the job of political leadership to rouse those good instincts, to give the people a real purpose.

"Before that can be done, American divisions must come over here to strengthen the Western German feeling of security. How can you give people a purpose when they know that if the Soviets attack, they'll be on the Rhine in no time? Even if everyone took up a knife or club, there would be no stopping them. The people have to know there is at least a chance.

"Military measures are no final solution to the problem. The people have to know what they are fighting for, what shape their country is intended to take. That can only be done if the Bonn government begins to move to Berlin. Then the whole world would understand that Bonn had taken title to all of Germany, that it spoke and acted with a claim to the Germans in the East. The aim would be to get the Soviets to withdraw, with some face-saving gesture.

"Impossible? The Soviets are much more elastic than other powers; they can go backwards elastically too. After all, they did it during the blockade."

Toward New Horizons. "Whether we actually get another Soviet assault on Berlin depends on how much the West rearms, politically, morally and militarily, and on how much it moves on to Berlin. If it does that, it can demand from the Soviets: 'We want free elections in all Germany. We want free access to Berlin.'

"Therefore, we must quickly get a genuine Western army and a Western general staff. Any idea of a separate German army is obvious nonsense, and we don't have to discuss it. A Western army must be organized in which the Germans can join.

"All Europe needs a new horizon, just as the Germans do. We can't keep up this sitting behind the stove of the Elbe. The plan must be to reunite all of Europe, including the Soviet satellite states. Or do you think that Poland and Czechoslovakia are not part of Europe? Do you think the Poles are happy with their Ivan? A plan like that would kindle the forces of resistance behind the Iron Curtain.

"It's not enough just to solve the German problem. The Soviets cannot stand still either on the Elbe or the Oder-Neisse --they have to go forward or backward. I do not believe they will go to war at all costs. Nor can the Soviet Union last forever as a hermetically sealed system behind a wall. However, we cannot rely on possible internal dissensions in the Soviet Union, but only on our own strength. If we all really unite, we cannot fail to push them back."

But time, as Reuter well knew, was all-important. Last week in Washington, John J. McCloy, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, was anxiously discussing European morale with a friend. "You speak," said the friend, "as if you are sounding the last call for Europe."

Said McCloy, "That's exactly what it is."

*Invited by Catherine the Great in the mid-18th Century, Germans settled in the region around the present Stalingrad. After the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, the Volga Germans, numbering about 500,000, were regarded as potential fifth columnists, deported en masse to Asiatic Russia.

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