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Germany's Frontiers are discussed in "The Economist" (July 10). "In this war, the united Nations appear to have avoided one practice which was a severe embarrassment to the Allies of the last war - they have made no secret treaties embodying territorial promises ... What kind of peace do the United Nations want to make? There are only two feasible approaches to the ultimate problem. On the one hand, the United Nations may envisage a permanent assertion of force by themselves to keep the vanquished down - a policy that would impose upon the victors the material burden of maintaining huge armaments and armies of occupation for an indefinite period, the political burden of maintaining constant and permanent unity among themselves, never to be relaxed even for a year or two, and the moral burden of maintaining without lapse the conviction that a policy of inequality is right. The democratic peoples have, no doubt, learned a number of lessons in this war. But there is not the slightest sign that they have made the gigantic adjustments in their whole outlook on the world that this would require. The only policy that has a chance of permanent success is thus one which looks forward to some future date when Germany will once more be accepted as a free and equal member of the society of nations, no more addicted to aggression than others. The date at which this happy consummation is expected may be put a long way off, and much may be done in the meantime to restrain and re-educate the German people - always subject to the proviso that no programme is entered upon which does not stand a chance of being carried out by virtue of its duration or of the burdens it imposes on the resources and single-mindedness of the victors."

Discussing Polish demands "The Economist" writes: "On the Question of population, the policy entails one of three solutions: the handing over of a German minority, millions strong, to Polish rule; or the forcible expulsion of millions of Germans from land they have occupied for centuries; or massacre. ... The difficulties inherent in a

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severe and vindictive peace do not arise at the time it is made - dismemberment of Germany will be easy and, possibly, for the moment, the popular solution. The difficulty is that of maintaining such a peace years afterwards when the passions of war have died away among the victors, but are kept alive among the vanquished by their sense of outrage. Then the vengefulness of the settlement will be the Germans' best weapon against it. The British and the American peoples will lack that passionate conviction of rightness which will alone induce them to shoulder the burdens of enforcement. They will be weak and hesitant before an outraged and resurgent Germany. ... If the Poles could keep alive their sense of national unity through a century of total control and perpetual persecution, do they suppose that the Germans would do less? ... The Poles may, of course, be looking only to Russia for Great Power support. Yet the policy advocated is not compatible with Marshal Stalin's statement on Russia's attitude towards Germany nor with the general terms of the Atlantic Charter. Nor have the Poles a tradition of seeking Russian support ... In territories where the races are as intermixed as Eastern Europe it is tempting to solve the problem by wholesale transfers of population. Transfer has taken place on so vast a scale in the last few years that people are tending to forget what a ghastly and inhuman process it is. The analogy of the Greco-Turkish exchange of population is often used to justify mass deportations. It was a political success; but it involved massive human misery. And, in any case, it is no precedent for what is proposed in respect of East Prussia. The Greco-Turkish exchange was a genuine exchange; it was administered internationally; it took over a decade to accomplish; it was liberally conceived and supported by an international loan. If transfers of population are to be used to "clean up" Germany's frontiers after this war, the conditions must approach those under which the Greco-Turkish exchange took place. For example, it might be possible to exchange the eastern part of East Prussia against the Polish Corridor - but the chances of Poland even considering this are negligible. Such exchanges should be as limited as possible, and as well financed as possible and undertaken over a period of years. Above all, they should come into consideration only in the last resort; and there should be no forcible removal of people - Pole or German - who are prepared

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genuinely to accept the authority which will afterwards govern their land. Unless a large measure of national self-determination is incorporated in the settlement and policies incompatible with it are accepted only for exceptional reasons in very exceptional cases, then there is little chance of a settlement that the peoples of the West will ultimately fight to maintain. And their willingness to fight to maintain the peace is the real condition of security. ... The trouble about the Versailles treaty, and the League system which it established, was not so much the terms of the settlement as the lack of will among the victors to enforce it ... The plea for a just peace is not part of any desire to "let the Germans off". It is based on the knowledge that since no settlement based on repression of Germany will last without force behind it, only a "lenient" peace has any chance of enduring ..."

Communists' views before the Labour Party Conference:
D. N. Pritt, K. C., M. P., wrote in the "DAILY WORKER" (June 10): "What are we to do with the Germans? ... we must make sure that we not only win the war and destroy the Hitlerite State, but also eradicate Fascism so thoroughly that it can't raise its head again - anywhere. To secure this, it is not enough to win the war, however complete the military victory; we must go on to make the right kind of peace. ... the great masses of Germans who today acquiesce in the Hitler regime and its crimes. For this they cannot be absolved, and their late repentances will be suspect; but they will be there after the war - millions of men of whom ten years ago a large proportion were trade unionists and voted Socialist or Communist - and we must have a policy to deal with them ... it would be impracticable to attempt to make a slave state of Germany; and it would be a mere counsel of despair to write off these masses of Germans but rather permanently unite them to help in building up a new and progressive Germany ... Nor can we seek to dilute or neutralize them by dismemberment ... this means dividing the German nation up into a number of relatively small and weak states controlled by reactionary governments ... Such a course offers no hope of peace or of progress, or of working-class unity. Germany cannot be destroyed; and the only hope for us, or for it, is to ensure that it has the fullest chance to make of itself a progressive State with no vestige of Fascism left in it ... The Labour Party Conference agenda

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does, however, reflect two dangerous errors: some organisations have embraced the view that there is no German problem at all, while others have sunk into the belief that the causes of war are solely the evil characteristics of the Germans. The first belief is typical of the Liberal-pacifist trend within the Labour movement ... The second regards the German as an unchangeable natural character ... "Vansittartism" would encourage racial hatred and racialism, and diminish the blame that lies at the door of Fascism; for it would suggest that the causes of the war lay in the racial characteristics of Germans (and, I suppose, of Italians and Japanese) and not in economic evils in general and Fascism in particular. It would treat the war as if it were merely a matter of races and frontiers ... More serious still, such a policy would dishearten and weaken the small but well-organised and growing leftwing movement that has never given up working underground in Germany with unending heroism - the very moment which we ought to be doing everything to build up and reinforce as a weapon both for the destruction of Hitler now and later for the reshaping of the world in cooperation with ourselves and our great Soviet Allies."

After the LP Conference the "DAILY WORKER" (July 3) attacked in a leader the Amendment moved at the Conference by Mr. Evans[1]: "... The problem cannot be construed in terms of measurements of 'guilt' ... might place the German people under exploitation and tutelage precisely of those outside by business interests in other countries which backed up Hitler and helped fit him out for war. It would make inevitable the diversion of new generations of Germans into wars of revenge ... if we do not collaborate with and aid all democratic tendencies among the Germans, however weak these may be today, we not only delay the unconditional surrender, we make certain the failure of the peace."

(In our next Survey we shall quote some
different views of Communists in Moscow)

Supplement to
"Sozialistische Mitteilungen" (No. 52)
- News for German Socialists in England -
33, Fernside Avenue, London NW7.

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