Gathering Victims

Like doomed men in a death cell, the puppet rulers of Communist East Germany had waited for weeks, desperate to know which of them had been named for sacrifice. Last week one of them (perhaps only the first) found out. An eight-line announcement in East Berlin's Neues Deutschland said: "State Security Forces . . . arrested Georg Dertinger, Foreign Minister." Dertinger was accused of "hostile activity against the German Democratic Republic . . . carried out under orders from imperialist spy services."

Dertinger is not likely to stir up much sympathy. A Prussian cadet, then a newspaperman, he became a jackbooted member of the jackbooted Stahlhelm (steel helmet) organization before Hitler came to power. After the war, though apparently not a Communist, he became their stooge, useful at keeping his fellow Roman Catholics in line. He was rewarded by a visit to Moscow for Stalin's birthday in 1950, a high Polish decoration only last month for having signed away to Poland all German territory east of the Oder-Neisse rivers, and a congratulatory telegram only a few weeks ago from Andrei Vishinsky.

With Dertinger into disfavor went a dozen top bureaucrats, four of them Jews. Included: Max Keilsen, chief of the Soviet Union section of the East German Foreign Office, and his wife Greta; Peter Floring, head of the East European section; Georg Handcke, East German ambassador to Red Rumania. Even Premier Grotewohl himself appeared to be in danger. Secret Police Chief Wilhelm Zaisser acted without Grotewohl's orders in arresting his Foreign Minister.

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