Leahy Papers: Telegram
No. 147
The President’s Adviser and Assistant (Hopkins) to the President
1
priority
Top secret for the President only from Hopkins.
Stalin on two occasions has emphasized the importance of planning at once for the organization of the peace conference insofar as [Page 161] it relates to Europe. He apparently is thinking about a formal conference and emphasized that the Allies were not properly prepared at Versailles and that we should not make that mistake again. He will bring this up at your forthcoming meeting.
Some days ago we reminded Stalin that he made a speech3 in which he said that he did not favor the dismemberment of Germany. … Stalin stated that it was his understanding that both Great Britain and the United States were opposed to dismemberment. I undertook to tell him that this [was] not the case, that while you had made no final decision in regard to this, the United States considered this an open question and that you would surely want to thrash this out at your next meeting. … He then said that he would keep an open mind in regard to it and that dismemberment was a matter which the three Allies must settle amongst themselves.
… You can be sure that at your meeting Stalin will have some pretty specific proposals to make about prisoners of war, and more particularly, I believe, about war criminals. …
- Sent by the United States Naval Attaché Moscow, via Navy channels. Cf. document No. 26. Text communicated to the Secretary of State by Leahy in a memorandum of May 31 (file No. 740.00119 Control (Germany)/5–3145).↩
- For a paraphrase of the full text of the body of this message, see Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins , pp. 904–905.↩
- See document No. 26, footnote 7.↩