Pseudo-Sovereignty

What the democratic West had failed to achieve in all of four years' diplomacy --a sovereign, rearmed West Germany--the Soviet Union ordained in East Germany with a flick of its whip. Last week the Kremlin announced that the Soviet occupation of its East German satellite is at an end, that the puppet "People's Republic" will now be "a sovereign state . .. free to decide, at its own discretion, its own internal and external affairs."

The second paragraph of the "sovereignty" manifesto made plain what the Kremlin's brand of "freedom" amounts to: "The Soviet Union retains . . . those functions which are connected with the safeguarding of security." The Red army, in other words, will continue to maintain its 340,000-man garrison in East Germany, a dagger directed at NATO, a club to be used against the East German people should they rebel again against their Red masters.

East Germany's Communist "sovereignty" will be equally unreal. The East German government, cracked a British Foreign Office man, "will now be completely free to follow the directives it receives from Moscow." Washington called the Soviet maneuver a "sheer fac,ade"; Bonn termed it "a booby trap." Yet for all its patent falseness, the Soviet move was not to be quipped away. In a week when pique and punctilio made a tragicomic opera of Western efforts to enlist West German arms (see below), the Kremlin was boldly reaching out on three fronts--military, diplomatic and psychological.

Militarily, the fiction of "sovereignty" enabled the East German Communists to remove the fancy Potsdam wrappings from the 600 tanks, 2,000 guns and almost 200,000 men that comprise the "People's Police." (About one in three of the Red "policemen" has deserted or has been purged since the June 17 riots, according to West German sources.) Last week, for the first time, the Communists called the so-called police by their proper name: the East German Streitkrafte (fighting forces). Diplomatically, the Kremlin hoped for even greater gains. A "sovereign" East Germany could plausibly be a step toward the gargantuan pan-European security pact that Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov proposed at the Berlin Conference as a Red alternative to NATO (TIME, Feb. 22). It might also force the West, which has previously been able to ignore the East German regime as "illegitimate" and deal only with Soviet occupiers, to deal directly with the Grotewohl regime, thus bolstering its claim to sovereignty.

Psychologically, East Germany's rise to pseudo-sovereignty will nourish discontent among the sensitive West Germans, who are once again the most powerful people in Europe, yet still are denied the right to bear arms or exercise national sovereignty. "We are still waiting for the change from occupation statute to contractual agreement [peace treaty and EDC]," snapped Bonn's pro-government General-Anzeiger. "How long must we wait? The question can only be answered in Paris."

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