COMMUNISTS: Conciliationism

When Communist Gerhart Eisler beat out a U.S. jail sentence in 1949 for contempt of Congress and passport fraud by stowing away on the Polish liner Batory, he was hailed by East German comrades as a “victim” of American “repression.” They installed him as a professor in Leipzig University, then made him propaganda boss of the Soviet zone.

Yet somehow Eisler, who had sat at the top of the Communist pile in the U.S., did not make the East German party’s Politburo or Central Committee. Last week, in an abject display of Red breast-beating, published in one of his own propaganda agency handouts, he told why.

Twenty years ago, he confessed, he had committed the sin of “conciliationism” by demanding an alliance with socialism. Groveled Gerhart: “A conciliationist cannot be an honest Communist, cannot be a Marxist-Leninist, cannot be an honest friend of the Soviet Union, cannot be an honest disciple of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of Comrade Stalin.”