740.00112 European War 1939/1744
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Acting Chief of the Division of European Affairs (Atherton)
The German Chargé d’Affaires called this morning by appointment and delivered to me the attached translation of a note addressed by the German Government to the seafaring neutral nations.48 He pointed out that a similar note would not be addressed to the United States because the question had already been taken care of by this Government through its neutrality legislation.49 It will be noted that the Germans define a danger zone which is roughly the combat zone determined by the President’s proclamations in pursuance of the Neutrality Act. In brief this runs from the French Brittany coast out into the Atlantic, then north and east between the Shetland and Faroe Islands half way in the North Sea towards the coast of Norway and from there down to the port of Ostend. At the same time that he gave me this translation the German Chargé d’Affaires made the following oral statement to me:
“I have been instructed by my Government to advise the Government of the United States that any assurances of safe conduct in respect of individual American vessels given prior to the date of this notification will remain valid. As far as the German Government is able to ascertain, there are, however, at this time, no vessels with a German guarantee of safe conduct in the area defined in the notification of the present note.”
I immediately stated that this raised in my mind the question of the American Legion. He said he also had thought of this but he had no knowledge that we had addressed a note to the German Government on the subject of the voyage of the American Legion and he assumed the route of this ship lay well to the north, presumably north of Iceland. I said that we had indeed advised the German Government through our Embassy in Berlin as to the voyage of the American Legion and had a reply quoting a Note Verbale which had been delivered by the German Foreign Office on August 16. He did not ask the contents of this note nor did I ask him whether he had knowledge of it; but he said he would inform his Government that he had visited the State Department in this connection today and that the immediate question had been raised by the State Department of this danger zone and the route of the American Legion, which had been the subject of discussion between the American Embassy and the Berlin Foreign Office.
- Not printed.↩
- See Foreign Relations, 1939, vol. i, pp. 656 ff.↩