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-—

Continued on Page 12 PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 10