THE NATIONS: The Saar Again

THE NATIONS The Saar Again Five times in the last 150 years the Saar Valley has shifted back & forth between France and Germany. Hitler's first international triumph was the 1935 plebiscite in which 90% of Saarlanders voted to go to Germany. After World War II French troops moved into the Saar, left no doubt that France planned to take over its rich mines and its mills, to have & to hold.

Two months ago loud caterwauling over the Saar arose on both sides of the Rhine: the French were reported ready to take formal, long-term control of the Saar mines. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson quieted the uproar with what seemed to be a confident announcement. The Saar question could not be settled by France alone, it had to wait on an allied peace treaty with Germany.

"How in the World?" Last week Germans were aroused and enraged by a report that France had signed with the French-run Saar government a so-year lease of the Saar coal mines. German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer asked French High Commissioner Andre Frangois-Poncet for a copy of the agreement. François-Poncet obliged. Later Adenauer called the French officials for "clarification" of some points in the document. François-Poncet obliged again.

Then Adenauer, echoed by most West German leaders, issued statements of bitter protest. Their position: before the war, the Saar mines were the property of the German government; the Allies turned over former Reich property to Adenauer's Bonn government; nobody else may legally lease them. On this basis, Adenauer expressed sharp disappointment with the Western powers. The Saar deal, he said, made it impossible for West German representatives to attend the proposed Council of Europe meetings in Strasbourg.

The German Communist press screamed out against the "rape of the Saar." Adenauer showed that he was not immune to the powerful German temptation to play East and West against each other. Said he: "When things like this happen in the West, how in the world can one say anything against Poland because of the Oder-Neisse line?"-

Adenauer's case was somewhat strengthened by the fact that U.S. high officials in Germany had no advance knowledge of last week's French action. Cried one: "Now the fat is really in the fire."

Washington, however, stayed calm. It pointed to a clause in the Franco-Saar accord which said the whole deal could be changed by an Allied peace treaty with Germany. Everybody knew that France was going to get the Saar, but there was general regret that the French had warmed the embers of German nationalism by taking it in the most tactless possible manner.

"The Only Heir." The sober Frankfurter Rundschau listed contradictions in the German and French positions. Then it said: "The statesmen of Europe seem to have reached the end of their wisdom—or of their courage. Don't they see that they cannot continue this policy of thoughtlessness, that it must inevitably end in social chaos, and that the only heir of such a state is Stalin?"