Main LA Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 23, 5 June 1905, p. 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
This is the third installment of a series, based on a remarkable document prepared by an investigator for Congresswoman Katherine St. George. This report was first mimeographed for confidential or semi-confidential circulation in Washington. It is dated July 1949. We present it today as a vivid picture of the background of Allied policy in Germany. As in the case of the first installment, the following consists of verbatim excerpts from the investigator’s report. The series will be concluded next week with an article on the political meaning of the dismantling program.
To understand the minds of the workers who will lose their jobs, one must first consider the belief which virtually the whole of Germany shares today, that the prime motive behind the planned destruction of German capacity was the desire of France and Britain, particularly of Britain, to eliminate forever from the world market their one-time greatest trade competitor – Germany. To the German worker this motive is so patent that even the Social-Democrats, who have clung so hopefully to the belief that a “Labor Government” must be their friend, now speak openly to me of the “imperialistic drive” of Bevin.
Certain sources of information are available to me which I have not yet been able to follow up, but it seems worth while for me to collect a small dossier on the business-interest background of some of these men who determined the original selection of German plants for dismantling. Where these business interests appear to have been decisive, it seems high time that the American people who are underwriting a recovery program for Western Europe should have a clear view of both faces of the double-headed hydra.
Dismantling to eliminate German competition? Evidence which I have been able to collect in the past two weeks indicates that since April 13 “dismantling” has more and more boldly taken the form of outright “scrapping” of plants. In British Military Government circles here the subterfuge is apparently rapidly being abandoned that the dismantlings apply only to. war plants or to the elimination of excess capacity. Since the Washington agreement, several incautious statements have been made by RD&R (Reparations, Dismantling and Restitutions Division) officials in the British Zone to the effect that the dismantlings will have a salutary effect for Great Britain, through elimination of the most dangerous of their German competitors.
The most violent statements to this effect were reported to me by the American writer, Christopher Emmet, who had a long conference two weeks ago in London with Whittam, chief of the British Zone RD&R Division. The whole tone of Whittam6rsquo;s fuimination was a gloating over British successes at Washington at the expense of the Germans, and a categorical damning of every German businessman and politician as a congenital liar.
To understand Bevin’s stand on the dismantlings, it is of particular interest to note that his chief adviser on German steel affairs has been Dr. Colclough, who comes from the British Iron and Steel Federation.
Colclough was consulting engineer in London for the firm of Corby, a subsidiary of Steward & Lloyds, tube manufacturers. He was particularly interested in getting the German tube mills put on the dismantling list. Also his loyalties to the British Iron and Steel Federation apparently prompted an interest in eliminating competition from the Germans in other fields.
Last autumn, Colclough observed to George Wolf, of the Wolf Steel Investigation Mission (in a conversation which Wolf repeated later to George Loesch, managing director of the Deutsche Edelstahlwerke A.G., Germany’s leading producer of fine steel): “I consider it a matter of personal honor to be able to report back to the Federation that I have destroyed the Deutsche Edelstahlwerke, the brains of the German fine steel industry.” I have not yet had an opportunity to check this statement with Mr. Wolf, but it could be easily done by someone in America.
If should also be mentioned that another leading protagonist of the four-year-old fight to eliminate key German steel plants was the British officer, Dawson, who was a member of the steel committee determining which plants should be placed on the dismantling list. Dawson has been an engineer with the British construction firm of Brassert’s, whihc built the Hermann Goering Steel Works at Salzgitter during the Hitler period. During the war, so the story goes, he was a bombardier who tried, unsuccessfully, to bomb the same works and what he couldn’t accomplish through bombing he succeeded in accomplishing via the dismantling list.
It should be particularly noted that Dawson, whom the Germans and Americans both call the “British Morgenthau,” has now reputedly got himself appointed to the newly constructed Allied Security Board, a key board, which will determine which German applicants will receive permits to rebuild or to enlarge their plants. The personnel of this board should be studied with the most careful scrutiny.
As another instance of competitive interest which appears to have motivated British policy regarding the German dismantlings, I cite the fate of the two Bergius process hydrogenation plants at Wesseling and Gelsenberg. Although both plants were placed on the “Forbidden Industry” list, the Wesseling plant is now to continue in operation, while the Gelsenberg plant is to be dismantled. The Wesseling plant carries out crude-oil treatment on the base of contracts of treatment with the German Shell Company (subsidiary company of the British-Dutch Shell concern, which, in turn, is part-owned by the British government). The Gelsenberg gasoline plant signed similar agreements with the German Vacuum Oil Company and the German-American Petroleum Company (subsidiary company of the two big American oil concerns, Socony Vacuum Oil Inc., New York, and Standard Oil Company of New Jersey).
It appears that if strictly national interests were at stake, the British were better represented in this case than the Americans. Perhaps this is because the chief of the petroleum section of OMGUS, in the days when the forbidden industries category was being set up, was a man whom Dr. Albert Newman, past president of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and first chief of the chemical industry section of OMGUS, described as “a man whose background for the job was filling station experience in the United States.” ...
If seems to me thaz one has to have a background of knowledge of such pressures to be able to understand how Bevin, theoretically at least a representative of the working class, could have been so insulated against the appeals of the German socialists and trade-union leaders, not to mention all of the leading churches of the Ruhr, that he would not reconsider the Ruhr dismantlings in the light of the unprecedented distress being caused to the German working people ...
As for German labor sentiment, the German trade-union movement, which in past months has maintained trust in the friendship of the British Labor Party, has reached such a state of disillusionment and hostility that leading socialists have told me here within the past few days that they do not consider the British Labor Party a socialist party at all. “They have no heart at all for their fellow German workers,” I was told the other day by a German who has been a socialist for more than thirty years. “Their hearts are as stony as the worst of the monopoly capitalists!” ...
One must first understand the extent of unemployment in Germany and the peculiar circumstances which make unemployment status here even more critical than in most places in the world. Unemployment in the Western Zone is now about 1.2 million, with the trend steadily going upward. Because of the extreme hardships of recent years, very few unemployed workers have any reserve of savings whatsoever to fall back upon. Neither can they count upon anything but the merest pittance of a dole, for the German government is already on the verge of bankruptcy.
Even an employed worker finds the going very tough ... However, because the Deutsche Edelstahlwerke plant was so long on the dismantling list, only recently having been released, the company has suffered from lack of orders due to uncertainty over its future, also because of the lack of government funds to place orders for greatly needed construction work on bridges, railroads, etc. As a result, the work week is now shortened, with correspondingly smaller pay. The short work week is now common in many steel plants throughout the Ruhr – only the workers engaged in dismantling being assured of steady pay and long hours.
The fact that it has been difficult, in spite of all hardships, to recruit Germans for the dismantling work is real testimony to their feeling of resentment, and especially of loyalty to what they consider the best interest of their fellow workers.
Against the low wages one must put high living costs which prevail throughout Germany today. Everything can be bought here now, it is true, but only if one has the money – a very large IF, which the casual tourist and roving reporter too often fail to note ...
For those who have been thrown out of work, the situation is really desperate. It is out of the question to talk about moving around the country in search of work; the housing situation is still a despair to everyone ...
Not only is the employment situation growing increasingly more critical in the Ruhr because of the dismantlings, but indirectly it is seriously affecting Berlin. Professor Ernst Reuter, lord mayor of Berlin, tells me that there are 175,000 unemployed in the West sector of Berlin today, or about 16 per cent of the total population able and willing to work. Unemployment has been increasing since the lifting of the blockade, in part because the new influx of black market goods into Berlin cuts down on orders from Berlin firms ... But as has already been pointed out, the dismantlings continue to add to the already swelling unemployment rolls. There is less and less work for the old-time employee, and nothing for the newcomer.
I believe that the emotions of the people here in the Ruhr are rapidly approaching the boiling point, and an explosion may be near. One must consider what goes on in the mind of a worker in Bochum, for instance, where both the Bochumer Verein, which is capable of employing 12,000 workers, and the Hochfrequenz-Tiegelstahi works, which employ 700, are slated for dismantlement. The welfare of at least 50,000 persons – workers and their families – one-sixth of the population of Bochum, is at stake.
Bochum has been bombed until it resembles some gray ruins out of a prehistoric age. The store windows are starkly bare. Faces have the rigid preoccupation of people to whom the struggle to survive is still an all-absorbing effort. What goes on in the mind of a man moving day after day among these ruins, seeing the factory which has given him, and perhaps his father, livelihood for decades, being SCRAPPED in the midst of a Europe crying for steel?
To get to the Henrichshuette steel works, a single main thoroughfare winds through the cliff-bound city of Wuppertal. My German chauffeur, Ramspot, told me of the horrible inferno this city went through during the war ... It is incredible that men and women who have lived through such hells remain normal, human and rational. Yet they, like millions of other Germans, have grimly struggled back to whatever narrow basis of decent life they could find.
They have rebuilt their homes with their own hands. They have scrounged day after day during the starvation years following the war for whatever bits of food they could find for themselves and their families. They have given eloquent testimony to the indomitable will to survive that seems to live in each human being. But now, when a little peace is in sight, the loss of work, the shoving back into the abyss, must seem to many of them like the final unendurable blow.
If no explosion comes from such men as these, the ultimate results may be even worse for the democracies. The Russians are making tremendous capital out of the present situation. There is even more danger, perhaps, that these emotions be siphoned off into support of the Communists, than that they find an outlet in unpolitical organized resistance.
The worker in the Ruhr steel plant – the kind of man I have been talking with every day – is a decent, stable kind of man ... They were not the breeding ground for Nazism. Less than 10 per cent of the steel workers, at Deutsche Edelstahlwerke at Krefeld, for instance, were Nazis.
But their very pride in their work makes them into a hard core of rebellion now against all wantonly wasteful occupation policies. It is not surprising that in each plant the forgers whose work requires the strongest muscles and great skill, are now becoming the hardest to handle, the most revolutionary.
The Germans have no illusions about Communism – too many prisoners of war from Russian concentration camps, and too many refugees from the East Zone trickle through their cities and tell the damning stories of their experiences. But the explosion of a desperate man is usually in revolutionary ways. And the Communists have one effective ace in their hands – their appeal to the Germans to unify and restore their national self-respect ... In spite of the fact that in previous years the Communists exceeded all the other occupation powers in the quantity of dismantlings and so-called restitutions, the Soviets are now capitalizing vociferously on the dismantlings being carried out by the Western Powers. The West Zone Communist leader, Max Reimann, became a hero by resisting the dismantlings and being put in jail for three months ...
It is true that even more impelling is the common sense of rebellion which is welding all people of the Ruhr, workers, management, church leaders, together into a unified spirit of resistance. Following the announcement of the Washington Agreement, church services in both Catholic and Protestant churches were held throughout the Ruhr one Sunday. The common theme was: “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread!” On May the second, an extraordinary meeting of the City Council of the town of Duisburg was held, and a mass protest of the people of Duisburg against the dismantlings was drafted ...
The real voice of the man in the Ruhr is one of a human being possessed of basic self-respect. On numberless occasions I have seen in areas of plants where the dismantlings are going on, scrawled in large lettering on a wall of the room: “WE DON’T WANT ALMS. WE ONLY WANT A CHANCE TO EARN OUR DAILY BREAD!”
Heretofore, what we have won in Germany has been won all too often by the default of the Soviets. Now the situation seems about to reverse itself. In each of the factories which I have visited, I have noted on those sections of the plant where dismantling is going on, signs such as “HERE YOU SEE WESTERN DEMOCRACY IN ACTION!” ...
(Concluded next week)
Main LA Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 6 February 2024