It is welcome news that the United States has agreed to consider the possibility of allowing East German refugees to enter America as immigrants, and that the Canadian Government has given an assurance that it will assist in giving East German farmers in particular new homes and places of work. For the problem of the twelve million refugees, swollen every month by thousands of fresh arrivals from the Russian Zone, is still one of the most important of all European questions. The plight of the D.P.s is perhaps even worse, for there are still between 150,000 and 200,000 of the old, weak, infirm and unemployables in D.P. camps in Germany.

The unprecedented migration that followed the Potsdam agreement—when in the winter of 1945-6 fifteen million people were moved out of Eastern Germany and neighbouring territories to make way for Poles and Russians—has provided an unprecedented responsibility for the Church in Germany. Only twelve million finally arrived in Western Germany—three million died or were directed eastward— but nearly half of them were Catholic, coming from the almost completely Catholic areas of Upper Silesia and the Sudeten territory, as well as from Tower Silesia, East Prussia and Pomerania. Up to the last war the Catholic and Protestant majorities in Germany could be delimited almost exactly by the boundaries set up by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1,648 on the principle ‘cujus regio ejus religio.