[The following takes place during the Tehran Conference, or The Meeting of the Big Three.]
That evening, with the Marshal [Stalin] hosting a dinner of borscht and fish, Churchill toasted “Stalin the Great.” But Stalin responded, “You are pro-German!” He said that Churchill’s attitude seemed to be “The Devil is a Communist and my friend God is a Conservative.” Staling added that his own attitude was that “if Germany moves a muscle, she will be rapidly stopped.”
Stalin continued, “At least fifty thousand – and perhaps a hundred thousand – of the German command staff must be physically liquidated.” Then he raised his glass. “I propose a salute to the swiftest possible justice for all Germany’s war criminals – justice before a firing squad! I drink to our unity in killing them as quickly as we can capture them. All of them! There must be at least fifty thousand.”
What Churchill heard deeply disturbed him. He knew that Stalin’s demand went far beyond October’s three-power Moscow declaration of War Crimes. He replied, “The British people will never stand for such mass murder… I will not be a party too any butchery in cold blood.” War criminals “must pay,” but he would not agree to execute soldiers who had fought for their country: “I would rather be taken out in the garden, here and now, and be shot myself than sully my country’s honor by such infamy.”
Roosevelt said, “As usual, it seems to be my function to mediate this dispute.” In jest, he asked them to compromise on a smaller number – “say, forty-nine thousand, five hundred.”
One of the guests at the dinner was the President’s son Elliott, a reconnaissance pilot based in England. He raised his glass and said, “Russian, American and British soldiers will settle the issue for most of those fifty-thousand in battle, and I hope that those fifty thousand war criminals will be taken care of – but many hundreds of thousands more Nazis as well!”
Stalin rose to his feet, gave Elliott a bear hug and clinked glasses with him.
Outraged, Churchill addressed the President’s son: “Much as I love you, Elliott, I cannot forgive you for making such a dastardly statement. How dare you say such a thing!” Churchill stalked away from the table, but Stalin chased after him, grabbed his shoulders and said he had only been kidding.
When the Prime Minister returned to his rooms after dinner, his doctor, Lord Moran, noted that he had fallen into hone of his “black depressions.” With his instinctive understanding of history and the vicissitudes of national power, Churchill predicted that there might one day be a war with the Russians “more bloody” than that with Germany: “I want to sleep for billions of years… Stupendous issues are unfolding before our eyes, and we are only specks of dust that have settled in the night on the map of the world.”
Elliott apologized to his father for offending Churchill, but the President simply laughed: “Forget it. Why, Winston will have forgotten all about it when he wakes up.”
The President was wrong. Elliott later ruefully noted that before Tehran, Churchill had included him on country weekends at his official retreat, Chequers. But after hearing Elliott’s toast to Stalin, the Prime Minister never invited him again.
Source:
Beschloss, Michael R. “Fifty Thousand Germans Must Be Shot!.” The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. 26, 27. Print.
Further Reading:
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, PCc, DL, FRS, RA
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