The packed little hall in the Saar mining town of Illingen crackled with excitement. Behind the stage, huge and threatening, a black eagle glared down from a red banner with the three initials of the new Saar Democratic Party (DPS) slashed white across its breast. Party Chieftain Heinrich Schneider, a stocky, sad-eyed lawyer of 48, bounded onto the platform to speak. The crowd of coal miners—yellow-haired youngsters and grizzled, Russian-front veterans—stiffened in anticipation, ready to jump frenziedly at his every hoarse shout.
"We are Germans!" cried Schneider, an oldtime Nazi who worked for Goebbels' propaganda ministry in World War II. "When we vote on the 23rd, we will be the first Germans to show that Germans want to be reunified!" The miners rose, cheered, and burst first into Deutschland Uber Alles and then into Deutsch 1st die Saar (The Saar Is German), a song unheard since Hitler's fall.
For three months such pro-German rallies have exploded almost nightly in the French-controlled, German-speaking industrial border basin of the Saar. They are a prelude to decision: next week the Saar's 960,000 citizens will freely vote, ja or nein, whether to accept the statute which French and German statesmen finally agreed on last year as the best means of taking a 1,000-year-old quarrel out of politics until a final World War II peace treaty is sealed. Should the Saarlanders vote ja, their borderland, which has changed hands four times in the last three European wars, would be "Europeanized," i.e., granted political autonomy under the new seven-nation Western European Union, and continued in its postwar economic union with France. A commissioner, probably British, would oversee the Saar on behalf of WEU, but an elected Landtag of Saarlanders would continue to run Saar affairs. The Saar's 13 million tons of coal and most of its 3,000,000 tons of steel a year would remain French-controlled, giving France about equal balance with the Ruhr-rich West Germans in the European Coal and Steel Community.