WROCLAW, Poland.

HIS great city is an-

I other cemetery of lives
and homes and treas-

ure. Like Warsaw, it has

come to symbolize the will

and courage and hopes of
the Polish people. It seems
strange that such ruins could
be the inspiriation of a nation’s
efforts to create a new land.

Wroclaw has a symbolic
meaning of a special kind. It
used to be the German city of
Breslau, a citadel of Prussian-
ism and a springboard for ag-
gression against the East. To-
day it is a bastion of the New
Poland, a center of the western
territories, 39,000 square miles,
bestowed on Poland by the
agreements of Yalta and Pots-
dam. In its present condition,
it is an awesome reminder of
the peril to the world of a
renascent Prussia.

I wish it were possible for
Winston Churchill and James
Byrnes to come and live among
these shattered and_ twisted
buildings, to look daily upon
the crumbled walls of the great
cathedral, the magnificence of
which required seven centuries
of painstaking effort to build.
I wish they might make a daily
pilgrimage to the great ceme-
tery on the city’s. outskirts,
where tens of thousands of Red
Army graves bear witness ito
the cost in human life at Wro-
claw’s liberation.

Such an experience would
spoil the sophistry of all the
Bryneses and Churchills who
how demand a revision of the
‘Yalta and Potsdam accords and
a restoration of the western
territories to Germany. It would
contain a lesson, and also a
warning.

_ It took the Red Army four
months to take Breslau. Prus-
_ Sian junkerism and the great
cartels of the German imperial-
ists made their last stand here.
Their elite troops, the most
brutish and bestial of the Nazi
hordes, made this city their
final ditch. Berlin fell first. But
Breslau also fell. The Red Army
took it yard by yard, house by
house. And the pride of Hitler’s
troops, the defenders of German
trusts and feudal estates, were
exterminated. 3

That should be remembered
_by the representatives of ‘SBri-
tain amd the United States at
the Foreign Ministers” meeting
in Moscow. It is important to
recall, when the question of
Poland’s western frontiers arises,
that if the magnificence of Bres-
lau once reflected the triumph-
ant supremacy of Prussianism
in central Europe, the ruins of
Breslau teach what happens
when Prussianism tries to real-
ize its oft-repeated dreams of
world conquest,

But so long as Poland’s wes-

tern frontier is the Oder and
the Neisse Rivers, so long will
Prussianism be incapable of re-
viving, and so long will Ger-
Many be unable to rebuild its
‘war industries. This is the whole
significance of the new Polish
western territories.

T SCHUMACHER, leader
: of German Social Democracy
whom John Foster Dulles, Chur-
chill and other friends of Ger-
man fascism in the west would
like to groom for the presi-
dency of another Weimar Re-
public, has protested Poland’s
acquisition of the western terri-
tories as a great injustice to
Germany. The poor Germans
- will be depriveq of their food
supply, srgue Schumacher and

his friends. Germany industry

will be unable to revive. And a

sacred principle of nationality,

that the soil belongs to the

nation which inhabits it, will be
-viulated. Ms

FRIDAY, APRIL 11, 1947

i

“for

By JOHN PITTMAN

But at Yalta, Roosevelt and
Stalin, and even Churchill, after
his objections had been over-
ruled, placed the requirements
of peace above everything else.
For the Big Three leaders, the
cardinal considerations were

twofold: How to prevent a re-.

vival of German imperialism and
Nazism; and how to guarantee
the independence of the Polish
nation. By ceding the western
territories to Poland, they acted
to implement both aims. And
they also compensated Poland
territories lost as a conse-
quence of the revision of her
eastern borders, roughly along
the old Curzon Line.

What Roosevelt, Stalin and
Churchill wrought at Yalta in
the midst of war. Truman, Stal-
in and Attlee. confirmed at
Potsdam in the flush of victory.
The Potsdam Agreement _ re-
states the aims and accord of
the Yalta Agreement. But now
Churchill has retracted, and
Schumacher and the American
advocates of a ‘western bloc’
hope to discard these aims of
a united, anti-fascist coalition.

ERE is an answer to each

of the arguments for revising
Poland’s western frontiers. The
Poles themselves have given
the clearest, most irrefutable
answer to Schumacher’s invoca-
tion of the nationality principle.
For the western territories are
now Polish in population.

This is one of the miracles of
the New Poland. A population
greater than the population of
Denmark and almost as large
as that of Switzerland has mov-
ed across hundreds of miles to
settle in the regained territor-
ies. By train, truck, wagon and
on foot, 5,000,000 Poles hare
settled in an area which was
ouce inhabited by 6,000,000 Ger-
mans. Ang thousands more are

on their way from eastern or
destroyed areas of Poland.

For Schumacher and others
who, forgetful of the role of
the Sudeten Germans in Czech-
oslovakia and of other German
minorities in lands subsequently
conquered by the Nazis, would
make a fetish of the nationality
principle, the Poles can answer
with an accomplished fact. The
western territories are now Po-
lish. Less than half a million
Germans remain, and these: will
be on their way to Germany
within a few months.

The cities and town of the
western territories are now
Polish. Street names have been
changed from German to Pol-
ish. Bus drivers and_ store
clerks speak Polish. Thousands
of Polish peasants now own the
great estates of the Junkers.
Poland’s nationalized industry
has absorbed the big industries
of the German capitalists and
cartels, while thousafds of Po-
lish artisans, shopkeepers and
retailers conduct the small busi-
nesses reserved: to the sphere
of private enterprise.

Deprivation of the western
territories prevents a revival of
German war industry, but does
not stop Germany from produc-
ing peacetime goods. Nor does

-it deprive Germany of an im-

portant source of its food supply.

The territories now lost to
Germany, according to prewar
German statistics, supplied the
rest. of the Reich with 0.86 per-
cent of its total consumption of
wheat, 5.1 percent of rye and
2.7 percent’ of potatoes.. The in-
dustries lost to Germany in
these areas, in relation to the
remainder of German industry, —
constituted but a small propor-
tion of industrial production. .
Yet, without Lower  Silesia’s
brown coal deposits, to cite a

'

single example, Germany is de-
prived of a major source of
the synthetic benzine which
powered Hitler's war machine.

T THE same time, according
to Polish Minister of Indus-
try Hilary Minc, Poland could
not exist as an’ economically

sovereign state without the wes-~

tern territories. ©

“We -recelved in the West,”
said Minc, “a great. apparatus
producing capital goods which
does. not require to be built
afresh but to be reconstructed.
We received the Walbrzych basin
and Opole; great metallurgical
factories. like. the State wagon
factory, for example; the Oder
factory of bridge and wagon-
building; several foundries. We
have received an important
basis of industrial power, opti-
cal glass, fertilizers and the only
factory in’ Europe producing
coal electrodes; and many other
factories producing’ capital
goods.” i

Indeed, with the western ter-
ritories, New Poland ranks as,
fourth in world coal production,
third in world production of
sugar beets, third in rye crops,
fifth in zine production and
third in world potato production.
Only five other Europeans coun-
tries will
output. She will rank fifth in
European cement production. ©

Toward attainment of these
goals the Polish government
has given special attention to
the development of the western
territories, although the devasta-
‘tion

stance, 70 percent of the in-
dustrial and office buildings
were destroyed. Today, 70 plants,
employing 22,000 workers, are
in operation. img

At the State wagon factory
outside Wroclaw, 30 percent of

._ day the factory is

surpass her textile

in‘ these territories was.
enormous. In Wroclaw, for in- —

\

the buildings, 80 percent of the
machinery and- all the glass
was destroyed. But, by June of

this. year all repairs will be
finished. Output of the plant to-

day is 18 coal. cars per day,
and two to three passenger
coaches a month. The working
force has risen from 55 per-
sons in July, 1945, to 4,054 to-
day. During the war the Nazis
built V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs
here.

The glass factory at e Lustr-
zanka in Lower Silesia is con-
sidered to be the biggest in
Europe. Near the entrance of
one of the great pouring rooms
are rows of tremendous search-
light reflectors, part of the mil-
itary supplies produced here by
the Nazis during the war. To-
producing
about 120 percent of its prewar.
capacity.

At Groszewitsa, a few kilo-
meters outside of Katowice, is
one of Poland’s 13 cement
plants, It is a $9,000,000 plant
which was so profitable that
its German owners declared
eight percent dividends even
during the great economic de
pression of 1929-1933. Since June,
1945, Poland has invested an-
other 150,000,000 zylotys to re
pair damages and reach 90 per-
cent of German prewar produc-
tion.

Coal production in the wes- —
tern territories accounts for
one-third of Poland’s total, is
expected this year to exceed
this proportion with the repair
of mines and equipment. The
area’s paper industry will pro |
duce 40 percent of the coum
try’s output. Timber, furniture
and toys produced here will —

amount to 45 percent of the :
total for Poland; metal indus-—

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