We favor the economic unification of Germany. If complete unification cannot be secured, we shall do everything in our power to secure the maximum possible unification.
The working out of a balanced economy throughout Germany to provide the necessary means to pay for approved imports has not been accomplished, although that too is expressly required by the Potsdam Agreement.
Most of the victims of Nazi aggression were before the war less well off than Germany. They should not be expected by Germany to bear, unaided, the major costs of Nazi aggression.
It is not in the interest of the German people or in the interest of world peace that Germany should become a pawn or a partner in a military struggle for power between the East and the West.
Important as economic unification is for the recovery of Germany and of Europe, the German people must recognize that the basic cause of their suffering and distress is the war which the Nazi dictatorship brought upon the world.
I have come to Germany to learn at first hand the problems involved in the reconstruction of Germany and to discuss with our representatives the views of the United States Government as to some of the problems confronting us.
That was the principle of reparations to which President Truman agreed at Potsdam. And the United States will not agree to the taking from Germany of greater reparations than was provided by the Potsdam Agreement.
The conditions which now exist in Germany make it impossible for industrial production to reach the levels which the occupying powers agreed were essential for a minimum German peacetime economy.
We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men. But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends.
Mr. Chamberlain desires to avert the threat to England's peace by making England, in alliance with Germany, stronger than her rivals and so to force them to renounce their hostile intentions against her.
This fact lays on us - so long as the maintenance of good relations with Russia seems to us worth an effort - the duty of satisfying Russia that she has no need to fear any invasion of her sphere of interests on Germany's part.
I said to myself, where are we living? In the United States of America where you're innocent until proven guilty, or Nazi Germany with the Gestapo calling?
I was signed when I was 19 years old, in 1980. I went to Germany and France. Seeing the world at that time was just an awesome experience for a teenager.
