Office of the Historian

862.01/300: Telegram

The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Standley)

Washington, July 30, 1943—10 p.m.

626. Reference your 925, July 23, 10 a.m. In view of the importance attached by the Department to the establishment of the Free Germany Committee50 in Moscow and of the possible far-reaching repercussions from this move please keep the Department currently informed of any developments indicating the nature of Soviet interest in the Committee as well as of any indications that similar other European national groups have been or are being formed in the Soviet Union.

The following background information gives rise to the belief that perhaps the establishment of the Committee was not primarily and solely a move in psychological warfare and that it might be part of a concerted plan which the Soviet authorities have been building up for some time and is connected with the establishment of the Union of Polish Patriots,51 the dissolution of the Comintern, and other moves made or contemplated with regard to various European countries:

1.
The paragraph in Stalin’s Order of the Day of November 6, 194252 in which he states that “we have no such task as the annihilation of every organized military force in Germany . . . .53 But the Hitlerite army can and must be destroyed.”
2.
An article in the New York Daily Worker of December 13, 1943 [1942] entitled “There is a Way Out”, quoting a Moscow broadcast in the German language which was almost a paraphrase of the Free Germany manifesto of July 21, 1943. This article appealed to “all Germans from workers to noblemen, from the private to the general” to turn on the Hitlerites and bring about the salvation of Germany.
3.
Reports which have appeared in Communist papers in this country in January and February 1943 of an alleged clandestine meeting in the Rhineland which also issued an appeal to Germans similar to [Page 558] the Moscow manifesto. This Rhineland conference was reported only in Communist papers which maintained that they had heard of it through broadcasts from a secret German station.
4.
Indications given by Stalin and other Soviet officials (i.e. Stalin’s Order of the Day, May 1, 194354) emphasizing that they desire only the liquidation of Hitlerites, apparently meaning the closest collaborators of Hitler.

Hull
  1. In telegram No. 591, July 22, 9 p.m., the Department had already asked the Embassy for “all available information and comment” on this new development (862.01/318c).↩
  2. The first congress of this organization of Communist-sympathetic Poles, sponsored by the Soviet Union, opened in Moscow on June 8, 1943, and exchanged letters with Stalin as reported in Pravda, June 17.↩
  3. For comments on the speech by Stalin on this day, see telegram No. 438, November 8, 1942, from the Chargé in the Soviet Union, Foreign Relations, 1942, vol. iii, p. 475.↩
  4. Omission indicated in the original telegram.↩
  5. See telegram No. 388, May 2, 11 a.m., from the Ambassador in the Soviet Union, p. 519.↩