The Red Red Carpet

A tall, gaunt man in a wide-brimmed hat, accompanied by his Russian-speaking daughter, climbed aboard a Soviet DC-3 in East Berlin one day last week and was whisked off to Moscow. There the Russians rolled out the Red carpet for their guest : 60-year-old Pastor Martin Niemoller, head of the German Evangelical Church in Hesse, World War I U-boat captain, onetime Hitler follower and then for eight years Hitler's personal prisoner. Niemoeller's mission to Moscow was clothed in strictly clerical garb. He simply wanted, he said, to confer with leaders of Russia's Orthodox Church "on matters of relations with Christians in Russia."

But Pastor Niemoeller had already said enough to give the trip sharp political significance. For nearly three years, he has been speaking contemptuously of West Germany's Bonn government ("It was conceived in the Vatican and born in Washington") and using platform and pulpit to oppose West German rearmament and integration with the West. It was no surprise that the Kremlin had seen fit to invite him to Russia--the first top figure in West Germany so honored since war's end.

What was surprising was the reaction it set off in West Germany, where Pastor Niemoeller's odd convictions are usually rebutted gingerly because of his prestige. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was, not unexpectedly, angry. "I deeply regret," he said, "that a German national in the position of ... Niemoeller has chosen this moment to stab his government in the back." Protests exploded from other places. Said a spokesman for the Social Democrats, the fiercest opponents of German rearmament: "The pastor plays the Russian game." Snapped Welt der Arbeit, newspaper of the West German trade unions: "Niemoeller seems to labor under illusions that he can convert Stalin."

Mindful of the more than 80,000 German soldiers and 27,000 German civilians still in Soviet prison camps, the German Young Democrats advised the pastor: "Stay in Moscow. Your return is unwelcome before the last German prisoner has been released."

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