Word: sed
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...communizers of East Germany had learned from bitter experience that Stalin might be right. After nearly five years of trying to saddle their cow, they seemed to be having more trouble than ever. Last week Party Boss Walter Ulbricht decreed that East Germany's Socialist Unity Party (SED) would have to be purged. He announced that 20,000 party officials, working from now until July in 4,000 teams of five, would screen the SED's 1,600,000 card holders. The 20,000 would be supervised by 1,000 of the party's elite...
...SED was formed in 1946 when the regular Communist Party merged with the Eastern Zone Socialists. For a while, the Communists honored their promise of biparty "parity." Then, one by .one, nearly all the Socialist leaders were eased out. Now the rank & file Socialists who have not been fully converted to Communism will have to go too. SED card holders, announced Ulbricht, will be investigated "regarding all phases of their lives." They must be "true workers," must know Marx & Lenin by the numbers, must above all be devoted to the interests of the Soviet Union-no "morally tainted elements...
...charged last week with working with Field included dark, sneering Leo Bauer, boss of Radio Berlin; former SED Executive Committee Member Paul Merker, who spent the war years in Mexico; Lex Ende, onetime editor of Neues Deutschland, official party organ; Railways Boss Willy Kriekemeyer, and dapper little Bruno Goldhammer, Eisler's own second-in-command at the propaganda bureau. Though still at liberty and at his job last week, Gerhart Eisler, who was kicked off the Central Committee two months ago, was reported to be high on the list of those soon to be purged...
...Russian zonal press growled that the audience had reacted with paraphrase of Nazi slogans to a Hitlerite speech; but three days later Russia permitted its pet party, the Communist-run SED, to blurt out an announcement of a Russian new deal in the Soviet zone. Some of the promises: reduction in reparations from current production; a 200-300% increase of the zone's industrial level; abolition of the lowest ("starvation") ration card. Meanwhile, the Russians also appeared to be softening somewhat (at least on the surface) in London...
Significantly, SED polled exactly the same amount of votes which the Communist Party polled in Berlin's last free elections before Hitler, in 1933. It was a measure of its disastrous unpopularity that it was beaten even in the Russian sector of Berlin. TIME'S Berlin Bureau Chief John Scott cabled a portentous conclusion: "This fiasco will, in my view, clinch the opinion of Russian leaders that they must resign themselves to losing political control, at least temporarily, over almost any area where reasonable political freedom exists...