1949. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer Signs the Petersberg Agreement

Adenauer Negotiates Greater Sovereignty for West Germany

"Konrad Adenauer (second from left), Sept. 21, 1949, with the high commissioners of the occupation (left to right), America's John J. McCloy, Britain's Sir Brian Robertson and France's André François-Poncet" (source)

Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

November 16, 1949

We know today at least some of the decisions taken by the three Western foreign ministers in Paris—decisions that slowly but surely are raising the West German state to a place of equality in the Western European community of nations.

In the first major foreign policy debate in the two-and-a-half month history of the German republic, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer revealed a five-point program under negotiation with the Western high commissioners.

First, it was agreed that the dismantling of German industry would be slowed almost to a halt until an Allied-German committee investigates the situation. However, plants which were devoted solely to war production during Hitler's regime will be torn down.

Adenauer said that technical legal reasons prevented the Western Allies from declaring an official end of the war with Germany but that this status will continue to exist in name only.

The high commissioners also agreed to lift restrictions on German shipbuilding to allow construction of bigger and faster oceangoing vessels. This means a revival of shipbuilding industries in Hamburg and Bremen and promises a resumption of world trade in German ships.

And finally, the Western occupation powers have agreed that the West German republic will be allowed to establish consulates and trade representatives wherever she wants in foreign countries—an important step in recognition of the sovereignty of the nation.

The opposition Socialist leader, Dr. Kurt Schumacher, attacked the German chancellor for conducting independent and secret negotiations without informing the parliament, but otherwise his criticism of the Allied-German negotiations was comparatively mild.

One West Berlin commentator today sees significance in difficulties at the big Russian war memorial in the Tiergarten. This memorial is a giant twenty-ton statue of a marching Russian soldier. The difficulty is that the memorial is so heavy that it is sinking into the ground.

This proves, the writer says, that the basis for Communism in Germany is extremely weak.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

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Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

November 18, 1949

The West German state today has moved officially into the Western European community of nations; a move agreed upon in negotiations between Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the three Western high commissioners.

In their second meeting at Allied headquarters at Petersberg, across the river from Bonn, it was decided that the new German republic should be allowed to join the International Patent Institute and at the same time to call upon German technicians and administrators for assistance in operation and organization of the institute. It means that German officials now will be appointed to The Hague, where the institute has its headquarters.

Other German authorities will be allowed to go to Brussels to join the European Customs Union study group, the commission assigned to integrate West European customs agreements to further our ECA affairs. German observers have been working with this commission, but now the high commissioners have promised the republic full membership.

On the other side of the Spree river, here in Berlin, the East German Communist government also is increasing its sovereignty among the Russian satellite nations. The East Berlin government is expanding its trade relations by sending commercial attachés to Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and Peking.

But the Communist propaganda in East Germany today is turning most of its attention to December 21, the birthday of Joseph Stalin.

Workers are being urged to over-fulfill their quotas. One factory is building a locomotive to give to the Russian premier as a birthday present. A special committee has been appointed by the Eastern parliament to prepare the birthday celebrations.

But a new high in something or other was reached by a Communist political commentator who the other day wrote a long article supporting the thesis that Stalin's birthday on December 21 is a more important day historically than the birthday celebrated four days later, the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

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Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

November 25, 1949

The West German parliament at Bonn stayed up all night last night in the most stormy debate in its three-month history. And when the meeting broke up a few hours ago, the right-wing government had suspended the opposition Socialist leader, Dr. Kurt Schumacher, for insulting Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The parliament then gave its approval of Adenauer's signing of an agreement with the Western high commissioners.

Schumacher, the most vitriolic politician in Germany, led the opposition debate against Adenauer, charging the German chancellor with superseding the constitution by signing agreements without the approval of parliament. The blowup came when the one-legged, one-armed Schumacher shouted that Adenauer was the "chancellor of the Allies" and not the German republic.

He refused to withdraw his statement. The parliament's legal committee went into session, decided the chancellor had been insulted, and ordered that Schumacher be suspended from the floor of the Bundestag for the next twenty sessions.

The new international agreement is generally hailed in Western Germany as a great step forward for the West German republic. It provides a drastic curtailment of dismantling, allows the republic to establish consulates abroad, places West Germany on the international Ruhr control board, guarantees her cooperation in the demilitarization, and allows Germany to begin reconstruction of her merchant marine.

But the most important point for the Germans is the ending of dismantling of eighteen important iron, chemical, and synthetic oil plants formerly earmarked for destruction. Economists estimate that this means some fifty thousand jobs will be saved for German workers.

In the Ruhr valley this morning flags were raised over the plants saved by the agreement. Dismantling crews sent only token gangs into the plants to remove their tools and work clothing.

Entrances to the plant were decorated with tree branches, and pamphlets were distributed. The theme: "The Ruhr has won the day."

But the Communists disagree. They charge that Adenauer's signing of the agreement is treason—now West Germany has become an American colony in a gigantic military plan to make war against Russia.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

1950. Klaus Fuchs Arrested in Britain

Dr. Fuchs Accused of Espionage

Dr. Klaus Fuchs with his nephew Klaus Kittowski at an airport in East Berlin soon after Fuchs' release from prison, June 24, 1959 (source)

Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

February 6, 1950

Further background has come to light today on Dr. Klaus Fuchs, the German-born atomic scientist now under arrest in Britain for violation of security regulations.

German sources, trying to trace the family of the German physicist, have turned up a tragic story of Nazi persecution. And it might perhaps provide a clue as to the motives which caused Dr. Fuchs to violate his trust—if it is proven that he did.

Klaus Fuchs is the son of Professor Emil Fuchs, who until Hitler's rise in 1933 held the chair of theology in the Academy of Kiel. There were three children, a daughter and two sons, one of whom was Klaus. The brothers joined the socialist movement early, a widespread reaction in Germany following the defeat of the Kaiser's armies.

In Kiel the brothers became known as the "red foxes," a comment not only on their politics but also the color of their hair.

But when Hitler came, the Fuchs family was doomed. The Nazis jailed the old professor for insulting the state. Klaus succeeded in getting a scientific scholarship in Britain. But his brother also was jailed for many years. His sister married, her husband likewise went to a concentration camp. The sister finally committed suicide.

This is the tragedy of the family of the brilliant atomic scientist now under arrest in London.

The story is not yet finished. The elderly professor Fuchs, now more than seventy years old, during the war intensified his work with the Quakers. He spent some time in Switzerland and in 1945 returned to Germany, where he was offered the chair of theology at the University of Leipzig in the Russian zone of Germany.

The final chapter of the saga of "The Foxes of Kiel" will be written in London.

Here in Berlin, the city is more quiet than it has been in a month. Traffic is rolling normally, and everyone is happy to get even a temporary respite from the crisis atmosphere that has plagued us lately.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

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Bill Downs

CBS London

February 10, 1950

Attorneys for the Crown this morning submitted a full confession by Dr. Klaus Fuchs alleging that he gave and sold America's and Britain's atomic secrets to Soviet Russia.

The 39-year-old German-born scientist appeared in Bow Street court for arraignment on charges that he violated Britain's Official Secrets Act—once in this country and earlier in 1944 in the United States when the first atomic bomb was being constructed.

The confession, parts of which were read in the jammed courtroom, is a moving document of moral struggle in the rarefied atmosphere of atomic physics.

But the confession confirms that the Soviet Union was well-informed of America's billion dollar atomic experiment at a time when most Americans didn't know what was going on.

How much information and how important it is will not be revealed. The court announced that no technical details would be discussed in public.

Fuchs looks like an atomic scientist is supposed to look—spare, intense, youthful. He sat in the dock without any display of emotion as his confession was read.

The confession says Klaus Fuchs joined the Communist Party as an anti-Nazi when Hitler came to power. He came to Britain in 1933 and was granted British citizenship, meanwhile becoming what the prosecuting attorney today termed "one of the finest theoretical physicists living."

During the war Fuchs was interned here, then released and asked to work on Britain's atomic project. "At this time," the confession says, "I decided I would give the information to Russia." Fuchs said he believed Russia was building a new world and he wanted to be part of it.

Then he described himself as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He said he was able to divide his mind into two compartments, one that was happy and friendly, "the kind of man I wanted to be." But the other was the man devoted to the cause of communism, or as he was charged, "a political fanatic on the payroll of a foreign power."

Fuchs called his strange psychological process "controlled schizophrenia." He admitted voluntarily contacting British communists and giving information to them. At one time he visited the Russian Embassy in London.

He admitted to taking one hundred pounds in payment, "but only as a symbolic payment signifying his subservience to the cause."

The real payoff came after the war. "In the postwar period I had doubts about Russian policy. Finally I came to the point where I knew I disapproved of many actions of Russian policy. I had to decide whether I could continue to hand over information without being sure I was doing right. I decided I could not do so."

Fuchs said that this new world could not be built "when at the same time it would destroy the fundamental decencies in human behavior."

Dr. Klaus Fuchs today revealed himself as a man betrayed by these fundamental decencies. He said he did not want to implicate his fellow scientists at the Harwell laboratories nor to destroy his work and "the people I love."

He was committed to Old Bailey, in custody, for trial.

This is Bill Downs in London. Now back to CBS in New York.

1967. The Pentagon Presents the Annual "Military Posture" Report

Defense Secretary McNamara Testifies Before the Senate

At a press conference in Washington, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara displays a Chinese-made machine gun seized from the Viet Cong in South Vietnam, April 26, 1965 (source)

Bill Downs

ABC Washington

February 24, 1967

Just about everyone in the country would agree, we think that it's Washington—not Chicago—which should be called the Windy City. And if there is any question that the mass production of words is the main manufacture of this city, then let the doubter try to lift only three months of Congressional Records during a normal session on Capitol Hill.

Which brings us to one of the most inclusive and important government documents published here in Washington at about this time every year. It's put out by the Pentagon and signed by the Secretary of Defense, and unofficially it's called the "military posture" report. This year the report is more than two hundred pages containing some 390,000 words—or about the length of three average-sized novels.

Defense Secretary McNamara presented it to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, thus making public a global survey of America's estimate of the military and diplomatic state of the world and the probability of preserving the present piecemeal peace—and preventing a nuclear World War III.

Of course, we Pentagon reporters are allowed to see only the so-called "sanitized version" of the secretary's military posture survey. All military and diplomatic secrets are carefully screened out.

But each year the Pentagon makes public for all the world to see the best military, economic, political, and diplomatic estimates the US government can make of the state of American military power as compared with the actual potential threats to our national security around the world.

The McNamara report includes a frank discussion of the "strengths and weaknesses" among the Communist nations, and goes on to assess the condition of peace, or lack of it, in every other section of the globe. There's also a full review of the current condition of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, plus the Pentagon plans for strengthening and improving them over the next five years.

Secretary McNamara calls it a "unique document" and unprecedented in the history of nations. Certainly the annual military posture survey is most eagerly sought after—by the military and political columnists who will feed off it for the next twelve months, by the members of Congress both favoring and critical of the Johnson Administration, and both by our friends as well as our enemies overseas who constantly assess the tremendous military power of the United States.

However, the true value and real measure of this carefully qualified exposure of America's defensive and offensive strength lies in the fact that such a report is published at all.

In these days of public debate over America's policies in Vietnam and charges of military and administrative penury, the military posture report, even the sanitized version, is not a statement from a weak, confused, or fearful government or its people.

Personally, we hope Secretary McNamara sends separate copies, airmail special delivery, to Moscow, Havana, Peking, and Hanoi.

This is Bill Downs for ABC News in Washington.

1967. Voice of America Turns Twenty-Five

Marking Voice of America's Twenty-Fifth Anniversary

Robert Bauer doing a German-language broadcast in 1942 (source)

Bill Downs

ABC Washington

February 3, 1967

In one sense of the word, history for the past 150 years has been playing a dirty trick on the United States of America. And it's only in the last half-century that technological development and electronic communications are making it possible to set the record straight.

There are still places in the world where the single word "America" continues to conjure up an image of milk and honey, streets paved with gold, and every man his own king owning his personal crenulated castle.

The early immigrants who came to these shores hid their disappointment that New York's ghettos were not too unlike Europe, and that the hard winters on the Kansas prairies were substantially the same as the cruel cold of the Russian steppes. And that US citizens could be as evil or generous, as considerate or cantankerous, as any other society in the world.

The difference, of course, was and always has been that the New World offered even the lowliest of men opportunity; a chance to improve himself and his family's future in a climate of political freedom which still is alien to most parts of the globe.

But as these new citizens prospered they forgot the bad things and wrote letters back to their relatives in the old country extolling the virtues and gilding the myth of national perfection which has become both America's shining escutcheon and also a historic and damaging weight around her neck.

Which brings us to the point of this story, that this month marks the 25th anniversary of the Voice of America, the broadcasting network owned by the US taxpayer whose voice he seldom hears unless he travels overseas.

The VOA—or "Voice" as it's called here in Washington—was an early post-Pearl Harbor war baby. It was on February 24, 1942, that the US government went on the air to challenge Dr. Goebbels and Hitler's propaganda machine. The assignment was to explain America's policy and aims both for the war and for the peace to follow.

"Daily at this time," the VOA announcer said 25 years ago, "we shall speak to you about America. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth." That first broadcast, incidentally, was in German.

As a matter of fact, the Voice of America from the beginning had no other choice. The Nazis could get away with the so-called "big lie" technique because Hitler's dictatorship was absolute. But even then the truth leaked out.

In an open society such as ours, the truth cannot long be contained by anyone.

Thus the Voice of America, which now broadcasts around the clock in some 38 languages, has changed America's image in the world—and sometimes it has been painful. Both our friends and enemies overseas think of the United States in the glorious words of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. Thus when news stories of racial violence, of scandal or immorality are reported, the disillusionment overseas is compounded many times than if the same news had come from another world capital.

But the VOA's contract with the truth still stands—to present the USA as she is, warts and all.

Fortunately there are more good things to report about the nation than bad. So to John Chancellor, head of VOA, to his predecessors and colleagues, we at ABC say congratulations on the first quarter-century.

This is Bill Downs for ABC in Washington.