The Long Road

Four weeks after V-E day, General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower and Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery had finally headed for Berlin. There they would sit down with Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov, their opposite number from the Red Army, and open the long delayed first meeting of the Allied Control Commission.

These men would soon prove whether the wartime Allies could ally themselves in a concerted policy for governing Germany. Perhaps the military men, with their great sense of the practical and possible, might succeed where political minds so far had failed.

One-Way Traffic. Before the Commission's members could proceed with the job at hand, each would have to know what was going on in the others' zones of occupation. At the administration level there had been no secrets between the Americans and British. Both were still operating under SHAEF, in which British and U.S. officers were intermixed. And SHAEF had dutifully informed Russia of its policies and practices. There the exchange of information had stopped. The Russians had drawn a cloak of secrecy around their zone in eastern Germany.

The longer the secrecy continued, the more alarming became the reported explanations for it. Among the new ones last week:

P:Republican Senator Owen Brewster, speaking from hearsay after a tour of western Europe, said that Germany's professional and bourgeois crust was being liquidated in the Russian zone.

P: In addition to the movement of Poles westward into Germany, which the Western Allies had sanctioned, large blocks of the German population were being driven eastward to Russia. The Lublin radio broadcast that 7,500,000 Poles were to be moved into Poland's area of the old "eastern Germany."

P:The Big Three were playing a waiting game, watching the others' tactics and mistakes.

Everyone Makes Mistakes. Regardless of the truth of these reports, Russia undoubtedly had problems in Germany that she wished to settle in her own way before exposing her territory to the other Allies. She was going about it with the singlemindedness of a housewife preparing for guests.

Russian radio and press reports had at first told a story of tranquility and machinelike precision in Russian-occupied Germany--of more food, of mutual tolerance, if not outright friendship, between conqueror and conquered. Then there was a change in tone. The Berlin mayor broadcast a warning to his citizens that "continued" attacks on Red Army troops would bring stiff reprisals: 50 former Nazis would be killed for each incident.

Ardent Nazis sometimes popped up in high places. Clemens Krauss, whom the Russians brought to Vienna to conduct symphony concerts, was strongly pro-Nazi. The black, white & red flags which German civilians were allowed to fly in Russian Germany were the emblem, not of the Weimar republic, but of old imperial Germany. These may have been mistakes; they may have been planned policy.

End of the Beginning. The Russians had no monopoly on trouble. In the British and U.S. zones, policy differed from district to district, and in some areas military government teams changed almost as often as the weather (TIME, June 4). Harsh observance of the non-fraternization rule was robbing the Anglo-American forces of the cooperation of sincere anti-Nazis, while the necessity of employing existing staffs for administration kept many a Nazi in power.

Many of the flaws could not be corrected unless a common policy was adopted by the Control Commission. Meanwhile the mistakes of the first phase of Army government were bound to affect the next phase: Commission government.

Open for Business. Presumably the first item of business for the Control Commission would be to devise ground rules for its own operation, including the choice of a headquarters, if ruined Berlin proved unsuitable or inhospitable.

The Commission's function was to coordinate individual policies of the occupying powers in these and other matters. But, practical-minded as the Commission members might be, it would be difficult to coordinate the policies until they had been mutually disclosed.

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