Editorial Note
Following a conference in Warsaw on June 23 and 24, 1948, apparently convened at the initiative of the Soviet and Polish Governments, [Page 371] the Foreign Ministers of the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, and Hungary issued a Declaration regarding the decisions of the London Conference on Germany. For the text of the Declaration, see Carlyle, Documents on International Affairs, page 566, The Soviet Union and the Berlin Question, page 32, or Poland, Germany and European Peace, page 17. For the text of Foreign Minister Modzelewski’s speech to the Polish Sejm on June 26 regarding the Warsaw Declaration, see ibid., page 25, or Zygmunt Modzelewski, Polityka Zagraniczna Polski (Warsaw, 1960), page 120. In his airgram A–972, July 9, 1948, from Warsaw, not printed, Chargé Edward Crocker reported in part as follows on the comments made by Ludwik Leszczynski, Head of the American Section of the Polish Foreign Ministry, regarding the Warsaw Conference of Foreign Ministers:
“The sole purpose of the meeting was to discuss the German problem and the decisions of the London conference on the subject. The communiqué issued at the conclusion of the deliberations represented the only real achievement of the conference. There were no secret or supplementary agreements reached, although there did take place some informal exchanges of views between the Foreign Ministers present on a few subjects which Doctor Leszczynski did not mention.…
“The communiqué issued by the Foreign Ministers was drafted exclusively by three Polish Foreign Office officials who are experts on Germany. When the draft was completed the three authors, accompanied by Doctor Leszczynski, took the document to the conference for examination by the Foreign Ministers. Molotov made two or three minor changes in phraseology. The Bulgarian Foreign Minister [Vasil Kolarov] objected to several points in the draft, but he was overruled by Molotov. The others had no comments or suggestions to make.” (740.00119 Council/7–948)