Surrender Terms

For months the three men had been discussing endlessly in the big room at Lancaster House in London. U.S. Ambassador John Winant, Russian Ambassador Fedor Gusev and Sir William Strang, the three members of the European Advisory Commission, had held scores of meetings, examined hundreds of proposals, dictated thousands of words of notes, memoranda, dispatches. But to the eagerly watching world the three men seemed no nearer than ever to accomplishing their task--the drawing up of surrender terms for defeated Germany. London's well-informed Economist suspected that the Allies had failed to agree on a joint policy for the German armistice. Sternly it warned them: "No policy for Germany means, in fact, no policy for peace." For unconditional surrender is less a policy than a slogan, and that only for war.

Last week there was hope that the London conferences had not stalled. Reports of the armistice terms began to filter out before the official announcement. The general outline of the terms, as they were reported:

P: All of Germany will be militarily occupied, Russians in the east, British in the north, U.S. in the south, maybe some French troops in the west. Germany will be governed by a joint commission of U.S., Britain, Russia.

P: Germany will be totally disarmed, its arms and plane factories removed or destroyed, its chemical industry and other heavy industries strictly controlled.

P: Domestic and foreign banking in Germany will be supervised. Loot taken from occupied countries will be recovered and returned. Germans will be forced to compensate expropriated Jews, other oppressed people in Germany "and the occupied countries.

P: Russia, but not the other Allies, will form Germans into labor battalions for repair work in the U.S.S.R.

P: There will be no money reparations. War criminals will be punished by methods not yet agreed upon, but vengeance will not be visited upon all Germans. The Allies will provide medicine, clothing, food and a big program of re-education for Nazi youth.

P: Austria will be separated from Germany, jointly occupied by U.S., British, Russian troops, jointly governed by an Allied commission until the people are able to go it alone.

P: How much territory should be taken from Germany still appeared uncertain.

Said the Economist, assuming that the latter would be the case: "Hard facts, not the morals of the case or the goodness or badness of the Germans, are the compelling reasons why, in a settlement with Germany, it is absolutely necessary to go the way of moderation. It is only the moderate that will be enforced--not now, but in the 15 or 20 years' time when the fat and lazy habits of peacetime have returned."

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