Potsdam Product

Leipzig's great railway station was smashed and burned in the bombings, but its charred walls were hung last week with red bunting, evergreen boughs and Socialist slogans. Tens of thousands of Germans, transported on 95 special trains, poured through it to Leipzig's first fair since 1941. Other Germans came, as visitors to the Leipzig Fair had come 700 years ago, by horse & wagon and a foot.

The 2,750 exhibitors (2,500 of them from other parts of the Russian 20ne of Germany) had little to show, less to sell for immediate delivery. But most of them were loudly sure that they would be able to produce much more if the occupying powers would administer Germany as a single entity, instead of continuing the tightly compartmented four-nation zones. Significantly, exhibitors and visitors got the impression that it was the Western powers, not the Russians, who blocked German unification. This, and many other triumphs of Russian "reeducation" of Germans, prompted an old German farmer to remark: "Ach, this is no real fair--it's just another propaganda show."

Nevertheless, the fair was a symbol of reviving economic life in the Russian zone which had outstripped the zones held by the democratic powers.

Downward Spiral. The Potsdam agreement had provided that Germany be administered as an economic whole. But even at that time the Russians were running their zone along lines the Western powers could not accept. Rather than face up to the tough problem of coordinated administration, the U.S. and Britain half welcomed French obstructionism, which made unification impossible.

Now that procrastination was bearing a bitter fruit. Germans in the Russian zone were eating 1,600 calories a day, in the U.S. zone, 1,275, m the British zone, 1,000. Much of the machinery left by Russian reparations grabbers was humming.

The occupation of Germany was costing U.S. taxpayers $1 billion a year and British taxpayers $300 million. There was no prospect of reducing that burden unless the British and Americans found a way of putting Germans to work. In the western zones, production was in a slow downward spiral which might become a rapid decline within six months. Some figures from the British-administered Ruhr told the story. On March 3 the average miner there was producing 2.76 tons of coal a day. On March 4, the British cut his rations by 15.5%. The miner's productivity dropped on March 10 to 2.55 tons a day.

Much of the Ruhr's food used to come from eastern Germany, now in the Russian zone. The British will not get industrial production on the upswing until there is either 1) real economic cooperation between the zones, or 2) acceptance of the split, followed by a positive U.S., British and French policy for getting their part of Germany going. The present level of German production was so low (and so likely to drop further) that not even the most vindictive Morgenthau-er could reasonably object to emergency recovery measures.

Longest Shadow. Nevertheless some officials continued to argue whether it was more important to keep Germany down or let Germany up. To allay the fears of the keep-Germany-down school, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes had offered his 25-year Big Four treaty to enforce German disarmament. That Russia had cold-shouldered this offer indicated that Moscow was not really so much worried about a revived German threat as it was intent on continuing its successful unilateral policy in western Germany.

The fission of Germany would divide Europe--a prospect which overshadowed all the agreements and disagreements discussed around the Foreign Ministers' Council table in Paris. Germany was not on the Foreign Ministers' agenda, but Secretary Byrnes dropped hints last week that the U.S. might move to merge the three western zones of Germany if the Russians did not cooperate. There were signs that Britain's Bevin and even France's Bidault would go along with such a plan.

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