Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1943, The British Commonwealth, Eastern Europe, the Far East, Volume III

760C.61/1006

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

[Washington,] February 19, 1943.

The Polish Ambassador called to see me this afternoon at his urgent request. The Ambassador handed me the document attached herewith⁴⁴ and indicated that the date of February 7, mentioned as the date when the Soviet Ambassador to the governments in exile in London handed this communication to the Polish Foreign Minister, should be February 17.

The Ambassador requested that I transmit this communication to the President and I said I would be glad to do so.⁴⁵

The Ambassador reminded me that the so-called “Peoples’ Assemblies” mentioned in the Soviet communication had been constituted in the following manner:

When the Soviet Union invaded Eastern Poland, after the German onslaught on Western Poland, the Soviet military commanders and political commissars who accompanied them had in their possession lists of the inhabitants of each district of Eastern Poland. In each district one or two hundred of the leading anti-communist members of the so-called capitalistic groups were executed and the leading members of the population believed to be unsympathetic to the Soviet Union were rounded up for eventual deportation from Soviet territory; thereafter a carefully prepared list of leading communist sympathizers were ordered to form themselves into a “Peoples’ Assembly” and then were told to adopt unanimously a resolution previously prepared for them expressing the hope that the community in which they lived would be permitted to be incorporated in the Soviet territory. The Ambassador said that this was the only procedure adopted by which the so-called Peoples’ Assemblies were permitted to voice their “freely expressed will”.

I told the Ambassador that in my judgment, since Mr. Eden was due to arrive next week and in view of Mr. Churchill’s illness, it would probably be better to discuss this entire problem with the British Government through Mr. Eden upon his arrival.⁴⁶

S[umner] W[elles]

44. Not printed; it was copy of a note handed to the Polish Foreign Minister on February 17 by the Soviet Ambassador to the Allied Governments in Exile, at London. The Soviet note sharply rejected the Polish note of January 26, which had protested the imposition of Soviet citizenship on Poles in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. The text of the Soviet note of February 17, with the translation varying somewhat from that in the document referred to here, is printed in Polish-Soviet Relations, 1918–1943, Official Documents, p. 173.
45. The Under Secretary transmitted the note to President Roosevelt on February 19.
46. No record has been found of any discussion of this aspect of Polish-Soviet relations in conversations of United States officials with Anthony Eden during his visit to Washington, March 12–30, 1943.