761.62/1011
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Under Secretary of State (Welles)
The Minister of Sweden28 called to see me this morning at his request having been away for three weeks on a vacation.
The Minister discussed in general terms the present situation in Germany and in Italy and expressed the belief that the situation in Germany was fast reaching the cracking point. I told him I knew that some of his own officials in Stockholm were beginning to get reports of this character.
The Minister said he was continuously disquieted by reason of the persistent rumors that the Soviet Union would make a separate peace with Germany. I said that of course in critical days like these rumors of every kind and description persisted, but that in the present case I need hardly remind him that the Soviet Union was a signatory of the United Nations Declaration29 which pledged all of the United Nations not to enter into a separate armistice or peace. I added that from recent information which had come to me I was inclining to the [Page 685] belief that the Soviet Government was tending towards a policy of international cooperation which Stalin and his associates were beginning to think would be far more conducive to the interests of the Soviet Union in the post-war period than the policy of isolation and withdrawal which they had pursued in the years up to 1939. The Minister said he hoped this would prove to be the case since he regarded the issue under discussion as the biggest issue before the world today, the satisfactory answer to which involved continued independence and security for every small power of Europe.
- Wollmar Filip Boström.↩
- Signed on January 1, 1942, Foreign Relations, 1942, vol. i, p. 25.↩