Office of the Historian

740.0011 E.W./4–2645

Memorandum of Conversation, by the Acting Secretary of State

[Washington,] April 27, 1945.

While I was at the White House this morning I showed the President telegram 1565, April 26, 8 p.m., from Minister Johnson in Stockholm5 concerning negotiations between a representative of the Swedish Government and Himmler’s representative to discuss the possibility of all Germans in Denmark and Norway surrendering to the Swedes in Sweden.6 The Swedes would undertake not to turn German troops over to Soviet Russia but would intern them for the Inter-Allied Commission and they would also endeavor to arrange that 20,000 Russian prisoners of war now held by the Germans in Norway would be returned to Russia via Sweden. The President was keenly interested and said he thought that this made sense.

Joseph C. Grew
  1. Not printed.↩
  2. The negotiations involving Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, and Major General (Brigadefuehrer) Walter Schellenberg regarding the surrender of German armed forces in Norway and Denmark to Swedish custody during April 1945 are discussed in Forrest C. Pogue, The Supreme Command, in the official Army history United States Army in World War II: The European Theater of Operations (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1954), pp. 476–477.↩