(2 of 7)
From Bulgaria came disquieting reports of complete Russian domination through the Red Army and the Minister of the Interior, Anton Yugoff, veteran Communist. In Rumania there was an almost total news blackout, punctuated by occasional reports, like rifle flashes, of political strife between Communists and the Government.
Hungary and Finland were under Red Army control. Even Czechoslovakia, which had long been Russia's friend, was threatened with the incorporation of its only liberated province, Ruthenia, into the Soviet Ukraine.
Now the question of the future control of Germany was at issue. And since Germany was the strategic and economic key to Europe, so was the future of Europe and the world. Who would control the conquered Reich — Russia and the western Allies (who so far had barely dented the German frontiers) or the Russians alone (who might soon be in Berlin)?
Already the Sofia radio reported that Moscow's Free Germany Committee was preparing to move into East Prussia on the heels of the Russian troops. There was talk, still unconfirmed, of a Provisional German Government. Reported Sofia radio: its head would be Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, captured commander of Germany's Stalingrad armies, who last year joined the Free Germany Committee. Over the Sofia radio he was calling upon the Wehrmacht to end the German ordeal by surrendering to the Russians. Meanwhile ABSIE (American Broadcasting Station in Europe) broadcast that the first Russian governor of occupied Germany "has taken up his functions in the East Prussian town of Gumbinnen" near the Lithuanian frontier.
Crisis of Civilization. Facts, as Lenin liked to say, are stubborn things. These facts ran, like an obbligato of doubt, under the great gunfire of victory. But what chilled every thoughtful American and Briton and warmed every watchful German was the knowledge that with military success in sight the Big Three were split apart as never before. The stubborn fact of Allied relations was that Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were preparing for a second Big Three meeting,* not because it was convenient to hold that meeting now, but because the crisis among the so-called United Nations had reached such a pitch that a face-to-face ventilation of their differences could no longer be postponed.
In the short space of two months this crisis had twice come to a head. The first time had been in Athens, where for six shameful weeks liberating British troops had fought a bloody miniature war with liberated Greeks. The second crisis had come just before the Red Army's drive, when the Soviet Government had recognized a Kremlin-controlled Government of Poland that denounced as a "lackey of Hitlerite Germany" the Polish Government in Exile which was insistently recognized by Britain and the U.S.