740.5/12–2754
The United States High Commissioner for Germany (Conant) to the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs (Merchant)
Dear Livie: I am writing to you rather than to Cecil Lyon because I would like to have this letter highly restricted in its distribution. Indeed, if when it arrives the French Assembly have approved the Paris Treaties, it will be unnecessary for you to read it and you might well destroy it; for I am writing it in contemplation of the really desperate possibility that Mendes-France will not succeed in gaining the necessary votes today or tomorrow and therefore by the end of the week France may be without a government and the Assembly have rejected the essential part of the Paris agreements.
You will already have known how upset the Chancellor was the day before Christmas at such a possibility. As to his suggested remedy, namely that we should proceed at once along the lines of the “empty chair” philosophy, I have grave doubts. I think that some careful “readings” should be taken on the German situation before any precipitate action along these lines is set in motion, for unless our observations [Page 1527] are all wrong here, the German mood is far less satisfactory than it was even last September. This the Chancellor is well aware of, for in my conversation with him on Thursday last when the prospects in Paris seemed good, he was worried lest Mendes-France should delay the depositing of the treaties and start bargaining with the Russians. He said that as soon as the treaties were ratified by the parliaments concerned, we should proceed at once with providing arms for the German troops so there would be no delay in getting underway with the rearmament. In his conversation with me the day before Christmas when we were all so upset about the news from Paris, he emphasized the danger of German sentiment shifting to neutralism followed by a naive expectation of the outcome of negotiations with Russia.
On the other hand, I think the Chancellor quite naturally fails to realize the extent to which his own prestige and policy have been shaken by the events of the last few months and about how far the damage would have gone if Paris once again fails to take proper action. I am very worried lest the Chancellor’s prestige and that of his party will have suffered so serious a blow that we can no longer count with certainty on his effective leadership.1 In this connection a conversation I had a few weeks ago with the new Minister President of Hamburg, Sieveking, is of considerable significance. Sieveking is a newcomer on the German political scene, but a man of great experience and ability. Indeed, from what I have heard of him and what I have seen of him, he would be one of my leading candidates to succeed the Chancellor,—though whether he has as yet acquired sufficient standing among the politicians among his own party (CDU), I do not know. At all events, he said to me that there could be no question of the rearmament of Germany without full cooperation of the SPD. And remember that this was from a man who had successfully beaten in a recent and rather bitter campaign an outstanding SPD man, namely Max Brauer.
A dispatch in Saturday’s Herald Tribune from Gaston Coblenz I think very well sums up the situation here in Germany. If we are going to keep the Germans on our side, I feel we must be very careful not to do anything precipitously about rearmament. For the Social Democrats and some members of other parties might be quick to attack us and the Chancellor in a variety of ways. And when I say us, I mean both the United States and Great Britain. Of course, there would be a group of Germans who might be anxious to go down the road of a rearmament policy backed only by the U.S. and U.K., at once, but I [Page 1528] doubt if they represent the forces in Germany with whom we can cooperate for the long pull.
The strange thing about the present situation is that we are no longer concerned primarily with taking off the Allied ban against rearmament. We are concerned with the best way we can get the German people to cooperate with Great Britain and the United States in rearming.
The return of essential sovereignty is quite apart from this question of getting forward precipitously with rearmament. On this point I believe we would have the support of almost all the parties if the United States and United Kingdom were to find some method of putting the Paris Protocol into effect at once and simply walking out on the French insofar as the occupation was concerned. I should be inclined, then, to see if we could not get the SPD in some way committed to whatever policy of rearmament seemed appropriate in the altered circumstances (remembering how vulnerable we are with our establishments in the French Zone, not to mention our lines of communication in France itself). It will be difficult for us to make contact officially with the SPD without deserting the Chancellor, yet I feel strongly that if we are in a terrible second crisis, some sort of dealings with the leaders of all the parties in the Bundestag will be required. I am not prepared to make a definite recommendation on this point—certainly not at this time when the terrible prospects I am considering are purely hypothetical. The purpose is to try to tell you, and through you The Secretary, some of the complications in the German picture and some of the ways in which the situation seems to me to have become worse since the crisis in September.
I never wrote a letter which I hoped would be so much out of date when it was received. If the news from Paris has been good, I hope you will never have read as far as these few lines.
Sincerely,
- Opposite this sentence in the source text there is a handwritten marginal notation, presumably by Conant, which reads as follows: “Not that the Chancellor would be overthrown but merely that he would no longer get enthusiastic response to his proposals; the opposition would drag its heels and make difficulties at every turn including the passage of various bills necessary if an army is to come into being.”↩