860F.00/9–346: Telegram
The Ambassador in Czechoslovakia (Steinhardt) to the Secretary of State
[Received 6:20 p.m.]
1601. Re my 1599, August 30.4 It should be borne in mind that although the United States supported Czechoslovak request at Potsdam for expulsion of Sudeten Germans5 and has loyally abided by [Page 185] decision authorizing their expulsion and is accepting 70% of expellees into American zone, Germany, Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, including highly placed government officials and left wing press, have at all times given exclusive credit for the Potsdam decision to the Soviet Union even going so far as to repeatedly state publicly that United States accepted the decision reluctantly under pressure from Soviet Government. Insofar as I am aware, no official of Czechoslovak Government and none of moderate newspapers have had the courage to give United States much credit for Potsdam decision although on two or three occasions, the moderate press has taken issue with left wing press as to the numbers of expellees accepted into the American and Soviet zones reacting particularly vigorously to a speech by Kopecky, Communist Minister of Information, in which he charged that while the Soviets had accepted a million expellees and were receiving 9,000 daily, the “Anglo-Americans” had broken their promise and had accepted only about 200,000.
Sent Department 1601; repeated Paris 159.
- Not printed; it transmitted a translation of a portion of a recent speech by Prime Minister Gottwald wherein he commented on Slav solidarity in supporting the Czechoslovak government’s efforts to evacuate its German and Hungarian minorities (860F.00/8–3046).↩
- See Foreign Relations, The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference), 1945, vol. i, pp. 643–650; ibid., vol. ii, pp. 398–399, 1495, 1511.↩