The Washington Post and Times-Herald claimed in an editorial that the Yalta papers, as released, were incomplete in that “several references, notably some remarks by President Roosevelt about the Jews, have been deleted. Unquestionably these deletions were made with the best of intentions, to prevent what was regarded as needless exacerbation.”
“The omissions,” the paper said, “like the differences with the British version, probably are trivial, But it is hard to see, in view of the decision to brave all the unhappy consequences of disclosure of 99-plus percent of the papers at this time, why the Administration had to doctor history in these small particulars. There already has been too much of this pernicious practice.”
(The Manchester Guardian, in a cable from Washington commenting today on the release of the Yalta documents, says that release of some of Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill’s jocular remarks about the French has “produced the demand in the United States that the State Department should now release passages in the Yalta papers in which Roosevelt, as is widely known, spoke harshly about the Jewish people. The papers are in danger of becoming a grab bag of ugly gossip,” the British correspondent added.)
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