Office of the Historian

740.0011 Moscow/10–1943

U.S. Proposal With Regard to Questions of Reparations

undated

Conference Document No. 39

1. Purpose of reparations.

We believe that reparations policy should be formulated with a view to speeding economic recovery and achieving the economic peace aims of the United Nations; that Germany should be required to contribute goods and services to the recovery of the Allied countries in so far as that (a) is acceptable to such countries, (b) does not injure third countries, and (c) can be done without so affecting Germany’s living standards and productive plant as to create serious economic and political problems; and that reparations should be considered as one of a series of measures of economic reconstruction and so should be judged by the contribution they can make to the establishment of the kind of world economy desired by the United Nations.

2. General reparations principles.

In order to achieve the above purpose, it is suggested that reparations policy should conform to the following principles:

(a)
Reparations should be imposed on Germany to the extent that, and in the forms that, they may reasonably be expected to contribute to the strengthening of the post-war world economic and political order.
(b)
German reparations obligations should not be expressed in terms of money; reparations obligations should be in terms of goods and services; this would not preclude the statement of certain of Germany’s reparations obligations in terms of sums of money expendable by claimant countries only within Germany for specific kinds of goods.
(c)
Germany’s reparations obligations should be stated in terms of specific amounts of goods or services of specific types that the claimant countries are willing to accept.
(d)
The claimant countries should share in the total reparations exacted from Germany in proportion to their losses of non-military property resulting from military operations or the action of German occupation forces.
(e)
The period of Germany’s reparations obligations should be limited to a period coinciding as closely as possible with the time required for the first stage of European reconstruction.
(f)
Reparations should not be relied on as a major instrument of control over Germany’s military power.

3. Commission on German Reparations.

It is suggested that a Commission on German Reparations, composed initially of representatives of the Governments of the U.S.S.R., the United Kingdom and the United States, with provision for the representation of other directly interested Governments, be established in the relatively near future. The Commission would be [Page 741] guided by general principles such as those set forth above, and this would be made clear at the time the establishment of the Commission was announced. In the light of governing principles agreed upon by the Governments concerned, the main tasks of the Commission would be (a) to estimate, as soon as possible, after Germany’s surrender, the total amount of reparations, broken down into kinds and amounts of specific goods and services; (b) to recommend how this total, by specific categories, should be divided among the claimant countries; and, after formal approval of the Commission’s recommendations, (c) to supervise the discharge by Germany of the reparations obligations finally imposed on that country.

This discussion does not include the subject of restitution.