Hands Across the Rhine

Europe's moneymen, like its governments, have seldom been respecters of international frontiers. Some of the wealthiest shook hands across the Rhine last week in an $1 8 million deal that gave control of one of the Ruhr's biggest coal combines to France's biggest steelmaker.

Millionaire Friedrich Flick, onetime financier of the SS, is a German coal baron whom the allies jailed (1945-50) for using slave labor in his farflung mines. Two-thirds of Flick's holdings were grabbed by the Communist government of Eastern Germany; the rest were ordered broken up by U.S. and British trustbusters. Flick agreed to sell his majority (60%) interest in the Harpener Bergbau, and looked around for a German customer. He found none: German businessmen, strapped for cash, need all their ready capital to build new factories.

Flick turned to France and quickly landed a buyer: the giant De Wendel steel company, which has, in the past, built French (and German) cannon. Unable to feed their blast furnaces with scarce and low-quality French coke, De Wendel and eight associates needed a more reliable "coal-base" for their steel mills. They bought out Flick, thereby making sure of 5,500,000 tons of Ruhr coal a year, about 5% of West Germany's total output.

By meshing French steel with German coal supplies, the Flick-De Wendel deal seems, at first blush, to hasten the pooling of Western Europe's heavy industry, which is the object of the Schuman Plan. Already, however, there are fears that it may create an international version of the old Flick cartel that the Allies had undone and Schuman Plan authority has promised not to reestablish.

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