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

Taking their turn, Molotov and Ribbentrop then appended their signatures to the treaty and smiled for Hoffmann’s camera. With that, the lives of millions of Europeans would be changed forever.

EIGHT DAYS, ALMOST TO THE HOUR, AFTER THE CEREMONIAL SIGNING of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in the Kremlin, war returned to Europe. Before sunrise on the morning of September 1, 1939, the elderly German cruiser Schleswig-Holstein —a veteran of the Battle of Jutland making a “friendship visit” to the Free City of Danzig—slipped her moorings and opened fire at close range on the Polish garrison of the nearby Westerplatte. The signal was thereby given, brutally and dramatically, for the German invasion of Poland.

The week preceding those opening salvoes had had an oppressive tenor. Although the precise details of the pact remained opaque, most contemporary commentators agreed that it marked an unprecedented shift. “It is a stunning blow,” Romanian diarist Mihail Sebastian wrote. “The whole course of world politics has suddenly changed.” Moreover, there was a grim consensus that the pact was more than just another chapter in Europe’s ongoing crisis and most likely heralded war. Thus, the world’s statesmen urged circumspection. American president Franklin D. Roosevelt sent Hitler a personal appeal, suggesting “alternative methods” in solving the crisis; French premier Édouard Daladier followed suit, urging the German dictator to step back from the brink; otherwise “Destruction and Barbarism will be the real victors.” British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, meanwhile, was disconsolate, confiding to the US ambassador that “the futility of it all is the thing that is frightful.” Britain began preparing for the worst. London’s museums began evacuating their treasures to the countryside, hospitals were cleared of nonessential cases, and railway stations installed blue lights to comply with the expected blackout. Everywhere sandbags were filled and stacked, and windows were taped. While Chamberlain prepared to move into the Central War Room, newly completed beneath Whitehall, orders were prepared for the evacuation of children from Britain’s towns and cities, to begin on the morning of September 1. The public mood was dark. “Poor weary world,” one diarist wrote, “what a mess we people have made of it.”

While the world digested the news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and considered the prospect of war, Ribbentrop had traveled back to Germany with his entourage to a rapturous reception from Hitler, who hailed his returning foreign minister as “a second Bismarck.” As Ribbentrop was being feted, Heinrich Hoffmann was busy developing his photographs of the signing ceremony in Moscow. When he met with Hitler, he was dismayed to find the Führer more interested in his impressions of Stalin than his pictures. “Does he actually issue orders?” Hitler asked eagerly, “or does he cloak them in the guise of wishes?” “What about his health?” he wondered, adding, “Does he really smoke so much?” and “How did he shake hands with you?” Bizarrely, he also asked about Stalin’s earlobes: were they “ingrown and Jewish, or separate and Aryan”? Hoffmann replied that the Soviet leader’s earlobes were separate, to Hitler’s evident satisfaction. Clearly, the Führer was most impatient to learn as much as he could about his new political partner.

When they finally came to looking at Hoffmann’s pictures, Hitler was disappointed. “What a pity,” he said. “There is not a single one that we can use.” To Hoffmann’s protests he replied that in every photograph Stalin was smoking: it was, Hitler said, “out of the question. The German people would take offence.” He explained: “The signing of a Pact is a solemn act, which one does not approach with a cigarette dangling from one’s lips. Such a photograph smacks of levity! See if you can paint out the cigarettes.” So the photographs released to the German press were all doctored by Hoffmann, with no cigarettes visible.

Other frustrations were to follow. Hitler had originally foreseen a swift campaign against Poland, but he had been forced to postpone an attack ordered for August 26 because of last-minute diplomatic maneuvers and fruitless negotiations with the British. He was also obliged to cancel the annual showpiece Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, which had been due to start on September 2. Ironically, that year’s rally had been given the theme of “peace.” Then, on August 31, Hitler issued his first “war directive,” ordering an attack on Poland to commence the following morning and stipulating that although “a solution by force” had been decided upon, it was vital to leave “responsibility for the opening of hostilities unmistakably to England and France.”

Stalin, meanwhile, had wasted little time reflecting on the niceties of the pact’s signing. Meeting his entourage the following day for a supper of freshly shot duck and “seeming very pleased with himself,” he mused on the new relationship with Hitler: “Of course, it’s all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me but actually it’s I who have tricked him.” When presented to the Supreme Soviet on the last day of August, the pact was duly applauded, with Molotov echoing Hitler’s line criticizing the “ruling classes of Britain and France,” which, he claimed, had been keen to involve Nazi Germany and the USSR in conflict. In the coming war, he stated, the Soviet Union would maintain “absolute neutrality.”

By the following morning, September 1, that conflict was already raging. In the gray light of dawn, German troops moved off from their forward positions across the 2,000 kilometer Polish-German border. Sixty divisions, incorporating over 2,500 tanks and over 1 million troops, advanced into Polish territory from Silesia in the southwest, Pomerania in the northwest, and East Prussia to the north. German armor and weaponry were comfortably superior to those of the Poles, and swift gains were registered on all fronts. In the air, the sleek Messerschmitts and screaming Stukas of the Luftwaffe were little threatened by the obsolete—if bravely flown—fighters of the Polish air force.

Outnumbered and outgunned, Polish resistance was nonetheless spirited. On the opening day, for instance, at the Battle of Mokra in southern Poland, the German advance was temporarily halted at considerable cost to the 4th Panzer Division; in the north at Krojanty, a brief engagement between Polish cavalry and German armor would spawn a durable myth about the romantic futility of Poland’s defense. Despite such actions, Polish forces were inexorably driven back by the German advance, and by the time of the campaign’s largest battle—on the river Bzura, ten days later—Warsaw itself was already being threatened. When the old tsarist forts defending the Polish capital were finally overwhelmed later that month, it was only a matter of time before the city fell.

Long before the campaign had been decided, however, the Wehrmacht’s conduct demonstrated that the world had entered a new era of warfare. Prior to the invasion, Hitler had admonished his military commanders, “Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally.” They complied. Right from the outset, Nazi forces were merciless in their treatment of Polish subject populations. Units of special forces— Einsatzgruppen —were instructed to follow the front-line troops to ruthlessly suppress any resistance in the rear areas. And, as the Poles quickly discovered, “resistance” could have an extremely broad definition and was invariably punished with summary execution. In the first five weeks of military action, German forces would burn 531 Polish towns and villages and carry out over 700 mass executions, the worst examples being at Częstochowa, where 227 civilians were murdered on September 4, and at Bydgoszcz, where as many as 400 were executed in reprisal for the alleged Polish killing of ethnic Germans. As one eyewitness recalled, the brutality could be baffling: