Word: rearmaments
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...bitter, contentious week before Der Tag (Feb. 24), the day when the West German Bundestag opens its final debate on German rearmament. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, secure in his huge parliamentary majority, was "100% certain" that the Paris accords would be ratified. Yet he and his Cabinet colleagues were stumping the countryside, pleading with the German people to abide by the Parliament's decision and accept the call to arms when it came. Crisscrossing the Chancellor's path and blackening his policies were the Social Democrats (SPD) in full cry. The Socialists' aim: to postpone German rearmament until...
...militarism and to promise, in the name of France, that the Paris accords would never be ratified. But though the Communists talked furiously, it was the massive Socialist campaign that was doing the most harm. In town after town, the SPD was whipping up German youths to riot against rearmament, circulating petitions and questionnaires whose loaded questions (gist: Do you want unity or do you want war?) led Konrad Adenauer to exclaim that these were the same techniques used by the Nazis and Communists...
...Socialist case against rearmament involves holding out a hope of Soviet generosity and good faith which many Socialists know to be irresponsible. But to the motley coalition of pacifists, patriots, militant trade unionists, left-wing Protestant pastors, wishful thinkers, Marxist intellectuals and East zone refugees who make up the SPD, the oversimplified cry of Einheit Deutschlands (German unity) has a ringing appeal. The Socialists' late leader, Kurt Schumacher, an embittered hulk after the Nazis endlessly roughed him up in concentration camps, left behind a sour political testament: "Never again must the Socialists be caught being less nationalistic than their...
Wahl also felt that Faure is more internationally minded than Mendes-France and more willing to work with the M.R.P. He will press for ratification of the Paris agreements on West German rearmament before attacking domestic problems...
Spoiled Campaign. The day after Malenkov fell, Britain's Nye Bevan made an uncharacteristically dispirited defense of his attempt to delay German rearmament and was defeated in a Laborite caucus by a decisive 23 votes. In Wrest Germany, where Konrad Adenauer had been forced to take to the hustings to argue for rearmament, the Chancellor now felt reassured. "The Russians should have waited just one more month," said Adenauer, "then they would not have spoiled the Socialist campaign so completely...