740.00119 Control (Germany)/12–2845
The Secretary of War (Patterson) to the Acting Secretary of State
Dear Mr. Acheson: I received your recent undated letter92 in reply to my letter of November 21, 1945, in which I urged the State Department to bring all requisite pressures to bear upon the French Government in an effort to obtain their cooperation in implementing the mandate of the Berlin Protocol concerning the establishment of central administrative machinery in Germany.
I have read with interest the report on the Franco-American conversations which you were good enough to inclose in your letter, and I have noted your statement that the French delegation is currently discussing the subject of the Ruhr-Rhineland regime in Moscow.
With respect to my request for guidance from the State Department concerning the areas which will be left to Germany and for which a [Page 923] peace-time economy must be planned, I note your statement that you cannot, at this time, give a categorical answer. In this connection, I invite your attention to a memorandum prepared in the Department of State, entitled “The Reparation Settlement and the Peacetime Economy of Germany”,93 which was transmitted to me by the Secretary of State on November 30, 1945. In paragraph 4 of that memorandum, the State Department advised that, for the purpose of determining the industrial capacity of the peace-time German economy, “it should be assumed that the geographical limits of Germany are those in conformity with provisions of the Berlin Protocol, i.e., those of the Altreich, less the territory east of the Oder-Neisse line”. This guidance has been transmitted to the Office of Military Government for Germany. In the light of the comment in your letter that you cannot give a categorical answer to the War Department concerning this important matter, I should appreciate confirmation of the guidance furnished in the memorandum transmitted by the State Department on November 30, 1945.
In accordance with the last paragraph of your letter, the War Department will be pleased to transmit appropriate instructions to the Office of Military Government for Germany after receipt from you of advice that the French conversations in Moscow have been completed. However, as I pointed out in my letter of November 21, 1945, and again in my letter of December 10, 1945, in which I called to your attention the recommendation of Mr. Byron Price that the full force and prestige of American diplomatic power be used to break the present dead-lock in the Allied Control Council for Germany, the War Department is gravely disturbed by the danger that continued refusal of the French Government to agree to the establishment of central administrative machinery in Germany may result in a breakdown of the provisions of the Berlin Protocol with respect to treatment of Germany as an economic unit.
Sincerely yours,
- Reference is presumably to Mr. Acheson’s letter of December 12, p. 919.↩
- Released to the press on December 12, and printed in Department of State Bulletin, December 16, 1945, p. 960, and in Department of State, U.S. Economic Policy toward Germany (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1948), p. 93.↩