500.A15A4 General Committee/763
The Ambassador in France (Straus) to the Secretary of State
[Received January 31.]
Sir: I have the honor to transmit herewith five copies each of the German reply31 to the French Memorandum and a translation thereof, [Page 10] the former having been obtained confidentially by a member of the staff of the Embassy from M. Jean Paul-Boncour at the Foreign Office.
M. Paul-Boncour was particularly anxious that the information contained in the memorandum should be considered both by the Embassy and by the Department of State as strictly confidential, and that in the event that Ambassador de Laboulaye should present the Department with a summary of the Memorandum, he should not be told that the full text had been forwarded from here.
The impression at the Foreign Office as to the tone of the German reply appears to be one of disillusion despite an optimistic message to the press delivered this morning by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The feeling apparently exists that the German Government, in “taking act” of the concessions made by the French Government in the note transmitted to the German Foreign Office by M. François-Poncet on January 1, 1934, offers practically nothing in return; in short, that the German claims32 are practically those of February 1932, with no concessions offered in return and that an impasse, insofar as disarmament is concerned, has been reached. A written answer to the German Memorandum may possibly be made to Berlin but the impression was gathered that, in view of the substance and tone of the German reply, this would only serve to prolong a futile discussion. The French Ambassador may, however, be instructed to continue verbal representations.
M. Paul-Boncour added that there was still some hope as the Foreign Office had reason to believe that the British Government, which had finally received elucidations from Berlin in answer to the specific inquiries made by Sir Eric Phipps33 on December 20, 1933,34 was in the course of preparing another plan which might be a more “intelligent” one than that previously submitted by Premier Mac-Donald. In the preparation of such a plan it was possible that the British might consult France and perhaps the United States. A rumor in this connection is current today that Sir John Simon has been pressing for a Four-Power meeting in Paris, but that the French Government is averse to such tactics in view of the tenor and substance of the German Memorandum.
M. Paul-Boncour felt that France remains in a reasonably strong position as she is now on record as having made definite concessions with regard to disarmament and that the responsibility for any future [Page 11] failure to continue negotiations must inevitably rest with the German Government.
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Respectfully yours,
- Great Britain, Cmd. 4512, p. 8.↩
- Conference Documents, vol. i, pp. 119–122; for correspondence concerning German claims, see Foreign Relations, 1932, vol. i, pp. 42–48 passim.↩
- British Ambassador to Germany.↩
- See telegram No. 213, December 22, 1933, from the Ambassador in Germany, Foreign Relations, 1933, vol. i, p. 348.↩