How two United States ambassadors serving President Franklin Roosevelt worked to wreck feelings of trust between Poland’s Foreign Office under Josef Beck and the government of Adolf Hitler. German Historian Dr. Alfred Schickel‘s paper “Germany and Poland in American secret documents” examines the secret memorandums and telegrams sent by Drexel Biddle, U.S. Ambassador to Poland, which contained secret conversations held by William C. Bullitt, U.S. Ambassador to France, with Josef Beck and other high-level Poles such as Marshall Ridz-Smigly. Some important points:
- Beck met three times with Ambassador to France Bullitt during his private visit to Warsaw in November 1937;
- The content of these and other
conversations were contained in four “confidential memoranda” sent by
Ambassador Biddle to Sec. of State Cordell Hull (and Roosevelt);
- Poland accepted Germany’s actions on behalf of the Sudetan Germans in Czechoslovakia in 1938, and the break-up of the Czech state, because through it she also gained autonomy for Poles in the Teschen region;
- Biddle’s secret telegram of March 29, 1939 revealed that the planned response by Beck to any specific suggestion from Berlin would now be a “dignified, polite but firm” no;
- The U.S. kept pushing the idea that
Hitler wanted to realize his plans for world domination and had to be
stopped, and that it would “help” Poland if she did so;
- The U.S. even deceived Poland about
the “Secret Additional Protocol” signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov on
Aug. 21, and so the British government signed the Anglo-Polish mutual
assistance agreement on August 25, 1939.
Click image to enlarge: William C. Bullitt, first US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1933-1936; US Ambassador to France, 1936-1940, seated in car with FDR. Bullitt played a prominent role in giving Polish diplomats the “American view” in 1938-39. His second wife, Louise Bryant, was the widow of John Reed, the famous American “Red.”
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