The Evening Star (September 3, 1945)
Editorial: Germany’s future
Reports from Berlin indicate that the economic situation in Germany is rapidly moving to a point where it is going to be most painful for the German people. A “rip-roaring inflation” is said to be unavoidable, vast unemployment is expected, and certain unnamed British and American technical advisers to the Allied Control Council are quoted gloomily to the effect that the Potsdam economic principles, though “a short-range political necessity,” simply will not work as a long-term policy.
It is inevitable, of course, that the German people are going to suffer. That is the price they must pay for having followed their leaders in a war of aggression devastating to all of Europe. The medicine they once gave to their neighbors, they must now take themselves, and it would be dangerously sentimental to deplore that fact. This said, however, it must be added that the stability and peace of the world will not be served if conditions in Germany remain in a churned-up state indefinitely.
As set forth at the Potsdam Conference by Britain, Russia and the United States, the economic principles to govern Germany’s future may be summarized as follows: (1) The country’s war potential is to be permanently eliminated by industrial disarmament and demilitarization; (2) this is to be achieved, apart from appropriate political measures, by the removal, destruction or rigid control of heavy industries, such as aviation and steel; (3) German living standards are not to be permitted to exceed the average prevailing elsewhere in Europe, and (4) Allied policy will nevertheless permit the development of a national economy offering an opportunity to the people to work their way back to a reasonably prosperous existence as free, peace-loving citizens of the world.
The latter point is implemented by the Potsdam promise that machinery essential to Germany’s peacetime economy will not be removed as reparations; that the country will be permitted to export; that means will be provided to help it pay for imports, and that primary emphasis will be given not only to the development of its agriculture but to the development of its peaceful domestic industries as well. In other words, though very drastic, the Potsdam economic principles – as far as the words go, anyhow – do not mean that the Germans are to be reduced to a nation of small farmers.
It is somewhat confusing, therefore, to be told now that there are experts connected with the Allied Control Council who believe that this is what is being done and that the Potsdam policy, even though necessary at this time, is “a long-range economic absurdity.” This may be a gross exaggeration, and it is flatly contradicted by Edwin Pauley, American member of the Allied Reparations Commission, but if there is any truth in it, it ought to be carefully considered in terms of the long future. Germany must be prevented from ever again making war, and it must lose much of its productive capacity, but it cannot readily be converted into a farm land without inviting the risk of injuring the economy of Europe and thus clouding the prospect of a stable peace in the world.