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"All Europe needs a new horizon, just as the Germans do. We can't keep up this sitting behind the stove of the Elbe. The plan must be to reunite all of Europe, including the Soviet satellite states. Or do you think that Poland and Czechoslovakia are not part of Europe? Do you think the Poles are happy with their Ivan? A plan like that would kindle the forces of resistance behind the Iron Curtain.
"It's not enough just to solve the German problem. The Soviets cannot stand still either on the Elbe or the Oder-Neisse —they have to go forward or backward. I do not believe they will go to war at all costs. Nor can the Soviet Union last forever as a hermetically sealed system behind a wall. However, we cannot rely on possible internal dissensions in the Soviet Union, but only on our own strength. If we all really unite, we cannot fail to push them back."
But time, as Reuter well knew, was all-important. Last week in Washington, John J. McCloy, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, was anxiously discussing European morale with a friend. "You speak," said the friend, "as if you are sounding the last call for Europe."
Said McCloy, "That's exactly what it is."
*Invited by Catherine the Great in the mid-18th Century, Germans settled in the region around the present Stalingrad. After the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, the Volga Germans, numbering about 500,000, were regarded as potential fifth columnists, deported en masse to Asiatic Russia.