Getting Warmer?

"It has a much warmer sound," said Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, speaking of the Big Three communique on Germany. But it did not have a very decisive sound. Its most important note was a flat announcement that the Big Three would consider any attack on Western Germany or on Berlin as an attack on themselves. This had in fact been Western policy for two years, but the black-on-white announcement heartened West Germany.

The communique was vague on the most fateful problem that had been before the Foreign Ministers in New York: the U.S. proposal to incorporate German units in a Western army. After further talks last week, in which Defense Secretary General George Marshall, British Defense Minister Emanuel Shinwell and French Defense Minister Jules Moch took part, the three Foreign Ministers' conclusions will be submitted this week to the full North Atlantic Council.

The Foreign Ministers gave the West Germans little that had not been already promised them: a legal end, soon, to the state of war with Germany; a Foreign Office of their own; a higher rate of steel production; a larger police force (40,000 men), but still lightly armed and most of it not under direct federal control, as the Germans had asked.

The Communists last week stepped up their creeping war of nerves in Berlin. Communists demonstrated in West Berlin against a Western order prohibiting pamphlets that spread anti-democratic ideas or were likely to cause unrest. West Berlin police quelled the demonstrators. Then the Americans arrested six armed Red policemen who had strayed into the U.S. sector; in retaliation, the Russians arrested 23 Western policemen who were going home on the subway through the Red sector. In retaliation for that, 51 Eastern railway policemen were arrested in the Western sectors. Two days later, in an impressive ceremony near the Brandenburg gate, Eastern prisoners were solemnly exchanged for Western prisoners.

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