562.00/7–653
No. 201
The United States High Commissioner
for Germany (Conant) to the Secretary of
State1
personal
Dear Foster: This is a personal letter to give you my own appraisal of the situation here in Germany. It may be of interest to you as a supplement to our regular cables. You will notice the date and realize by the time this reaches you the situation may have altered for events are moving fast here in Germany. However, I hope that we are in a relatively quiet period and therefore this report by mail may not be wholly out of date when it reaches you.
The first point I should like to emphasize is the difficulty of assessing German opinion in the Federal Republic because of the party conflicts intensified by the coming elections. As I write, the election law providing the way the elections will be carried out has not yet been passed by the Bundestag. The Chancellor is definitely worried about the nature of this law. His opponents accuse him of wishing to insert in the law arbitrary provisions which will ensure the return of the coalition. The coalition itself seems to be split on [Page 479] the merits of various proposals involving the highly complicated problem of proportional representation.
These intense party feelings, which are being generated at this time, tend to obstruct the view of German political leaders about events in the East Zone. Certainly they make for lack of candor in the public statements. The Chancellor, for example, feels that he must publicly support the opposition’s view, at least in part. Hence his rather impulsive telegram of last Sunday to the President and the Prime Ministers of England and France.2 As you know, he does not in the least desire a 4-Power conference before the German elections. Indeed, nothing would be less helpful to him in the coming campaign and more helpful to the opposition. He does not favor even a discussion between the three High Commissioners and the new Soviet High Commissioner. He told me only yesterday that any friendly move between the French, British and Americans, on the one side, and the Russians, on the other, would be misconstrued by the German people as representing sympathy to the oppressors rather than the victims of what has been going on in the East Zone.
The opposition leaders, on the one hand, both publicly and privately, are pushing for conversations between the Allied High Commission and the new Soviet Commissar. Privately, a few weeks ago they were pushing for a 4-Power conference and were willing to suggest privately that Germany might make great concessions in the way of boundary conditions and even reparations if unification could be obtained at once. To what extent they believe in the reality of these ideas, which seem to be fantastic, I am not prepared to say.
Mayor Reuter’s judgment about the situation in Berlin is likewise affected by his ambitions as a leading personality of the opposition party. He, for example, told the Commandants that he desired an “all-Berlin election”. When I asked him, in private conversation, what he meant by this attractive slogan, he had to admit that until there were new arrangements made with the Russians the election of a Mayor and Senat for all of Berlin would be disastrous. For, on pushing my argument with him, he admitted readily that a Mayor and Senat acting for all Berlin would, under the old arrangements which are still in force in theory, have to be subjected to the veto power of a Russian member of a 4-Power Kommandatura. He then proposed that the Allied High Commission should negotiate with the Russians to establish arrangements in Berlin [Page 480] similar to those that exist in Vienna. But, as he had to admit, on pushing, this was a far more complicated, delicate and far-reaching proposal than the attractive slogan “all-Berlin elections.”
My analysis of German opinion today is that the most intelligent Germans are torn between their desire for re-unification and their realization that, barring miracles, the Russians are not going “to be talked out of” their Occupation status. The events in the East Zone have demonstrated to the whole world the failure of the Russian policy insofar as making converts of the working people is concerned.
What is not always realized in talking about the East Zone is the fact that some 10 percent of the population has already left. It is my estimate, based on talks with a number of people who should be good sources of information, that essentially all the middle and upper class families have left the Zone. Only the workers, the peasants and older retired people are left. This presents a rather special situation in Europe, therefore, and one which the Russians may well have thought was readily susceptible to their form of propaganda. Exactly the reverse seems to have been the case. Workers seem to have rejected the Communistic leadership partly for political reasons but largely, I believe, for economic reasons. The situation in regard to food in the East Zone seems to have been much worse even than some of us, who were pessimistic about the situation, had imagined.
Whatever may have been the cause, it is important to know that the workers in their demonstrations pulled down the Red flag of the SPD and seemed to be almost as hostile to the Socialistic Party as to the Communistic leaders. Workers in Germany in this mood could well be supporters of a powerful right-wing reactionary movement. I believe there is a danger here which must not be underrated, though it cannot be publicly discussed.
One of the questions which may be settled before this letter reaches you is whether or not the Russians can establish a new puppet government in the East Zone. If they cannot and continue to rely on the old regime they will in essence be controlling the affairs of the East Zone themselves. I assume, of course, that martial law will be lifted before long and that they will restore conditions in Berlin to the situation that existed two weeks ago, though even this is not certain. It may be they will decide to try to bargain with us about the Berlin situation, since they have been forced to accomplish what they have long threatened to do, that is, to cut Berlin in half. It would be my judgment, as of today, that we should be very loathe to enter into any talks with the new Russian High Commissioner, Semenov, except on a bilateral basis, that is, between each one of the High Commissioners and Semenov himself. I should [Page 481] think that any offer on his part to meet with the three Allied High Commissioners should be carefully explored before we agree and one of the conditions should be a restoration of conditions in the entire East Zone to what they were on the 1st of June. A further condition, in my mind, should be a specialized agenda and above all it should be made plain that we are not in any sense re-establishing the old 4-Power Control Council. Of course, even the mention of such a possibility as the re-establishment of the 4-Power Control Council terrifies all Germans. You will have seen by our cables that there is a difference of opinion in my staff as to the extent of the pressures in the coalition parties for 4-Power talks at any level. Hallstein, Blankenhorn, Lenz, at my house today, seemed to express almost the opinion of the Chancellor. But one cannot be sure whether they were merely echoing what they knew to be his private thoughts, as shown to me, or whether they sincerely believed in his secret position.
Until the Chancellor himself, as a judge of the political situation here should pass the word to us that he believed negotiations with the Russians should be undertaken, I would be very sure of going very slowly in the direction of a meeting of the Allied High Commission and the Russian High Commissioner on any 4-Power talks about the state of Germany. Even if the Allied occupying powers are blamed for procrastination in going forward with the negotiations, I believe we should be well advised to hold the present line until after the German elections. Sir Winston Churchill’s recent reply3 to the Chancellor’s telegram seems to give us a clear line of defense: namely, we again offer the Russians, as we did in our last note,4 the opportunity for free all-German elections provided they meet the terms we then specified. I do not believe that they can possibly meet these terms when we start to spell out the details of what they must involve.
I hope these somewhat rambling comments of a complicated and rapidly moving situation may be of some value to you.
With all good wishes,
Sincerely,
- The source text was attached to a reply from Dulles, dated July 6, which stated that it was being shown to Merchant and Riddleberger and that, in general, the Secretary of State agreed with everything that the High Commissioner said.↩
- For text of Chancellor Adenauer’s message to President Eisenhower, see Document 715. For text of his letters to Mayer and Churchill, see Papers and Documents, pp. 119–120.↩
- For Churchill’s reply, June 24, see Papers and Documents, pp. 120–121.↩
- For the tripartite note of Sept. 23, 1952, see Document 138.↩