The Issue Is Adenauer

In less than three weeks, West Germany's 33 million voters will pass judgment on Konrad Adenauer, who for the last four years has presided over his country's economic resurgence and won his mistrusted nation a place in the councils of the West. Formally, West Germany will be voting for 484 Bundestag members. Actually, it will vote either to retain the dour old Chancellor or replace him with a Socialist. The betting was that he would win, but the spry, 77-year-old was taking no chances. On a 6,000-mile, month-long tour, he was delivering two or three speeches a day, carrying the brunt of the battle for his Christian Democratic Union Party and the government coalition.

He faced a second-string opposition. Since the death of Kurt Schumacher, the fanatic and brilliant orator, the powerful Social.Democratic Party is presided over by mild Erich Ollenhauer, a sort of chubby Clement Attlee in Lederhosen. The Socialists' principal attack on Adenauer's record: that not enough of West Germany's prosperity trickles down to the workers, that Adenauer's pro-American foreign policy prejudices the chance for a reunified Germany.

Coming up on the right as a new dark-horse party is the Nazi-tainted All-German Bloc of refugees (expected to poll 10% of the vote), which makes a big appeal to the rootless 11 million Germans who fled or were expelled from the East Zone and former German territories.

The great unknown is the size of the pro-Nazi vote, supposed to be a large proportion of the 7,000,000 eligibles who failed to ballot in '49 and of the ex-Nazis since enfranchised. With the election nearing, all parties talked a tough nationalistic line. Fortnight ago, several clumps of penny-ante Hitlers got together in something called the German Reich Party, and have blatantly put forward such candidates as Dr. Werner Naumann, former state secretary of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, recently arrested (and released) for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Bonn Republic and Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel, a onetime Luftwaffe ace now living in Argentina. Busy last week warding off the left, Konrad Adenauer threw a worried glance over his shoulder at such distressing signs on the right, warned his countrymen not to play with that kind of fire.

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