Reference Library
Daladier's Declaration to Parliament, 2 September 1939
Full Korean translation of the declaration read by Premier Daladier to the Chamber of Deputies the day after Germany invaded Poland, justifying French entry into the war, with the parliamentary applause markings of the Journal officiel.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsThe Moscow Peace Treaty between the USSR and Finland (1940)
The treaty of 12 March 1940 and its protocol that ended the 105-day Winter War. Finland cedes the Karelian Isthmus with Viipuri, Ladoga Karelia, Salla and the islands of the Gulf of Finland and leases the Hanko peninsula for thirty years; the USSR withdraws from Petsamo. The new border cost Finland a tenth of its territory and displaced 400,000 people; it lay behind the Continuation War the following year and was confirmed by the 1944 armistice and the 1947 Paris treaty.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThree Vichy Documents: the Constitutional Law, the Statut des Juifs, the Ordinance Restoring Republican Legality (1940–1944)
The constitutional law of 10 July 1940 that handed full powers to Pétain, the Statut des Juifs of 3 October that Vichy enacted on its own initiative, and the Provisional Government's ordinance of 9 August 1944 declaring that 'the Republic has never ceased to exist' and voiding both. The end and the rebirth of the Third Republic in three laws.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersFührer Directives Nos. 16 and 17 (1940)
Hitler's two directives a month after the fall of France. No. 16 (16 July) orders the preparation of a landing in England on a broad front from Ramsgate to west of the Isle of Wight under the code name 'Sea Lion', with the defeat of the RAF as its precondition; No. 17 (1 August) puts that precondition into effect, ordering the intensified air and sea war from 5 August while reserving 'terror attacks as reprisals' to the Führer. The order papers of the Battle of Britain.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsPacific War Documents: from the Tripartite Pact to the Instrument of Surrender (1940–1945)
The Tripartite Pact (1940), the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with the 1945 declaration of war, the Imperial Conference's 'Outline of National Policy in View of the Changing Situation' of 2 July 1941, the Hull Note (1941), the Potsdam Declaration, the Sino-Soviet Treaty and the Japanese Instrument of Surrender (1945): seven documents that opened and closed the Pacific War, in order.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersDirective No. 21: Case Barbarossa
Full text of the top-secret directive of 18 December 1940 ordering the Wehrmacht to prepare to crush the Soviet Union even before the war with England was over, translated from the Nuremberg trial version.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersGerman Orders to Annihilate Cities — the 'Future of the City of Petersburg' Directive (1941) and Himmler on the Order to Destroy Warsaw (1944)
Paragraphs 1–3 of the directive 'The Future of the City of Petersburg' of 22 September 1941, issued days after the ring around Leningrad closed (raze the city; refuse any offer of surrender), and the passages of the Naval War Staff order of 29 September (Nuremberg document C-124) quoted in the IMT indictment, declaring that the survival and feeding of the population 'cannot and should not be solved by us'. Added is the excerpt of Himmler's speech to the Wehrkreis commanders on 21 September 1944, recalling what he told Hitler on hearing of the Warsaw uprising and his own order that 'every block of houses is to be burned down and blown up'. Only the excerpts transmitted by the sources are translated.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersFührer Directive No. 41 (1942)
The order paper of the 1942 summer offensive. As soon as the winter battle ends, all available forces are to be concentrated in the southern sector to 'destroy definitively the living strength remaining to the Soviets', encircle and annihilate the enemy west of the Don and advance to the Caucasus oilfields, while Stalingrad is to be reached 'or at least brought under the fire of heavy artillery'. Its execution led to Stalingrad.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsTwo White House Memoranda of the Molotov Conversations
Samuel Cross's memoranda of the White House conferences of 30 May and 1 June 1942: Molotov's blunt question about drawing off forty German divisions, Roosevelt's authorization to expect a second front that year, and the shipping bargain behind the promise.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & orders'Not One Step Back' and the Soviet High Command: Order No. 227, Directive No. 170703, the Stalingrad ultimatum, Order No. 20 (1942–1945)
Order No. 227 of July 1942, 'Not One Step Back', which forbade retreat and institutionalised penal units and blocking detachments; Stavka Directive No. 170703 of December 1942 ordering Operation Iskra to break the Leningrad blockade; the ultimatum of 8 January 1943 offering surrender terms to Paulus's encircled 6th Army; and Order No. 20 of 1 May 1945, issued amid the Berlin street fighting, which foretold victory and first named four 'hero cities'. Four documents of the Soviet high command from the Stalingrad crisis to the fall of Berlin.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsAVNOJ: the Bihać founding resolution and the Jajce decisions (1942–1943)
Korean translation, from the Serbian originals, of the full texts of the resolution founding AVNOJ as the political representative body of the struggle at Bihać in November 1942, and of the Declaration of the Second Session at Jajce on 29 November 1943, which made AVNOJ the supreme legislative and executive body and stripped the government-in-exile of its rights, together with Decision No. 3 building Yugoslavia on the federal principle.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsThree Italian Surrender Instruments (1943–1945)
The twelve-article 'short armistice' signed at Cassibile on 3 September 1943, the forty-four-article Instrument of Surrender (the 'long armistice') signed by Badoglio and Eisenhower aboard HMS Nelson off Malta on 29 September, and the Instrument of Local Surrender signed at Caserta on 29 April 1945 by the plenipotentiaries of the German Commander-in-Chief Southwest, with its land, naval and air appendices. The authentic English texts of the three documents that run from Italy's exit from the war to the end of the Italian campaign.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsAllied Documents: the Tehran Military Conclusions, Eisenhower's D-Day Documents, the Yalta Declaration, the Potsdam Protocol (1943–1945)
The Tehran military conclusions of December 1943 that gave the second front a date and a structure; Eisenhower's Order of the Day and his unsent 'in case of failure' note (1944); and the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe of February 1945 promising free elections in liberated Europe. And the Potsdam Protocol of August 1945, which settled the occupation of Germany, reparations, Poland's frontier and the transfer of Germans in twenty-one sections. Four Allied documents, from the second front to the post-war settlement.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsLes Jours Heureux: the CNR Programme
Full text of the common programme adopted unanimously by the National Council of the Resistance on 15 March 1944: the plan of immediate action against the occupier and the post-liberation measures of nationalization, social security and labour rights.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsOperation Overlord — Two SHAEF Documents: the Strategic Air Forces Bombing Directive (17 April 1944) and Eisenhower's D+2 Situation Report, SCAF 48 (8 June)
The directive of 17 April 1944 placing USSTAF and RAF Bomber Command under the Supreme Commander for the preparatory period, with the attrition of the German fighter force and the disruption of rail communications as their two missions (the basis of the 'Transportation Plan'), and SCAF 48, Eisenhower's first comprehensive report to the Combined Chiefs of Staff on 8 June after touring the beaches by destroyer with Admiral Ramsay: the unexpected resistance on Omaha, the foundering of the DD tanks, unloading a day behind schedule in rough weather, and the news of Bayeux. Cable procedure words have been restored to punctuation and paragraphs.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThe Warsaw Uprising 1944: Fifteen Soviet–British–American Diplomatic Documents
Fifteen documents exchanged between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies during the two months of the rising: Stalin's message of 5 August calling the Polish reports 'greatly exaggerated', the Harriman and Clark Kerr letters on landing rights for American shuttle bombers and Molotov's refusal of 16 August, Stalin's message branding the rising a 'reckless, terrible adventure', the British War Cabinet's appeal of 5 September and the Soviet Government's reply of 9 September, the record of Stalin's talk with the two ambassadors on 23 September, and the General Staff memorandum of 2 October proposing to end the supply drops. From the Russian Ministry of Defence series Russkii arkhiv, vol. 14 (3-1).
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsThe Varkiza Agreement (1945)
The agreement between the Greek government and EAM that ended the December 1944 fighting in Athens (the Dekemvriana): nine articles on liberties, the raising of martial law, amnesty, hostages, the national army, the demobilisation of ELAS, the purge of the civil service and security services, and a plebiscite and elections. The scope of the amnesty in Article III and the disarmament in Article VI became the tinder of the Greek civil war. Translated from the State Department's English version.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThe Italian Insurrection of 1945: Three CLNAI Documents — 'Surrender or Perish!', Insurrection Directive No. 1, and Pertini's General-Strike Appeal
The CLNAI and CVL command's ultimatum of 19 April 1945 to the Nazi-Fascist forces, 'Surrender or Perish!'; Insurrection Directive No. 1 of 21 April, ordering workers to gather in their own factories when the insurrectionary strike is called, to defend the plant and form their squads there; and Sandro Pertini's appeal of 25 April proclaiming the general strike over Radio Milano Libertà. The three documents that directed the April 1945 insurrection in northern Italy, translated from the Italian.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThree Central Committee Resolutions on Culture, 1946-1948
Complete translations of the three Central Committee resolutions that formed the backbone of the Zhdanovshchina. The resolution on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad (14 Aug 1946) singled out Zoshchenko and Akhmatova and closed one journal; the resolution on the film A Great Life (4 Sep 1946) banned its second part and condemned Part Two of Ivan the Terrible with it; the resolution on the opera The Great Friendship (10 Feb 1948) named Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian as formalists. The party itself corrected the opera resolution in 1958 and rescinded the journals resolution in 1988.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThe Kremlin Conversation on Ivan the Terrible (1947)
The record of the late-night Kremlin meeting of 26 February 1947, granted in answer to the letter Eisenstein and his lead actor Cherkasov sent Stalin after the September 1946 Central Committee resolution banned Part Two of Ivan the Terrible. Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov discuss the historical assessment of Ivan and the oprichnina, the style of historical film, and the Soviet cinema of the day, and end by allowing the film to be reworked. Taken down by B. N. Agapov from the two artists' dictation; the reworking was never realised, as Eisenstein died in February 1948.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsTwo Marshall Plan Memoranda (1947)
The two State Department papers that preceded Marshall's Harvard speech: the first recommendation of Kennan's Policy Planning Staff (23 May), which laid down that the initiative must come from Europe and that the target was not communism but economic exhaustion, and Under Secretary Clayton's 'The European Crisis' (27 May), which put Europe's collapse in balance-of-payments tables and asked for six to seven billion dollars a year in grants for three years. The raw material of the Marshall Plan.
Read the full text → Intelligence & investigation recordsCIA ORE 29-48, 'Possible Program of Future Soviet Moves in Germany' (1948)
The CIA Office of Reports and Estimates' assessment of 28 April 1948, two months before the Berlin blockade. It reads the March walkout from the Allied Control Council and the interference with Berlin traffic as the first steps of a program already under way: a Soviet-zone government through the People's Congress, the abolition of the Control Council, the Western Powers forced out of Berlin, a German army under Soviet 'protection', and pressure on Western Germany to 'rejoin the Reich', each step feasible, in its judgment, without military force.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThe Cominform Resolution on the Situation in the CPY and Stalin's telegram to Gottwald (1948)
The Cominform resolution adopted at Bucharest on 28 June 1948, declaring that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had placed itself 'outside the family of fraternal parties', and Stalin's telegram to Gottwald a fortnight later explaining that its aim was not to topple Tito at once but to isolate him (excerpt from the Works). The public condemnation and the private calculation of the Tito–Stalin split.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsThe North Atlantic Treaty
The full text of the twelve-nation founding treaty signed in Washington in 1949: Article 4 on consultation when threatened, Article 5 treating an armed attack on one as an attack on all while leaving each Party "such action as it deems necessary", Article 9 establishing the Council, plus NATO's three footnotes.
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