Editor’s Note
—The text of the Protocol, as released to the public by the Department of State on March 24, 1947,1 was developed in three distinct stages, as follows:
- Stage 1. From the preparation of a draft Protocol by the Protocol Subcommittee of the Conference to the end of the Conference. According to the minutes of the Thirteenth Plenary Meeting, August 1, 1945 (ante, page 596), the three Heads of Government merely signed “top copies” to which the perfected texts of the Protocol were to be attached, and appointed a committee, consisting of a representative of each of the three Delegations, to “compare texts”.1a The United States original of the Protocol as it left the Conference (i. e., the text as it stood at the end of Stage 1) consists of a one-sentence “top document”, dated August 1, 1945, and signed by Stalin, Truman, and Attlee, to which there is fastened by a wire staple the “Protocol of the Proceedings of the Berlin Conference”, part of which is typewritten and part of which is in mimeographed form, and on the face of which a number of manuscript changes and corrections had been made. The text printed below is the text as it stood at the end of Stage 1.1b
- Stage 2. After the United States original of the Protocol reached Washington, but before its text was publicly released, it became apparent that certain editorial corrections had not been made and that certain decisions of the Heads of Government with respect to the Protocol and the Communiqué had not been reflected in changes in the Protocol. A number of changes falling within these categories were then made on the United States original of the Protocol.
- Stage 3. Immediately before the publication of the Protocol in a Department of State press release, the United States text of the Protocol was checked against a British text of the same document, and [Page 1478] further changes were introduced to bring the United States text into harmony with the British text. These changes, however, were not entered on the face of the United States original.
The text printed below (the text as it stood at the end of Stage 1) is annotated to show (a) manuscript changes made on the signed original during Stage 1 and (b) changes introduced in Stages 2 and 3.1c
- Department of State press release No. 238 of March 24, 1947, as corrected by a sheet of corrigenda of the same date.↩
- Assistant Secretary of State James Clement Dunn represented the United States on the committee to “compare texts”. A copy of the Protocol (without the one-sentence “top document”) bearing manuscript changes and corrections, many of them in Dunn’s handwriting, is in the Department’s files (file No. 740.00119 Potsdam/8–245). Many of the changes and corrections entered on this copy (hereafter referred to as Dunn’s working copy of the Protocol) were not, however, entered at Babelsberg on the United States original of the Protocol, i.e., the copy to which the signed “top document” was stapled, although it was presumably intended that they were to be so entered.↩
- In identifying the Stage 1 text the editors used a photostatic copy of the United States original made in the Department of State on November 5, 1946, before the Stage 2 changes had been made on that document.↩
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Except that variations in punctuation, spelling, and capitalization which occurred in Stage 3, and minor variations in Stage 3 which were obviously the result of typographical errors, have not been annotated.
In the footnotes which follow, an asterisk (*) indicates that the United States text, as changed, is in harmony with the text published by the British Government in 1947. A dagger (†) indicates that the United States text, as changed, is in harmony with the Russian text published by the Soviet Government in 1955. (For full citations to the British and Soviet texts referred to, see ante, pp. xxix , xxx .) There remain, however, both editorial and substantive differences between the United States, British, and Soviet texts. Attention is called to the principal remaining substantive differences in the footnotes which follow.
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