No, No, No

"The war over Berlin will not take place," proclaimed West Berlin's Mayor Willy Brandt last week. Though conceding that "many critical moments" must be expected in 1959, Socialist Brandt based his confident forecast on three successive victories won in the last weeks of 1958: 1) West Berlin's municipal election, in which Communists got less than 2% of the vote; 2) West Germany's demonstration of solid economic support to the beleaguered city; and 3) the Western Allies' united stand against Khrushchev's proposal for their withdrawal.

The third and most decisive of these victories, foreshadowed at the recent NATO session in Paris, became official last week when the U.S., Britain and France, in different but "convergent" notes, rejected Khrushchev's proposals for all occupying nations to withdraw from a "free Berlin," which would then be isolated no miles inside the Iron Curtain. The obligation to protect the freedom of more than 2,000,000 West Berliners, the notes said, "is a right and responsibility solemnly accepted by the three Western powers." But, they added, if Khrushchev will abandon the "menace" of his six-month timetable, the three would be ready to discuss Berlin's status as part of a larger German settlement involving free elections and reunification.

It was the British, hitherto the politest, who delivered the sharpest retort to the insulting distortions of history implicit in Khrushchev's Berlin note. With tongue in cheek, the British wondered why, among other historical documents, the Russians did not mention the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which "made the outbreak of war inevitable," called Munich a lesson in appeasement to heed in Berlin now, and cuttingly recalled that because the Soviet Union had failed to honor the freedom of religion, press, speech and voting promised in the 1945 Potsdam agreement, "some 2,000,000 Germans have left East Germany rather than endure any longer the social system which exists there.''

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