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

The first victims of the campaign were a number of Boy Scouts, from twelve to sixteen years of age, who were set up in the marketplace against a wall and shot. No reason was given. A devoted priest who rushed to administer the Last Sacrament was shot too. Among the [other] victims was a man whom I knew was too ill to take any part in politics or public affairs. When the execution took place he was too weak to stand, and fell down; they beat him and dragged him again to his feet. Another of the victims was a boy of seventeen, the only son of a surgeon who had died the year before. We never heard of what the poor lad was accused.

In truth, there was often little logic to the killing, and some atrocities were sparked by the slightest pretext. At Kajetanowice, for instance, seventy-two Polish civilians were massacred in response to the death of two German horses in a “friendly fire” incident. According to the most comprehensive study, the German military executed over 12,000 Polish citizens in September 1939 alone.

The speed and ferocity of the German advance surprised not just the Poles. Stalin, too, was caught off guard by the Wehrmacht’s swift progress. Having anticipated an active Anglo-French intervention, as well as a more protracted campaign in Poland itself—similar to the style of attritional warfare seen in World War I—he was quickly forced to revise his plans. Stalin’s hand had hitherto been stayed by fear of the West’s reaction to Soviet participation in the attack and by the ongoing operations against the Japanese on the Mongolian frontier. However, when German troops appeared on the territory earmarked for the Soviet Union on September 12 and Ribbentrop himself was urging a Soviet advance, he was obliged to act to secure those areas promised to him by the pact. Having mobilized on September 11, the Red Army was assembled beyond the Polish border in two “fronts”—the “Byelorussian” and the “Ukrainian”—to the north and south of the river Pripyat. These two army groups comprised twenty-five rifle divisions, sixteen cavalry divisions, and twelve tank brigades with a total of nearly 500,000 men. Molotov then asked Berlin to send word when Warsaw was due to fall so that the Soviet intervention could be timed accordingly.

By September 17, with the situation on the Mongolian frontier stabilized by the signing of a peace treaty with the Japanese, and with the absence of any Anglo-French offensive against Germany in the west, Stalin resolved to act. At 3 a.m. that morning the Polish ambassador in Moscow, Wacław Grzybowski, was summoned to the Kremlin, where he was presented with a note from the Soviet government outlining the grounds for its intervention. As if to emphasize the impossibility of Poland’s predicament, the note itself had been drawn up jointly by the Soviets and the German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg. It claimed, “The Polish government has disintegrated,” and “the Polish state no longer exists.” Given this apparent collapse, it went on, “the Soviet government cannot remain indifferent at a time when brothers of the same blood, the Ukrainians and the Byelorussians, residing on the Polish territory have been abandoned to their fate.” Consequently, the Red Army had been ordered to “cross the border and take under their protection the lives and property of the inhabitants of Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia.” By “Western Ukraine” and “Western Byelorussia,” the note meant eastern Poland.

Faced with this apparent fait accompli, Grzybowski gamely refused to accept the note, protesting about Soviet dishonesty and the blatant violation of international law. He also argued, quite correctly, that Poland’s dire straits had no bearing on her sovereignty. Did anyone question Russia’s existence, he asked, when Napoleon occupied Moscow? His efforts were in vain, however. Within an hour, Red Army troops would cross the border into Polish territory, and the note would simply be delivered to his office with the morning post. Now redundant in a hostile capital, Grzybowski was not accorded the usual diplomatic immunity and found himself arrested by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. By a quirk of fate, he was rescued by Schulenburg, who used his good odor with the Soviets to secure his colleague’s release and subsequent escape from the USSR. The Polish consul at Kiev, Janusz Matuszyński, was not so fortunate; arrested by the NKVD, he was never seen again.

The ensuing Soviet advance was somewhat chaotic. Eviscerated by the purges of the late 1930s and given only days rather than weeks to mobilize, the Red Army was in no state to engage in serious offensive operations, lacking vehicles, spare parts, and effective leadership. Fortunately for Moscow, Poland’s defense was by this point similarly disorganized, with the few units stationed in the east of the county devoid of heavy weapons, unsure about how to react to the Soviet advance, and lacking clear instructions from the increasingly desperate High Command. Polish indecision was not aided by deliberate Soviet deceptions and the resulting rumor that the Red Army was advancing in defense of Poland to meet the German invasion.

For civilians caught up in the Soviet advance, it could be a profoundly confusing time, with fear of the unknown tempered only by the hope that the Red Army might be coming to their aid. Most, only vaguely aware of the wider political constellation, were unsure how to react. Janusz Bardach was fleeing the Nazis, heading east, toward Rowno, when an army patrol stopped him at night: “Two men shined flashlights in our eyes, while others surrounded us. I was astonished to see Soviet military uniforms and hear the Russian language—we were still a long way from the border. I couldn’t imagine what Soviet soldiers were doing on Polish territory and could only hope that the mighty Red Army had come to fight the Nazis and expel them from Poland. I wanted to express my joy at seeing them, but someone ordered us to put up our hands.” In the months and years that followed, Bardach’s youthful enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and communism would be tested to destruction.

A minority—communists as well as some Jews, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians—had fewer doubts, however, and rushed to greet the Red Army as their liberators. One such scene was recorded in the northeastern town of Jedwabne, where a few locals not only greeted Soviet soldiers with the traditional Slavic offerings but also erected a large banner reading, “We Welcome You.” Although comparatively rare, events such as this served, in the public mind, to confirm the long-standing association between Jewishness and communism. Early-twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals had often gravitated toward the political Left, partly as a result of their rejection by the nationalist mainstream. Interwar communist parties had consequently had large Jewish representation both in membership and leadership, with Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Bela Kun in Hungary, and Leon Trotsky in the USSR being the salient examples. Right-wing parties seized on this link as a means to smear both enemies, falsely arguing that because many communists were Jews, many Jews had to be communists. The resulting concept of “Judeo-Bolshevism”—that communism itself was little more than a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world—quickly suffused the extreme right wing of politics, not least Hitler’s Nazi Party, which was the most efficient and determined propagator of the fiction. Mein Kampf made this link explicitly: “We ought to recognise in Russian Bolshevism,” Hitler wrote, “the kind of attempt being made by the Jew to secure dominion over the world.”

Those Jews and others who welcomed the Red Army in 1939 were certainly not agents of any grand conspiracy. They had a variety of motivations; some expressed a firmly held conviction; others gave voice to frustration with the perceived iniquities of the Polish state; some, perhaps, were just tacking with the political wind. However, theirs was an act that their neighbors would not forget easily. Their siding with the new oppressor and giving apparent confirmation to the grotesque Nazi caricature of “Judeo-Bolshevism” would unwittingly provoke profound and bloody consequences.