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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 6. June 7, 1951
Business is Business
Business is Business
"It is my conviction that Germany can never be economically disarmed until the international monopolies, industrial trusts, and her external cartel arrangements are destroyed. A thorough-going programme to achieve this must be instituted immediately. And its execution should be entrusted only to officials who are interested in carrying out the Potsdam Agreement, and the political directives of their governments, rather than in preserving their old business connections and their own economic positions." (Nixon, quoted Burchett. p. 126.)
Nixon described to the Committee the connection between certain members of the U.S. occupation staff and American firms with German associations—Dillon Read and General Motors. But Nixon was a Roosevelt idealist—faced with stark facts about the American Way of Life, he was forced to resign.
The influence of American-German business connections began to disturb Britain. "What British exporters were now facing was no longer German competition pure and simple, but German-American competition. This partnership between German and American industrialists was to grow and strengthen as the months went by." (Davidson, pp. 223-224.)
But Burchett's impression of the Soviet zone was quite different. He describes the "Neusiedler" from the Polish border who have been rehabilitated happily on to the land. How few know that Barth, Brunner, Niemoller, Zweig and Mann have all gone east? "Waste and ruin"?
"They made poor raw material for the propaganda with which they were bombarded by the West German press, demanding that the lost lands be recovered and the 'expellees' returned to their old homes." (Burchett, p. 63.)
Who is trying to hoodwink whom ? Burchett describes how he saw the Allied Control Council deliberately broken up by the American delegation. He describes how, on an expedition to report on the functioning of the black market at the junction of East and West Berlin, he was arrested by the Russians on suspicion of being himself a black marketeer. When he returned home later, he found that the London dailies had him beaten up and near to death.
Here is the truth about Germany today, seen by objective and honest observers. Democracy or resurgent Hitlerism for the German people: that is the whole issue for Germany's present and future.
—Partisan.