Herbert W Armstrong

West Germany is in the throes of perhaps the most damaging spy scandal ever in its history. Names of those spying for East Germany are being released almost daily. The biggest catch in the net so far is Hans Joachim Tiedge, former head of the Bonn intelligence unit that kept track of East German spies roaming around the Federal Republic. He disappeared, then turned up in East Berlin seeking asylum. Was he a recent convert to the other side (perhaps trapped because of his heavy drinking and past marital problems), or had he been a "mole" for nearly two decades?

Bonn fears it may have to reconstruct its intelligence operations from the ground up. And Bonn's allies are fearful that Tiedge, having broad access to NATO intelligence links, may have jeopardized the whole alliance. Heads are beginning to roll in the unfolding affair, but Chancellor Helmut Kohl, said to be infuriated at the findings, seems secure for the moment. Josef Joffe, foreign editor of the SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG in Munich, explains both how serious the current affair is, and the tremendous disadvantage Bonn has in the spy-versus-spy business relative to its German Communist counterpart. He wrote in the August 28 LOS ANGELES TIMES:

Tiedge is the biggest fish that the East German State Security Service has landed in a generation.... What we do not know yet is whether Tiedge was a "mole" or a turncoat. If he was a mole who had burrowed into the intelligence system years ago, it would explain why the West Germans have not scored any notable successes against their Communist compatriots during the last four years. It also would explain why the East Germans could proudly announce that they had caught 168 West German spies during the past 12 months....

Whether Tiedge was a mole or a traitor, the damage is gargantuan. With his arrival in East Berlin, the West German network in East Germany was "burned" in toto. Now, during his debriefing, there are lots of other choice presents that he surely will deliver, such as the ways and means of other Western intelligence services, which he learned in regular top-secret conferences....

In the end there's not much that can be done to forestall further such disasters. The Federal Republic...is spy heaven. Before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, 3 million East Germans escaped to the Western half. Today thousands come across legally every year, and they are West German citizens from Day One. They look like West Germans, they speak like West Germans....

How many of them will re-emerge in East Berlin tomorrow as proud servants of the Peasant and Worker State?... It is easy to be a spy when all you have to do is cross from Germany into Germany, and then into the most liberal political system that the Germans have ever known.

In espionage, the East Germans will win hands down every time. Because of the Nazi period, West German society is regulated by stringent civil liberty regulations, the kind that East German authorities don't have to contend with. One cannot help but think that someday, someone will demand that individual liberties be constrained in the national interest! This brings us to another article about West German life titled "West Germans Do It All by the Book," written by Tyler Marshall in the June 5 LOS ANGELES TIMES. It gives a good insight into the German character, reformed only slightly by liberal democracy. The article packs a wallop at the end:

Intricate, often petty regulations and laws...envelop nearly every West German.... It is something that sets modern West Germany apart from other Western democracies. Today, federal West German law regulates when a homeowner can cut his lawn, the angle of the staircase inside his home and the number of wall plugs allowed in his bedroom. The mountain of rules governing housing construction has become legendary, with 660 separate regulations spanning about 8,000 pages of detailed, turgid German bureaucratese governing just the interior construction....

"German bureaucracy stifles individual initiative," charged Ralf Dahrendorf, a prominent political figure here in the early 1970s, who recently returned to West Germany after 10 years as head of the London School of Economics.

Even in the most personal family matters, such as the name for a new baby, government regulations define the limits.... A Frankfurt couple who wanted to name their child after the Peanuts character, Schroeder, went to court after city officials refused to register the baby's name. The family lost. A superior court judge backed the bureaucrats' assessment that Schroeder was a last name and therefore not permitted under West German regulations as a first name.

A couple in the Ruhr city of Moenchengladbach last November were prevented by a similar court ruling from naming their son Hemingway. "You have to understand that there are certain rules here," the director of the Bonn city Registry Office, Rudolf Buechner, explained to a foreign visitor. "Names help create a certain order," he added. "If a name is on a list and nobody knows if it's a man or a woman, then difficulties can arise."...

Many believe the West German penchant for over-regulation has deep cultural roots. "It is a very old story here, a Prussian tradition," said Dahrendorf, recalling that even Germany's industrial revolution was organized from the top by the government and large banks, not by freewheeling entrepreneurs as in Britain and the United States. "There is a long tradition here of not relying on the individual," he added. "When anything happens, there is a tendency to invent a new law to regulate it."

In an effort to counter the growing mountain of laws and regulations, Chancellor Helmut Kohl's center-right coalition government has established an independent commission for simplifying judicial and administrative procedures.... But reshaping German public consciousness won't be easy.... German mothers, for example, sometimes invent their own "laws" to control their children. One...mother routinely coaxes her son from the television set each evening with the warning that it is against the law for little children to watch TV after 8 p.m.

While other countries also have numerous laws dealing with petty subjects, officials' dedication towards enforcement of the rules helps set West Germany apart.... It was apparently a...desire to carry out the letter rather than the spirit of the law that led Bonn police officers to issue stern warnings to pedestrians who violated the "don't walk" traffic signals around the federal Parliament during the recent economic summit — even though the area had been blocked off to traffic.

"During my first weeks back here, I was amused by it all, but it is beyond a joke," said Dahrendorf. "It is the type of thing that could make the country stand at attention again if the wrong person came along."

The above article reminded me of what Herman L. Hoeh said a few weeks ago when some of us were discussing the differing approaches various nations have toward law. It goes something like this: In the United States, whatever is not expressly prohibited is permitted. In Germany, on the other hand, whatever is not expressly permitted is forbidden. And in the Soviet Union, even what is permitted is often forbidden.

On the issue of European defense, an important trend may be in the initial stages of development. A very significant article appeared in the August 5 European edition of NEWSWEEK titled "An End to 'Fortress France'?: French politicians call for greater defense cooperation with West Germany." This article did not appear in the U.S. edition. Here are key excerpts:

Ever since Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of the military wing of NATO in 1967, French military strategy has focused on protecting France's own borders. Now, however, the era of "Fortress France" may be coming to an end. In recent weeks French politicians of all-stripes, except the beleaguered Communists, have endorsed the notion of defending West Germany if war breaks out.

Last month French Defense Minister Charles Hernu told his West German counterpart, Manfred Worner, that Paris now believed their two countries "had security interests in common." Former President Valery Giscard D'Estaing's center-right UDF group declared France's "frontier of independence is the Elbe," not the Rhine....

According to the new strategy, in the event of war the 46,000-man French rapid-action force would mobilize. Within hours its helicopters would reach the front. The 50,000 French troops already based in West Germany would then abandon their defense positions and move forward to reinforce them. Still, even under the best of circumstances, the proposed reconciliation will have its limits. French officials say there will be no earth-shattering public announcement, such as an extension of the country's nuclear umbrella to cover West Germany, and Bonn's NATO commitments will still take first priority. But the change will present important new opportunities for broader European military cooperation. "If France and Germany have common strategy, then a European defense becomes possible.” says Andre Brigot of the Institut Francais de Polemologie, a strategic think tank....

France, in particular, has had good reasons for wanting to improve cooperation on defense. In the French view, the outpouring of pacifist sentiment over the installation of U.S. cruise missiles was an unsettling indication of West Germany's sometimes tenuous loyalties to the concept of Western solidarity.... In his new book, "The Future of War," Pierre Lellouche, a NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL columnist and associate director of the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales (IFRI), argues that France has an obligation, out of self-interest if nothing else, to contribute to West Germany's defense.... "There is widespread fear of what's going on in Germany," says Dominique Moisi, also of IFRI. "We cannot stay in our selfish nationalistic position. We must pay a price for Germany to stay in Europe."

Paying the price — literally — of protecting itself is becoming increasingly difficult for Paris. Some officials say privately that France simply can no longer afford an independent defense. By some estimates conventional-force spending will plunge 25 percent by 1988.... "If we want to maintain a credible defense, we must cooperate with West Germany," says Moisi. "The political logic combines with the economic logic."

As we have reported before, there occasionally appears a significant article in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL advocating the gradual withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Western Europe, dissolution of NATO and its replacement with a joint European military force. Yet another of these articles appeared in the August 27 JOURNAL headlined "Toward a Post-NATO Europe." It was written by Jay Winik, past executive director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. Here are key excerpts:

When NATO was founded in 1949, it was basically a unilateral American nuclear guarantee of European security in the guise of an alliance.... But with the advent of at least strategic parity, the U.S. nuclear commitment to defend Europe has been reduced to a pact of mutual suicide. It has lost much of its credibility....

The first step should be the gradual dissolution of the NATO alliance and the creation of an all-European Defense Community. Rather than be based on the negative goal of security, as NATO is today, this compact would articulate the historic goal of the emergence of more politically vital Europe....

Concretely, the U.S. should consider phasing out its ground troops over a period of 10-15 years, except for a symbolic force in Berlin, and rescind its strategic nuclear guarantee. This will provide Europeans with the necessary incentive to develop a credible deterrent, a task the U.S. should assist them in. While there can be no precise blueprint as to exactly what form a new European Defense Community would take, it would have to increase and reorganize its conventional forces as a minimum condition.

It should also consider developing a joint European deterrent that would build upon the mix of short- and long-range theater and submarine nuclear weapons currently in the NATO arsenal, the control of which would be turned over from the Americans exclusively to the Europeans....

In the final analysis, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has argued, only the Europeans can restore Europe, and American policy should give this goal concrete direction. A Europe that assumes a larger role in its defense, aided by the Americans, will of necessity be politically responsible and capable of evolving into world power in its own right....

Additionally, as a symbol of a rejuvenated Europe, this new alliance could support the larger goal of a united European cultural community, the heir to the continent’s more than 1,000 years of common cultural and religious ideals. In the nuclear age, the division of Europe cannot be undone by force. But as University of London Prof. Hugh Seton-Watson noted shortly before his death last year, the fact that Eastern Europeans cannot now belong to an all-European economic or political community in no way diminishes how a culturally united Europe could fulfill many of the deeply felt aspirations of those living under the Soviet yoke.

Over time, the idea of a culturally united Europe could gather momentum;" if not inevitability, and form the basis for fostering greater freedoms for the people of Eastern Europe. All possible opportunities to promote cultural contacts between East and West Europeans should be initiated, a point that was recently made by the pope in his latest encyclical. He emphasized the joint spiritual heritage of all Europeans as "one of the most solid reference points for the continent's reunification.

The reference to Pope John Paul II concerned his recent encyclical Slavorum Aeostoli, celebrating the missionary works of the two Middle-age Greek missionary brothers sent to the Slavic world, Cyril and Methodius. The Pope had wanted to celebrate the 1,100th anniversary of the death of Methodius by traveling to Velehrad, Czechoslovakia, said to be Methodius' place of death. Czech authorities refused to permit the trip. They also tried everything in their means to keep the crowds away (no refreshments, no public conveniences) but 100,000 turned up — and turned on to the occasion. Timothy Garton Ash reported on the event and the overall revival of religion in Eastern Europe in the July 20 issue of the British newsmagazine, THE SPECTATOR:

More than 100,000 people gathered in the Moravian village of Velehrad earlier this month, to mark the eleven hundredth anniversary of the death of St. Methodius, the "apostle of the Slavs." They cheered the Pope's envoy, Cardinal Casaroli, and they booed Mr. Milan Klusak, the Culture Minister of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. When Mr. Klusak...spoke about the politico-cultural contribution of Cyril and Methodius to the construction of the socialist Czechoslovakia, the vast congregation insistently corrected him: "Saints Cyril and Methodius!" they shouted.

When the cardinal read a message from John Paul II, saying that he was with them in spirit and had hoped to be with them in person...the crowd raised a great cheer, and there were chants of "Long live John Paul II" and "We want the Pope!" It might almost have been Poland. It was said to be the largest religious assembly since the communists seized power, and the largest spontaneous gathering of any kind since the crushing of the Prague Spring....

If an old communist put to sleep 30 years ago were awoken today, the one feature of contemporary Eastern Europe which would surely amaze him most is the growing power of Christianity — in Czechoslovakia, despite the institutional crippling of the Churches in the 1950s, in Poland, obviously, in East Germany, where the Protestant Churches have a unique institutional strength, in Lithuania, in the Ukraine, and in Yugoslavia....

Why has this happened? One obvious answer is: the Polish Pope. Since his election in 1978, John Paul II has constantly harped on the theme of Europe's underlying spiritual unity, and the need to heal the great split between the Eastern and Western Churches.... Yet the religious revival throughout East Central Europe cannot simply be ascribed to the impact of one man in Rome....

The explanation must be sought, to use the crude terms of economics, on the demand as well as the supply side. And the great promoter of religious demand is, of course, communism. As Lech Walesa once remarked: "If you take the example of what we have in our shops, then...communism has done very little for us. But if you take the example of what we have in our souls, then I answer that communism has done a great deal for us. In fact our souls contain exactly the opposite of what they wanted. They wanted us not to believe in God, and our churches are full."...

To be sure, there are still many practising young communists but even in East Germany I do not remember ever having met a believing one. In the 1970s this ideological failure was to a considerable extent covered up by a relative economic success-­ but as the standard of living stagnates, or declines, material goods can no longer fill the ideological vacuum. Many young people seek in Christianity...an escape from this hopeless-seeming world of materialism without materials....

It inevitably leaves one wondering how deep the religious revival goes: running, as it does, dead against the seemingly ineluctable secularisation of the modern world. If the Red Army departed and East Central Europe was given democratic capitalism tomorrow, for how long would the churches remain full? To recall Walesa's remark: if there was more in the shops would there be less in their souls? Is that also part of the explanation of the relative weakness of Christianity in Hungary?

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau