Unfinished Business at Pankow
The East German Communist rdgime has been in so much trouble lately that disgrace had to fall on somebody. Max Fechner, Minister of Justice, a former Social Democrat and one of the architects of the Socialist Unity Party; Wilhelm Zaisser, Minister of State Security, old Bolshevik and inter- national agent, once known (in Spain) as "General Gomez "; Rudolf Herrnstadt, editor of the Neues Deutschland, dullest of all newspapers after the Soviet Army's own Tagliche Rundschau. One by one, the god behind the curtain calls out the names. Has he, perhaps, forgotten Walter Ulbricht, party secretary and Stalin's true prophet in East Germany, the man really responsible for the mess at Pankow ? So long as he is there, no one can say that Stalinism is dead in Berlin. Indeed there is no evidence yet of a serious change of orienta- tion. For three months after Stalin died the puppet rulers at Pankow went on behaving as though no new fingers were pull- ing the strings at all. Then, in the second week of June, errors were suddenly admitted and a gentler economic policy announced; but some official failed to hear, and imposed on the building workers in the Stalin-Allee the heavier stints which set off the rising of June 16th and 17th. From this the Soviet Army itself had to rescue a People's Government paralysed with fear and self-distrust; we can be sure that a lesson was noted in Moscow and is now being learnt, slowly, by rote. Herr Zaisser as Minister of Internal Security was in charge of the vast machine which has the formal task of repressing western "saboteurs." His fall is in line with the official excuse. The machine of repression, though it has been absorbed into the Ministry of the Interior. continues in Itself unchanged, and the effective revolution in East German politics has still to come.
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