Saar Umpires

The most expert woman in the world on plebiscites is a U. S. citizen and her name is Sarah Wambaugh. She used to teach economics and history at Radcliffe and Wellesley. Last week the League of Nations picked her, with two men, to umpire that headline event Woodrow Wilson scheduled for sometime in 1935--the Saar plebiscite. The other umpires are Italy's Bindo Galli, president of Genoa's Court of Appeals, and Holland's L. A. Nypel, Supreme Court Justice. The three umpires will try to see that the Saar citizens, including Germans who lived in the area when the Versailles Treaty was signed (June 28, 1919), vote "freely and fairly" on three propositions: going French, going German, or remaining a League protectorate. To Sarah Wambaugh the plebiscite still sounded as simple as President Wilson intended it to be. But the League's Commissioner on the spot, Geoffrey George Knox who has ruled the Saar for two years with a firm hand, knew better. France owns the great Saar coal mines by right of the Versailles Treaty. If Germany wins the plebiscite, it may buy them, back. Since 1919 many a German has left the Saar. Many a Saar Frenchman, realizing that under League protection he pays extremely low taxes, may well vote to stay with the League. So may many a Catholic, Socialist or Communist who now fears Nazi Germany as much as France. From East and West into the Saar pour propaganda and terrorists, German and French. Last week Nazi Minister of Propaganda Paul Joseph Goebbels, charged with the job of getting the Saar back for Germany at any cost, began scouring Germany for oldtime Saar residents eligible to vote in next year's free-for-all. Then he rushed to Zweibriuecken on the Saar border to scream at a huge crowd of 200,000: "Your return to the Reich is no longer a question of parliamentary or party support but of the will of 66,000,000 people, finally united and standing beside and behind you. No measures of force or despotism can separate us." He denounced the "separatist traitors" who had fled from Germany to the Saar to escape the Nazis. He stormed and pleaded for Nazidom's case: ''Our winter relief campaign has proved we are pursuing practical Christianity, and we therefore are justified in checking attempts of the Church to meddle in politics." He promised that if Germany wins the plebiscite it will modernize the Saar's old mines, sink new ones and find new markets. Afterwards leaders of the Saar German Front promised him 92% of the vote (about 500,000). Setting her square jaw squarer, 52-year-old Sarah Wambaugh last week set out for her new job determined to hold both France and Germany at arm's length while Saar residents choose their own destiny.

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