Word: saar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This move represents a great change in emphasis of French efforts to keep a hand on the German industrial throttle. Heretofore, she has put her trust in one-sided plans like the Allied Ruhr Control Authority and her fifty-year lease on Saar coal mines. But the Ruhr control has been honored more in the breach than in the observance, and it is the Rhine and the Ruhr, not the Saar, which are the keys to German industrial might...
...Germans have two good reasons for submitting their production to the new bi-national authority. For one thing, the present quota which is severely limiting their steel production would be steadily relaxed. In addition, the new agreement would virtually nullify the French-Saar pact which has caused so much resentment in Germany...
These nationalists got more ammunition when France made a treaty with the Saar last month. That small territory, under French protectorate until a German peace treaty, leased its coal mines to France for 50 years in return for economic and political advantages. Western Germans claimed that the mines were German property--they belonged to the Third Reich--and that France had no right to make the treaty until a general European peace settlement. Both Kurt Schumacher, leader of the opposition Socialist Party and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, head of the Christian Democrats, complained. The Chancellor said, "German faith in the Allies...
...there would not be "a lot of courting of Germany to get them in" the Council. Adenauer, however, announced three conditions the Allies must accept before West Germany would consider entering. They were: 1) that a formal invitation to join be sent to the Bonn Parliament; 2) that the Saar issue be reviewed in the final peace treaty; 3) that West Germany have an observer on the Council's Committee of ministers as well as delegates to the Council meetings. The Allies accepted the first two points, rejecting the third...
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...