REARMING OF GERMANY

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27410, 24 July 1954, Page 7

REARMING OF GERMANY

Standstill For 10 Years Urged LONDON, July 22. Mr Aneurin Bevan and five other Labour Left Wing leaders have proposed a 10-year standstill on West German rearmament, and on the conclusion of a German Peace Treaty while ways are sought for unifying Germany. This plea was advanced in a pamphlet “It Need Not Happen. The Alternative to German Rearmament.” This sought to swing the Labour Party vote away from its present official support for immediate West German rearmament within the European Defence Community at the forthcoming Labour Party conference in September.

Urging that a fresh Four-Power conference on Germany should be called promptly, the pamphlet said: “We should try to find a way of unifying Germany which leaves the problem of Germany’s final status, and final frontiers, for later consideration.” One method of doing this, the pamphlet said, would be to leave the Russian and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation armies in Germany on the understanding that there should be no German army for 10 years. Another method would be withdraw the two occupation forces to the Rhone and the Oder-Neisse line, and to permit a small German police force.

“Unjust and Impracticable” The Bevan pamphlet rejects the unification of Germany at the price of neutralisation on the ground that this would be both unjust and impracticable. Mr Bevan and his co-authors, among them, Mr Richard Crossman, maintained that the failure of the Berlin Conference was no reason for failing to-call a new conference with a different agenda. They considered that in spite of powerful objections, the proposal made at Berlin by the Soviet Foreign Minister, Mr Molotov, for a European Security Pact, subsequently modified to include the United States, “now forms a basis for negotiations.” They stated that Labour should urge as an amendment to it a treaty guaranteeing the frontiers of a unified Germany against aggression either from the East or from the West, and imposing instant sanctions on any German effort to change these frontiers by force.

In criticism of plans to establish E.D.C., the pamphlet stated: “The European Defence Community in fact is not an alternative to a German national army, but merely the first step towards its creation.”

The official line of the Labour Party and Mr Attlee, supporting the principle of a rearmed Germany, was passed by narrow majorities by the party executive and by the Parliamentary Labour Party.