711.65/110½
Memorandum by the Under Secretary of State (Welles) of a Conversation With the Italian Ambassador (Suvich)
The Italian Ambassador called to see me this morning …
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… He said that because of the number of Italians in the United States and the fact that there had never been any serious disagreement between Italy and this country and no historical memories of hostility in the past, it was hard for him to understand why so large a proportion of the press in the United States and so large a section of American public opinion was so bitterly hostile to the Italian Government. He said he could fully understand the reasons for the hostility to Germany because of their persecution of the Jews, of the members of other religious faiths and the minorities in general, but he explained that the situation in Italy was quite different. He said no step had ever been taken in Italy against the Jews because the Jewish problem in Italy did not exist. He said there were not more than forty thousand Jews in Italy at the outside and of this number many of them today were prominent citizens, highly regarded and occupying important positions under the state. He said before he himself entered public life he had been closely associated in Trieste with prominent Jews and that he had never seen any prejudice of any kind on the part of the Italians against the Jews as such. He said he could not, therefore, comprehend, in view of the attitude taken by the Italian Government toward the Catholic Church and toward the Jews in Italy why there should be an attempt on the part of so great a proportion of the press here to make out that the Italian Government was persecuting religious or racial minorities in that country. I said to the Ambassador that, of course, I was fully aware of the truth of what he said, but that it seemed to me that perhaps he missed, in his attempt to estimate the situation, two rather important points. In the first place, I remarked, the very close relationship [Page 583] which existed between Italy and Germany and the fact that governmental systems not unlike in structure, however unlike they might be in methods or in details, existed in the two countries, created very naturally the popular impression that the domestic policies pursued in Germany with regard to racial minorities were favorably regarded or supported by the Italian Government and by Italian public opinion. It seemed to me, I said, that so long as this close identification in international policy between Germany and Italy persisted, it would be very difficult to persuade the American people as individuals that the domestic policies pursued by Germany were not sympathetically regarded in Italy.…
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