Double Bluff

In the champagne-flavored, poker-table good fellowship of midwar, the problem of postwar Germany did not seem to confound Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Over after-dinner liqueurs one night at Teheran they jauntily planned the Reich's future. "The world must be made safe for at least 50 years," remarked Churchill. "There will have to be certain measures of control. I would forbid them all aviation, civil and military, and I would forbid the General Staff system."

"Would you," asked Stalin, "also forbid the existence of watchmakers and furniture factories for making parts of shells? The Germans produced toy rifles which were used for teaching hundreds of thousands of men how to shoot . . . There was control after the last war, but it failed."

"This time," said Churchill, "it will be different."

Now eight years after Teheran, developments in Germany were showing how different it had become-different in a way Churchill had not meant. All thought of barring Germany from the club for 50, 25 or even 10 years had disappeared; the big players were stumbling all over each other to offer Germany chips and a seat.

The Communists started it by proposing to reunite East and West Germany (TIME, Oct. 8). They hoped to disrupt rearmament, and candidly said so. "You don't have to be a Columbus to make that discovery," said. Red Propagandist Gerhart Eisler.

Recognizing the appeal to Germans of a united Germany, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer agreed to talk it over-but his terms were uncompromising. First, there should be a United Nations investigation to determine whether free elections are possible. Second, elections should be carried out under 14 tough conditions. Examples: free ballots cast in secret and counted in public, strict U.N. supervision of polling, free campaigning and press coverage.

The three Western powers backed Adenauer up. Last week they decided to seek the U.N. investigators at the U.N. General Assembly meeting which opens in Paris on Nov. 6. In doing so, the West is taking a big risk, for it knows that a unified Germany would likely be a neutral Germany. That would delay the West's attempt to bring West Germany, with her manpower and industry, into the defense of Western Europe. But the three powers hope and believe that they are calling an even bigger bluff: that Russia, knowing it would lose in any free election, doesn't really want a unified Germany.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.