740.00116 European War 1939/571: Telegram
The Acting Secretary of State to the Ambassador in the United Kingdom (Winant)
4850. Your 5532, October 4, 3 p.m.34 and previous. With the President’s return I hasten to send you the following:
Text submitted to the President is acceptable to us and may be announced as having joint support of United States and Great Britain. We had previously advised Lord Halifax that we were agreeable to an announcement, concurrent with that concerning the Fact Finding Commission, of our intention to have armistice terms contain provision for the capture or surrender of wanted criminals. We prefer that Commission be called “United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes” rather than “United Nations Commission on Atrocities.”
The President desires that a statement to the following effect be made simultaneously with the proposed announcement:
That the U. S. Government and the British Government have no intention of executing Germans wholesale, that they believe the German people will understand that the two Governments are only desirous of punishing the ringleaders in Germany for the commission of [Page 59] atrocities which have violated every Christian tenet and those individuals among the German people who have in fact been responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent persons, that punishment would be meted out only to the individuals responsible for these murders and atrocities and that obviously the number of individuals eventually found guilty would be small in relation to the total population of Germany.
The President believes it essential that a clear-cut statement of this character be made to prevent the implication that the Allied Governments intend to undertake mass executions. Such a statement will be issued here on October 7th concurrently with that contemplated in the House of Lords. Please advise exact hour. Text will be sent as soon as possible.
- Not printed; it quoted a letter from the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs similar in content to the telegram from the British Foreign Office to the British Embassy, the substance of which is given in the memorandum printed supra.↩