Raid on Reds

The secret meeting in a classroom of the Hattingen trade-union school might have been a military briefing, except that the men wore mufti and talked of such unmilitary objectives as office keys, filing cabinets and street addresses. Intently they took instruction from an incisive young man, then hurried off in automobiles to nine cities of West Germany's industrial Ruhr. At the stroke of 8 next morning, the nine men led small groups of assistants into nine regional offices and the headquarters of the big Northrhine-Westphalia Building Workers' Union, seized the offices and the files.

As union staff members appeared for work, most were told politely that that local was dissolved, and to "go home until you hear from us." But 15 of them, gape-mouthed with surprise, were handed dismissal notices. They were Communist Party workers who had infiltrated into positions of strength in one of West Germany's most important (408,000 members) unions.

The raiders from the union's national headquarters already had evidence of the Communists' subversive activities; they found much more in the files they seized: papers showed how the dismissed Reds had been pressuring ex-Reds among union members to rejoin the party, had maintained illegal contacts with organizations in Russia and East Germany, were planning a Communist-sponsored building-workers' conference in the Ruhr, were using union funds to promote Red aims.

The blitz purge of the building-workers' locals was big news in West Germany last week, reflecting a new awareness of an infiltration that most West Germans had long thought themselves immune to. Though the Communists are almost powerless at the polls (they lost their 14 remaining Bundestag seats in the last national elections), they have deeply infiltrated West German industry.

The building workers' raiders found themselves cheered on all sides: by the government and the Socialist opposition, the unions and industrialists.

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