865.4016/36

Memorandum of Conversation, by the Under Secretary of State (Welles)

The Italian Ambassador called to see me this morning in order to tell me that he was sailing this week for Italy to return to Washington on September 24. The Ambassador said that as the weeks went by he felt more and more that it was imperative for him to return to his own country to get a first-hand impression of Italian policy and of internal conditions in Italy. Since his Government was not keeping him informed, it was very difficult for him to gain any accurate understanding of the line that his Government was following. I told him that I was particularly anxious to know whether his Government had confirmed to him the reports recently published in the press here indicating that the Italian Government was pursuing a policy of discrimination against the Jews in Italy and was commencing a course which might result in a definitely anti-Semite policy on the part of Italy.

The Ambassador said that this was exactly one of the things regarding which he had no full information. He said that some days ago the papers had reported that the Italian Government had instructed Italian booksellers not to display books by Jewish authors. [Page 586] He had immediately cabled to his Government and had received a reply to the effect that one or two individual booksellers had done this of their own volition but that the Italian authorities had never laid down any such regulation nor had they even considered such a matter. Some days later, the Ambassador said, the newspapers reported that the correspondent in Rome of the Jewish News Agency, Mr. Kleinlerer, had been ordered expelled from Italy on the ground that he was a Jew. Again the Ambassador had telegraphed and had received a reply stating that Mr. Kleinlerer’s race had nothing whatever to do with the expulsion which had been ordered on the ground that he had published anti-Fascist articles which were untrue and malicious. I told the Ambassador that I was gratified to have this information but asked him if it did not appear to him that the recent statements issued by Achille Starace29 had not apparently made it very clear that the Italian Government, on the ground of race purity, was commencing a policy of Jewish persecution.

The Ambassador said that so far as race purity was concerned he himself had a measure of responsibility but that it never, so far as he was concerned, had involved any question relating to the Jews. He said that at the time of the Ethiopian conquest he had persuaded Mussolini to insist upon race purity propaganda among the troops that were being sent to Ethiopia in order to avoid Italy’s being confronted in the future with a half-caste race in Ethiopia which in the Ambassador’s judgement would have raised very serious difficulties dangerous to the future of the Italian nation. He said that so far as he himself was concerned many of his closest friends in Trieste were Jews; that in the war of 1915 he himself was a volunteer and fought at the side of Italian Jews who had given their lives for Italy and he felt that some of the finest and most useful citizens that Italy possessed were Jews. I remarked that at the present time when the whole world was suffering from the effects of an inhumane policy of persecution against the Jews on the part of certain other countries, it was very natural that in such countries as the United States where we regarded a great majority of American Jews as among our finest and most patriotic citizens that an indication on the part of Italy that she was going to adopt a similar policy of persecution naturally profoundly shocked American public opinion. I reminded the Ambassador of the conversation I had had with him some weeks ago30 in which he had said that the Jewish question would never be a problem in Italy inasmuch as the Italian Jews didn’t number more than forty to fifty thousand in the entire country and that he could not conceive of any possible advantage that Italy would gain in aligning herself with the nations that were undertaking this inhuman policy of persecution [Page 587] and discrimination. I said that on the contrary it would seem to me that by some official statement on the part of the Italian Government that it intended in no way to undertake such a policy of persecution, Italy would derive immediate benefits and a far more favorable and friendly attitude on the part of public opinion not only in the United States, but in most of the other countries of the world as well. The Ambassador said he thought this was absolutely correct and that he personally would try to do what he could to get his Government to follow such a course. He said he would see Mussolini immediately upon his arrival in Italy and that he hoped he would find that Mussolini had no intention of going so far as recent newspaper articles would seem to indicate.

  1. Secretary General of the Fascist Party.
  2. See memorandum of June 15, p. 582.