COLD WAR: Reaction to Yalta

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The Yalta documents struck Western Europe with the force of painful memories freshly stirred. It was not so much the news—anyone who followed events closely knew much of it—but what one newsman called "the dirty little footnotes" that leaped from headline to mind, and from tongue to tongue.

In Germany it was the jolly talk of a Big Three toast to the execution of 50,000 German officers that caught most eyes. But most Germans needed no further evidence of the wartime hatred of themselves among the Allies, and some even conceded, as did Bonn's General-Anzeiger, that "those who are outraged at the attitude of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt should not overlook the fact that Germany was partly to blame for the unhappy development." Among responsible West Germans, the most widespread reaction was the realization that all of the Allies were responsible for 1) the partition of Germany, and 2) the opening of Europe to Communist invasion. Said the Rhein-Zeitung of Koblenz: "Yalta was Stalin's great victory over the freedom of the world. The West itself held his stirrups."

The Little Biscuit. In France, the Yalta phrase that most chagrined a proud and sensitive nation was Winston Churchill's offer to throw France "a little biscuit" of an occupier's rights in Germany. The neutralist Le Monde seized on the phrase: ''The truth is that in a world where only material power counts, our pretensions at playing the fourth big power were judged ridiculous by the three others because they really were." Le Monde saw it as a parallel to Sir Winston's recent letter to Pierre Mendès-France. warning that if Paris rejected German rearmament, the Allies would once again have to proceed with an "empty chair."

In Britain, the Foreign Office had argued strongly against publication of the Yalta papers. "It is undesirable," said the Foreign Office, to publish so detailed a record "so short a time after . . . and particularly during the lifetime of many of the participants . . . Some of the ex tempore observations when taken out of context might well lead to misunderstanding." The Foreign Office was speaking for itself, it insisted, and not Churchill. The only living member of the Big Three seemed fairly unperturbed when he rose in the House of Commons to discuss the affair. But, said he, we do "not accept responsibility for the accuracy of the American version. The extracts . . . disclose some serious mistakes."

Sir Winston singled out the remark attributed to him about Poland ("I do not care much about the Poles myself"). "I do not at all accept it," he said. "My record throughout the war . . . will show with what deep sympathy I viewed the fate of the people of Poland." Churchill himself, as eminent historian, had rushed into print as fast as anyone with newly declassified material. Besides, so far as Yalta was concerned, he and Anthony Eden could take some comfort in the record; whatever his own verbal indiscretion, the fact was that only the British delegation had fought with skill for the rights of France and Poland.