Status Quo Approved

The tiny Saar, a miniature (1,000 sq. mi.) Ruhr populated by Germans but ruled by functionaries of France, last week freely chose to stay as it is: an "autonomous" bailiwick attached to France.

Election day was cold and drizzly in the Saar's smoky coal hills, but no sooner had its coal miners, steelworkers and farmers gone to morning Mass than 93% of them began to flock to the polling booths. Ostensibly, they had only to decide whether Premier Johannes ("Joho") Hoffmann's Christian People's Party or one of the opposition parties would control the 50-man Landtag. Actually, they were being asked to choose between 1) France's plan to "Europeanize" the Saar by making it an independent but pro-French unit within the Schuman Plan's European coal and steel pool and 2) Germany's wish to reincorporate the Saar in the fatherland, from which it was parted in 1947.

Pro-German parties, legally barred from the polls, yammered against French "colonialism," urging the Saarlanders to stay away from the polls or cast blank ballots as a mark of German solidarity. Low-circling planes showered Saarbruecken with German leaflets; startled Saarlanders were assured that they are the victims of a "reign of terror." The Catholic bishop of Trier, whose diocese covers most of the Saar, advised Saarlanders that they had no Christian obligation to vote in an election that would separate them from "the German fatherland."

But most Saarlanders, prosperous beyond their wildest dreams of five years ago, let their stomachs--and memories--decide. In 1935, after voting--90%--to rejoin the Reich, the Saarlanders heard Adolf Hitler promise: "In ten years' time, you won't know your city of Saarbruecken." Hitler was right: by 1945 the entire Saar basin was a heap of smoldering ruins.

When the votes were counted, 430,000 Saarlanders had cast valid ballots--all, except the Communists' 40,000, in favor of the pro-French parties. There were 140,000 presumably pro-German blank ballots (24% of the total)--just enough to worry the French, but nowhere near enough for the Germans to claim a decisive protest against the Francophile regime. Saarlanders had given German nationalism a sharp rebuff.

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