Mission to the U. S.

We are going to be in for another peace offensive. In fact, it is going on right now. Recently I have encountered people who are alarmed about the fact that Russia is winning its battle against Germany. The Red Army is going to march into Berlin, they say, and the next thing we know Europe will be Communist. The Germans have been sending out this kind of propaganda ever since they began to take over in Europe. Naturally they would now like to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Russia.

This warning to the U.S. people came from a man who should know. For two and a half years Joseph E. Davies, onetime (1936-38) Ambassador to Russia, had kept secret the f ct that the Germans once came to him seeking peace.* Last week he told the story at a Town Hall meeting in Los Angeles:

"After Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France, including Paris, had been conquered, certain important civic and business leaders in this country came to see me to ask that I talk to certain very important people who had come from Europe authorized to speak for some of the highest Nazi and military officials. I looked them up and found these same representatives came with certain credentials that were unquestionably bona fide, vouched for by some of the finest banking facilities in this country.

"At this meeting [in a Manhattan hotel] these men stated that they were authorized by high Nazi Party and military authorities to say that they could make a peace that would be agreeable to any reasonable demand which fair-minded men would require; and that in order to make it possible for England to make a peace with other than a Hitler Government, they would guarantee that Hitler would be retired and devote his remaining years to painting and writing as an elder statesman. . . .

"The 'nigger in the woodpile' was that the condition for peace which Germany required was that it should keep the dominant place which it had achieved by conquest in Europe and be permitted to project its New Order in Europe and Eastern Europe without interference.

"I made it clear to these gentlemen that in my opinion it was a fake and it was impossible. They asked that I present their message and plan to President Roosevelt and Mr. Hull, which I refused to do, but I did report it to the Department of State."

Reporting now to the nation at large, Davies said he spoke as an "American lawyer, a capitalist and an individualist who believes that our system of government and our competitive society of free and fair enterprise are the best devised by mankind.

"It would be a tragedy of the first order if we made a peace with Germany under any conditions that failed to make the peace of the world secure. . . . The plain issue is whether nations, like men, must keep their word in dealings with each other. If I were 30 years younger, I would do nothing but evangelize about this."

* TIME reported the peace offensive (TIME, July 8, 1940), suggested Madrid as the most likely scene of negotiations (which may also have been true). Ex-Ambassador Davies identified the negotiators only as "an American businessman and industrialist, who had spent many years in Europe, and a European businessman who had been very successful."

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