711.52/12–1545

The Spanish Ministry for Foreign Affairs to the American Embassy in Spain 39

[Translation]
Note Verbale
No. 1007

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs presents its compliments to the American Embassy and regrets to have to call again its attention to the attitude of the Press Section of the Embassy concerning the publication of the so-called Semanário gráfico de la Embajada de los Estados Unidos.

[Page 698]

Indeed, in its November 29 issue the Bulletin transcribes an article of the New York Herald Tribune of November 26 in connection with the secret correspondence between Franco, Hitler and Mussolini which was found in Germany and sent from there to the Department of State.40

This Ministry would have nothing to object against the transcription of that article in the Semanario if it would not be a specially tendentious and offensive comment against the Chief of the Spanish State, and, as this Ministry cannot believe that one of the purposes of the aforesaid Bulletin of information is to attack the Chief of the State to whom your Embassy is accredited, it has no doubts that that diplomatic Mission will be good enough to repeat the necessary instructions to the cited Press Section in order to avoid that acts of serious discourtesy—as those which on two occasions the Ministry has had to point out—are repeated in the future.

  1. Copy transmitted to the Department in despatch 1319, December 15, 1945; received January 2, 1946.
  2. Selections from this correspondence were published by the Department of State in a booklet entitled The Spanish Government and the Axis, European Series No. 8 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1946). Additional papers through 1941 appear in Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, series D, vol. xi (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1960).