Office of the Historian

860C.01/674a: Telegram

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

Washington, January 24, 1944—7 p.m.

141. The three persons from the United States named by Molotov29 as possible candidates for posts in a reconstituted Polish Government30 [Page 1399] are apparently Professor Oscar Lange, Leo Krzycki and the Reverend Stanislaus Orlemanski. These three persons have been very active in recent months in connection with the setting up in Detroit of the Kosciuszko League31 whose program is distinctly pro-Soviet. This organization has received prominent, favorable criticism in the Daily Worker32 and other left-wing periodicals here and it has been particularly outspoken in its criticism of the Polish Government-in-exile.

The Department has obtained the following biographic information on these persons:

1.
Oscar Lange was born in Poland in 1904 and was a lecturer at Krakow University for a short time before proceeding to the United States in 1937. Since that time he has been teaching economics at the University of Chicago and was naturalized as an American citizen on October 6, 1943.
2.
Leo Krzycki was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1881; is Vice President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (CIO)33 and National Chairman of the American Slav Congress.
3.
Reverend Stanislaus Orlemanski was born at Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1889 and is at present pastor of a Roman Catholic Church in Springfield, Massachusetts. He recently made an extensive speaking tour in the Middle West and Canada appealing for support in Polish communities for closer collaboration with the Soviet Union.

Hull
  1. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union.↩
  2. See telegram 183, January 18, from Moscow, p. 1230.↩
  3. The Kosciuszko Polish Patriotic League was organized on November 6, 1943. It was named after Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746–1817), a participant in the American Revolution, and leader of the Polish uprising in 1794, culminating in the third partition of Poland in 1795.↩
  4. Communist Party newspaper published in New York City.↩
  5. Congress for Industrial Organization.↩