Letter from Senator Walter George to President Harry S. Truman, with a Draft Reply

Draft ARCHIVES Dear Walter: I appreciated very much your letter of the fifth regarding the tractors to be delivered to UNRRA. I am having that whole allocation of material for UNRRA investigated with a view to cutting off those things that are short in this country. I also appreciate your viewpoint on Palestine, but I sincerely wish that every member of the Congress could visit the displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria and see just what is happening to Five Hundred Thousand human beings through no fault of their own. We must make every effort to get these people properly located - only about twenty percent of them are Jews, the others are people from the Baltic States, Poland, Yugoslavia and other countries behind the iron curtain. A great many of them fought nn our side in the war and yet they are not able to go home because of conditions in some of those countries brought about by their present occupation. We have a large number of fliers who fought in our army and who are citizens of Yugoslavia - they can't go home because as soon as they set foot in that country they will be shot. There ought to be some place for these people to go - I am trying to find that place for them. There isn't a reason in the world why one hundred thousand Jews couldn't go into Palestine, nor is there any reason why we couldn't allow the unused quotas of northern Europe to be used to allow the entry of some of these displaced persons into our country.