740.00119 (Potsdam)/7–2445
Memorandum by the Ambassador to the Soviet Union (Harriman)
Memorandum of Conversation
Subject: Poland
Mr. Bierut presented on behalf of the Polish Delegation the basis of the Polish claims to the German territory as far as the Oder–Lower Neisse line along the general lines of his presentation to the Foreign Ministers.3 The President explained that he had great interest in Poland and its future and would do all he could to see that they got justice; on the other hand in frankness he pointed out that he did not like the arbitrary manner in which the boundary question was being handled by the Soviet and Polish governments.
He explained that the title would not be valid unless approved at the peace settlement and that a disagreement would be a source of trouble in the future. In answer to Bierut’s argument that it was German territory that was being taken, the President pointed out that under agreement there were four occupying countries responsible for the entire territory of Germany and that he did not wish to have a fifth. He further pointed out that France might wish the Ruhr and the Rhineland but that there was no question of any territory in the western part of Germany being given to France until the matter could be considered in an orderly way with full allied agreement.4
Mr. Bierut said that he understood the legal point of view but that there were many homeless people who had to be settled in the new territory which all agreed Poland was to have in compensation for the loss of territory in the East. He spoke of the 4,000,000 Poles [Page 357] east of the Curzon Line5 and 3,000,000 Poles in Germany or in western Europe.
The conversation ended with a statement by the President that the boundary question must be determined at the peace settlement and that it could not be settled here. As the Poles were fifteen minutes late, having been with Prime Minister Churchill,6 and as the President had a meeting of the Big Three, the conversation lasted only fifteen to twenty minutes.
- See ante, pp. 332–333, and the map facing p. 1152, post.↩
- Cf. ante, pp. 208, 211.↩
- See the map facing p. 748 in vol. i. For the origin and a description of the Curzon Line, see Foreign Relations, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. xiii, pp. 793–794.↩
- For an account of the meeting with Churchill, see Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 661; Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy, p. 408.↩