September 29, 1944
 
 
           MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF STATE            
 
 
 I don no think that in the present stage 
any good purpose would be served by having the
State Department or any other department sound
out the British and Russian views on the treat-
ment of German industry.  Most certainly it
should not be taken up with the European Advisory
Commission and not even a second level.
 
 
 The real nub of the situation is to keep 
Britain from going into complete bankruptcy at 
the end of the war.
 
 
 Somebody has been talking not only out
of turn to the papers or on facts which are not
fundamentally true.
 
 
 No one wants to make Germany a wholly 
agricultural nation again, and yet somebody down 
the line has handed this out to the press.  I
wish we could cath and chastise him.
 
 
 You know that before the war Germany was
not only building up war manufacture, but was
also building up enough of a foreign trade to 
finance re-arming suffeciently and still maintain
enough international credit to keep out of inter-
national bankruptcy.
 
 
 I just can not go alnog with the idea of 
seeing the British empire collapse financially, 
and Germany at the same time building up a poten-
tial rearmament machine to make another war 
posible in twenty years.  Mere inspection of 
plants will not prevent that.