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For many years, since his courtship of Bess Wallace beginning in 1910, when Truman was a farmer near Grandview, Missouri (which as a crow might fly was 15 miles from Independence where Bess lived), the president had been accustomed to writing longhand letters to her. He sent letters every time he was away from Bess and that included his time at the Potsdam Conference. It is interesting that he sent the letters from Babelsberg by diplomatic pouch to Washington, whereupon-- affixed with five-cent, air-mail stamps--they went by ordinary mail to Independence. If a spy, Russian or Japanese, had wished to know what was happening in Potsdam, he or she had only to steal the president's letters from the mailbags. Berlin, July 31, 1945 Dear Bess:
SOURCE: Box 9, papers relating to family, business, and personal affairs. NOTES: *1. In regard to German reparations, agreed upon at Yalta in a hedged and general way, it was decided at Potsdam that a reparations committee should be set up, with instructions that "the Soviet Union and the United States believed that the Reparations Commission should take as a basis of discussion the figure of reparations as twenty billion dollars and fifty percent of these should go to the Soviet Union." The British opposed naming any reparations figure and managed also to write into the instructions a statement of purpose, "to destroy the German war potential," rather than the more broadly phrased Russian statement, "for the purpose of military and economic disarmament of Germany." Because of the division of Germany into zones, each occupying power - Russian, American, British, and French-tended to control reparations within its zone. For a short time the Soviets obtained reparations from the U.S. zone and then they were stopped.*2. At both the Yalta and Potsdam conferences the issue of Poland loomed: What should be the nature of the postwar Polish government? During the war the Polish government-in-exile in London had proved too antiRussian, so the Soviets claimed, because in 1943 it proposed an international investigation of the German contention that the thousands upon thousands of Polish officers, whose bodies were found buried in the forest of Katyn, had been shot by the Soviet secret police. The Soviets thereupon broke relations and established what became known as the Lublin Committee, which the Russians installed in Poland after they entered that country's territory in the latter stages of the war. A compromise reached at Yalta was the establishment of the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity, supposedly an amalgam of the government-in-exile and the Lublin Committee but in fact Lublin dominated. The United States then recognized this new regime, with which the Soviets made a private arrangement by giving the Poles a slice of their apportioned zone of Germany, the important industrial territory (containing the city of Breslau, or Wroczlaw) between the eastern and western branches of the Neisse River. *3. Truman had left the United States for the Potsdam Conference by taking a ship from Newport News to Antwerp. By flying to Plymouth he saved time. It was off Plymouth, after embarkation aboard the heavy cruiser Augusta, that Truman received King George VI, who first greeted the president aboard a Royal Navy battleship. |
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