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I remember that Knox and Stimson thought that three weeks would be the most that the Russians could possibly hold out. Many people felt that there was thus no sense in wasting anything very important. There was also an underneath suspicision, which was based on nothing except hunch, that they might not even want to hold out. There was no immediate evidence that they wouldn't, but some people felt that they would just collapse. There were all kinds of stories that if they could get the Germans into Russia, they might start a big mutiny inside the German Army and they might go Communist. At the same time there was a great dispostion to believe that the Russians had certainly not believed that they were going to be attacked and were very resentful of it. That was a bona fide resentment. However favorable they might have been towards the Germans originally, that attack had changed their mind.

One must remember that a great many of Hitler's doctrines were pretty nearly Communist doctrines. They read as though they'd come out of Marx. Anyhow, that was laid out to us all the time by these who were suspicious and doubtful. People said, “After all, they're all one band of brothers anyhow.” It was not the dictatorship that was troubling people particularly, because it was sort of taken for granted that Russia would be a dictatorship anyhow, whether it was Marxist or Tsarist, that there's no other way to run a country like that, which is probably true of a