Letter from Edwin Pauley to President Harry S. Truman

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA # file ALLIED COMMISSION ON REPARATIONS OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE June 12, 1945 S. TRUMAN HARRY "NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS LIBRARY 85.C U.S. SERVICE" My dear Mr. President: GOVERNMENT Through a chance misunderstanding of flight instructions on the part of Soviet authorities, my planes landed in Berlin on June 11th while enroute from Paris to Moscow. We remained grounded for about three hours. During that interval the Soviet military authorities provided motor cars for us and escorted us through the center of Berlin. As I had previously spent some days in our own zone of occupation, I now have a basis for making comparisons. The contrast between the Russian methods and our own struck me so forcibly that I am taking this opportunity to write to you in all haste and in all earnestness. Certain inadequacies in the policy and program of our armed occupation disturbed me deeply at the time I was in our own zone. Now that I have had a glimpse of what the Russians are doing, in theirs, I feel that it is imperative that you take action at once for a better clarified policy and a better informed administration on our part. The principle difference that I observe is that the Russians are going ahead with a well-definied, purposeful program of re- education of the German people, holding out to them a ray of hope for themselves and a handclast of friendship between the two peoples -- on a strictly anti-facist basis; whereas we, in our own territory, offer them nothing, have no political program that I have been able to discover, and to all practical purposes are accomplishing little besides holding the German people at gunpoint. What the Russians have accomplished by their method, I am not able to say. What we have accomplished, as far as I can observe, is complete obedience at doing nothing, or next to nothing, with a deep undercurrent of hate and resentment. As we drove through Berlin we saw that the Russians had plastered the ruins with posters, bulletins and notices, using our own best advertising techniques to "sell" the Germans the idea of cooperation, anti-Nazism, and the preservation of their own self-respect -- this latter, I think, being a point of consummate wisdom, and one to which our own military government has been utterly blind.