Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

This was largely ex post facto wishful thinking, of course, but other, wiser heads than Ribbentrop’s also claimed to see similarities between the Nazis and the Soviets. A month earlier, in late July, for instance, German negotiator Karl Schnurre had drawn the attention of his Soviet counterpart to the question of ideology. “Despite all the differences in their respective worldviews,” he said, “there is one common element in the ideologies of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies. Neither we nor Italy have anything in common with the capitalist West. Therefore it seems to us rather unnatural that a socialist state would stand on the side of the Western democracies.”

Ribbentrop struck a similar note in the opening salvoes of his flirtation with Moscow in August 1939, stating that “differing philosophies do not prohibit a reasonable relationship” and suggesting that “past experience” should dictate that it was “the capitalistic Western democracies” that were “the implacable enemies of both National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia.” If nothing else, it seems, the Nazis imagined that they and the Soviets could at least find common ground in their shared antipathy toward Britain and France. Stalin and Hitler, it seemed, were edging ever closer.

For his part, Hitler was largely immune to such ideological flourishes. For him, the logic behind the pact was brutally simple. According to his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, he had arrived at the idea of the pact with Stalin partly due to the dawning realization that he had backed himself into a corner. “The Führer believes he’s in the position of scrounging for favours and beggars can’t be choosers. In times of famine,” Goebbels noted darkly, “the devil feeds on flies.” Hitler put a slightly more positive gloss on the decision. At the Berghof, on August 22, he addressed his paladins and senior generals on the challenges that lay ahead of them. In justifying the pact with the Soviets, he explained, “There are only three great statesmen in the world, Stalin, I and Mussolini. Mussolini is the weakest.” What was more, he added, Stalin was “a very sick man.” The pact was only temporary, he explained, serving to isolate Poland and defeat the expected British blockade by providing access to Russian raw materials. Then, “after Stalin’s death we will break the Soviet Union. Then there will begin the dawn of the German rule of the earth.”

Meanwhile, the British and French had not been idle and had made a tentative effort to bring Stalin onside, sending a joint delegation consisting of a British admiral and a French general, which arrived in the USSR in mid-August. Everything about that mission, however, appeared almost comically counterproductive. First, finding a secure route to Moscow had proved difficult, and the delegation had opted to travel aboard an ageing merchantman, the City of Exeter , whose leisurely six-day voyage up the Baltic did little to convince the Soviets of Allied seriousness. Second, the head of the mission, Admiral Sir Reginald Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, was unlikely to curry much favor with the prophets of proletarian revolution with his quadruple-barreled name. Even the British newsreel coverage of the delegation’s arrival in Moscow struck a strangely jocular tone, quipping that the admiral was met “by a whole lot of charming Russian gentlemen, with quite unpronounceable names.”

But there were also more practical concerns. For all their evident status, Admiral Drax and his French counterpart, General Joseph Doumenc, were not foreign ministers, and they lacked the authority to undertake serious material negotiations with the Soviets. Moreover, it is highly doubtful that striking any deal was ever really intended. Many in the West were just as wary of Moscow as Moscow was of them. In March 1939, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain confessed to a friend “the most profound distrust of Russia.” “I distrust her motives,” he explained, “which seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of liberty, and to be concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears.” It is easy to understand, therefore, why the Allied delegation to Moscow was sent with the instruction to “go very slowly,” dragging out any resulting negotiations so as to effectively “talk out” the summer campaigning season and thereby rob Hitler of his opportunity to invade Poland. Motivated by their governments’ instinctive anti-Bolshevism, its members were going through the motions—holding their noses while talking to the Soviets—apparently in the hope that their mere presence in Moscow, raising the specter of an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance, would suffice to deter Hitler. Never, one historian has written, has an alliance been pursued less enthusiastically.

The shortcomings of that approach were exposed almost immediately. Poland was naturally key to the negotiations. As Hitler’s next target and the country geographically doomed to be squeezed between the rock of Berlin and the hard place of Moscow, Poland was bound to loom large in the diplomatic horse trading of that summer. Yet Drax quickly found that he could offer the Soviets little beyond participation in a principled preservation of the status quo. Hemmed in by the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland, made earlier that year, he and his party could give nothing of substance and even failed to secure agreement from the Poles for a suggested passage of Soviet troops through the east of the country to meet any German threat. Polish intransigence was not mere obstinacy. Poles were acutely mindful of the Soviet invasion of their homeland during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919 to 1921—an earlier attempt by Moscow to spread communism westward that was only narrowly defeated at the gates of Warsaw. In addition, given that Poland’s eastern regions contained fractious minorities of Byelorussians and Ukrainians, Warsaw rightly had its doubts that the Red Army, once allowed in, would ever leave.

As Drax and Doumenc sat down with the Soviet defense commissar, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, on August 14 to discuss the possibilities for common action, this flaw in the Anglo-French plan was swiftly made clear. When Voroshilov pointedly asked whether Soviet forces would be allowed passage across Polish territory, the general and the admiral could only squirm and prevaricate, answering with platitudes and evasions, promising vaguely that such matters would be cleared up in due course. Voroshilov was unimpressed and brought the meeting to a close by expressing his “regret” that this “cardinal question” had not been considered. It was no great surprise, perhaps, that negotiations stalled.

The Germans, however, had no such inhibitions and were happy to offer genuine territorial and strategic gains to the Soviets—at other people’s expense—to secure agreement. As Johnnie von Herwarth would confess after the war, “We were able to make a deal with the Soviets because we were able without any problems with German opinion to deliver the Baltic states and eastern Poland to Russia. This the British and the French, with their public opinions, were unable to do.” Thus, in stark contrast to the hesitancy and impotence exhibited by Admiral Drax, Ribbentrop’s attitude—exemplified in a telegram to his Moscow ambassador on August 14—exuded confidence and optimism. “There exist no real conflicts of interests between Germany and Russia,” he wrote. “There is no question between the Baltic and the Black Sea which cannot be settled to the complete satisfaction of both parties.”

What was more, Ribbentrop was willing to fly to Moscow to negotiate in person. Berlin had considered sending Hitler’s legal expert and later governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, to carry on the negotiations, but Ribbentrop was selected in his stead. It is not clear from the archival record whether this change was the result of a fit of ego on Ribbentrop’s part or the hardheaded calculation that a senior minister would have more impact in the Soviet capital. Ribbentrop’s own account of the episode claims that he was selected by Hitler because he “understood things better.” Whatever the truth, it is certain that Molotov was most impressed by the prospect of the German foreign minister coming to negotiate in person; as Schulenburg noted to Berlin on August 16, Molotov found it “very flattering personally” and “proof of our good intentions,” contrasting very favorably with the status of previous foreign visitors.