811.61311 Germany/20
Memorandum by the Under Secretary of State (Castle)
The Ambassador24 said that things were not going so well in the negotiations for the purchase of wheat. He said that the Farm Board now agreed that the original suggestion was a credit of three years but that the negotiations on the financial end had apparently [Page 308] fallen down for what the Ambassador said seemed to him a foolish reason. The wheat is to be sold, if sold, to the German Grain Importing Company, the notes of this company will be endorsed by the German Government. Now the grain corporation says that it will not take these notes, unless in its endorsement, the German Government will guarantee that they will be paid ahead of reparations or any other political debts. I told the Ambassador that I would take this up immediately with the grain corporation (it stands to reason that this kind of a guarantee is fruitless because the German Government is merely guaranteeing the note of a private company and that private company has nothing to do, one way or the other, with political obligations of the German Government).
The Ambassador continued that there was one other trouble in the negotiations which was that the Germans insisted on having 1931 wheat as of better quality and the Farm Board insisted that it had no 1931 wheat to sell and that the 1930 wheat was just as good anyway. We agreed that this technical matter was obviously not one for discussion in the Foreign Office and that it was purely a question of fact to be decided by the negotiators.
The Ambassador asked me whether I did not think it wise for the Germans to come back to Washington from Chicago to continue their negotiations. I said the reason why I doubted this was that for some unknown reason the whole business had been kept out of the papers and if the negotiators came back here, it would almost certainly be known. The Ambassador agreed to this.
- Friedrich W. von Prittwitz unci Gaffron, German Ambassador.↩