Conference files, lot 60 D 627, CF 210: Telegram
No. 428
The United States
Delegation at the Berlin Conference to the Department of State1
Secto 92. Department pass OSD. Following is text Secretary’s statement eleventh plenary, February 5:2
“Since our meeting yesterday,3 I have read the transcript of Mr. Molotov’s remarks and have studied his proposal.4 I can still find no encouraging interpretation of what we heard yesterday afternoon.
The basic impression which strikes me is this: Mr. Molotov is afraid of genuinely free elections in the East Zone. He is afraid that the 18 million Germans in the East Zone, if given a chance to speak, would overwhelmingly reject the present imposed regime. Mr. Molotov has good reason to be afraid.
Consequently, the Soviet Foreign Minister has categorically rejected the proposals for genuinely free elections which have been put forward by the Western powers. In its place he proposes his own blueprint. In the name of peace, he proposes a method for extending the solid Soviet bloc to the Rhine. In the name of what he calls democracy, he has set forth the classic Communist pattern for extinguishing democracy as that word has been understood for 2000 years.
The cornerstone of the Soviet proposal is the so-called government of the German Democratic Republic. That government was [Page 971] put in office by Soviet power. It was confirmed in office by Soviet power. If it had not been for elements of 22 Soviet divisions, including tanks and armored cars, it would have been forcibly ejected from power by the workers who in their desperation rose up against it last June.
It is that regime which under the Soviet plan would negotiate on a basis of equality with the government of the German Federal Republic. However, the scales are to be still further weighted in favor of the Soviet puppet regime, because it is provided by the Soviet plan these initial negotiations shall also involve ‘wide participation of democratic organizations’.
In the Soviet dictionary the words ‘democratic organizations’ have a clear, precise meaning. They mean those front organizations—captive trade unions, youth organizations, women’s organizations—which promote the Communist purposes without openly presenting themselves to the people in their true guise.
It is under these auspices that there would be prepared the ‘all-German electoral law’, and the establishment of election conditions.
We can visualize in advance the type of elections upon which the East German regime would insist because we already know those conditions from its past. I have already told of the election conditions which were established in East Germany where the voters were compelled by armed force and penalties to go to the polls and, when there, were compelled to put in the ballot box a list of names which had been previously prepared for them and which was made public only on election day.
Indeed, the Soviet plan expressly stipulates in Communist language that the election conditions would in fact be what they were in the Soviet Zone. The election must be so conducted as to assure its so-called ‘democratic’ character. It must provide for the participation ‘of all democratic organizations’. It must preclude ‘pressure upon voters by big monoplies’, and it must exclude from voting privilege any organizations which by Soviet standards are of a Fascist or militaristic nature.
If we take the tragic pattern which has spread all over Eastern Europe in the wake of the Red armies, it does not require much wit to see what that means. It means that anyone who dares to express the slightest doubt concerning Communism is automatically deemed a Fascist or a militarist or a monopolist.
If this system were to be applied to Western Germany, no organization opposing the Communists or the policies of the Soviet Communists, which are the same thing, would be permitted to take part in the elections.
[Page 972]It would only be the Communist Party and the Communist front organizations which under Mr. Molotov’s plan would participate in the elections.
I have no doubt that the Soviet Foreign Minister would protest that his plan does not really involve the Sovietization of Western Germany.
I recall that in the October 1939 speech to which I have already referred, the Soviet Foreign Minister explained that the mutual assistance pacts which he had recently negotiated with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania ‘no way implies any interference on the part of the Soviet Union …5 as some foreign newspapers are trying to make out. … we declare that all the nonsensical talk about the Sovietization of the Baltic countries is only to the interest of our common enemies and of all anti-Soviet provocateurs.’
The memory of what happened within a few months to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and of having seen that same pattern extend to the countries of Eastern Europe by the use of the methods which the Soviet proposal prescribes for Germany, will, I hope, explain some skepticism at the Soviet proposals for restoring freedom to Germany.
Mr. Molotov is too intelligent to believe that the people or government of West Germany would accept his proposals or that the three Western powers would suggest that they do so. The Western German Bundestag, representing 70 percent of the entire German people, has unanimously refused to accept the East German regime as having any legitimate status or right to speak for the people of East Germany.”
- Repeated to Bonn, London, Paris, Moscow, Vienna, and CINCEUR.↩
- For records of the eleventh plenary, see Sectos 95 and 96, Document 426 and supra.↩
- For records of the tenth plenary of Feb. 4, see Sectos 86 and 87, Documents 419 and 420.↩
- FPM(54)33, Document 514.↩
- Ellipses in this paragraph are in the source text.↩