Propaganda Boomerang

Chancellor Adenauer was out of town when the message came through: the East German parliament wanted to send a delegation to Bonn to discuss "peace and unity." Bundestag President Hermann Ehlers tried to phone Adenauer, but could not reach him. On his own, Ehlers sent back word that the East German delegation could come on over.

When Adenauer heard about it, he was hopping mad. Even the West German Socialists, who have long been demanding unification, said that the delegation's visit was just another Communist propaganda plot. But Ehlers' "mistake" turned out just fine for the West. West Germany's people were not for a minute duped by the Red delegation.

Last week a Polish DC-3 set the five East German peace-and-unity boys down at Duesseldorf and three Russian-made Zims, led by two green police cars, took them on to Bonn. Crossing the big Rhine bridge at Bonn, the delegates were greeted by posters calling them "Schweinehunde!" and demanding "Out with Stalin's messenger boys!" In front of the Bundeshaus (parliament building), crowds pushed around the East Germans, shouting "Murderers!" "Go home!" A car with a huge loudspeaker followed the visitors, bellowing epithets.

President Ehlers listened to the delegates for 21 minutes, reported that they had "nothing new, absolutely nothing.'' On their way to lunch with the foreign press, the East Germans were showered with leaflets calling for an end to East German concentration camps and the release of Walter Linse, the West German anti-Communist who was kidnaped in Berlin last July. At the lunch Otto Nuschke, vice premier of East Germany, produced his packaged propaganda: "Serious anxiety for our homeland has driven us here . . . Our German fatherland is being integrated into [the Western] military system." Then the East Germans made three clumsy admissions:

P: They can do nothing about freeing Linse, because the supposedly sovereign East German government has no control whatever over the East Zone's Russian-run secret police.

P: Germany, once "united" according to their proposals, will have to continue paying reparations to Russia for twelve years.

P: They had come to Bonn to try to interfere in West German legislation, i.e., prevent the ratification of the Bonn regime's peace and defense treaty with the West.

If they had tried to show the West Germans that Communist-sponsored "unity" could mean only tyranny for all Germans, the delegates could scarcely have done better.

Dodging a rain of tomatoes, the delegates got into their Zims, headed down the Autobahn and back to East Germany. The loudspeaker called after them: "Go home! We can build our own house."

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