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

The Polish defense against the Soviet invasion was largely ad hoc, with most of the lightly armed border guards preferring to lay down their weapons or simply evade both the Soviets and the Germans and head southwest toward the Romanian border. In all, there are thought to have been about forty armed clashes between the Poles and the Soviets. One of these was the Battle of Szack on September 28, in which the eponymous small town, south of Brest, was briefly liberated from Soviet control by Polish forces, which routed a Red Army infantry division in the process. Another was the Battle of Grodno, where Polish general Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński organized a brilliantly improvised defense, which held up the Soviet advance for two days and inflicted heavy losses on the invaders. Both the general and his adjutant were among some three hundred of the town’s defenders who would pay for their temerity with their lives, being executed by the Red Army upon capture. Such actions were sadly not unique. The Red Army’s instinctive hatred for the Polish officer class, as made up of Catholics, aristocrats, and Poles, would lead to other atrocities, and the execution of captured officers quickly became the norm. At Pińsk, for instance, thirty officers of the river flotilla were separated from the other ranks after their surrender and led away for execution.

A few Polish commanders had the dubious honor of facing both sets of invaders that autumn. Perhaps the best example is General Franciszek Kleeberg, whose Polesie Independent Operational Group first confronted Guderian’s forces near Brest in the early phase of the war before pressing westward with the Soviet invasion on September 17, ostensibly to aid the besieged Warsaw. Overrun by events, however, Kleeberg’s force was attacked by Red Army units at Milanów at the very end of September, before once again engaging the Germans in early October at the Battle of Kock, the last engagement of the Polish campaign. Having run out of ammunition, the remains of the Polesie Independent Operational Group surrendered to the Germans on the morning of October 6 after a four-day battle. Kleeberg was the last to leave his post; he would not survive German captivity.

In most cases, Soviet and German forces kept clear of each other, adhering to demarcation lines and avoiding contact. Indeed, they were supposed to maintain a twenty-five-kilometer distance. Yet, despite this, there were examples of cooperation and concerted action. From the outset, for instance, the Soviet authorities agreed to allow signals to be broadcast from Minsk to aid Luftwaffe navigation. In addition, the two sides shared intelligence on the size and disposition of Polish units on the ground and collaborated in their neutralization. One example of this is the battle of Lwów, the southeastern regional capital, which was already under siege by the Germans when the Soviet 6th Army arrived on the outskirts on September 19. Despite having already taken numerous casualties in the battle, the German forces were instructed to withdraw, leaving the city’s Polish commander, General Władysław Langner, to surrender to the Soviets, under the assurance that his men would be correctly treated. Langner was misled, however, as an eyewitness recalled: “Hardly had they laid down their arms when they were surrounded by Russian troops and marched off.” Throughout, the Soviets were all smiles toward their new German allies, with one Red Army lieutenant greeting his counterpart enthusiastically with cigarettes and the hastily learned slogan “Germanski und Bolsheviki zusammen stark” (Together Germans and Bolsheviks are strong).

In the sphere of public relations there was also widespread cooperation, with both sides reporting each other’s successes and issuing joint communiqués. On September 20, for example, Izvestia carried a front-page directive—evidently passed by Berlin and Moscow—giving a cynical and disingenuous explanation of the actions of German and Soviet troops in Poland: “In order to prevent any kind of groundless rumours concerning the task of Soviet and German troops currently in the field in Poland,” it ran, “the governments of the Soviet Union and Germany announce that the function of these troops is not to pursue any particular aims conflicting with the spirit of the non-aggression pact agreed between Germany and the Soviet Union. On the contrary, the task of these troops is to maintain peace and order in Poland, which have both been compromised by the collapse of the Polish state, and to help the population rebuild the conditions necessary for the existence of the state.”

This collaborative attitude was perhaps best and most wickedly demonstrated at a meeting in Warsaw of the joint German-Soviet Border Commission in late October 1939. After a celebratory lunch hosted by Hitler’s representative in Poland, Hans Frank, he and the Soviet senior delegate, Alexander Alexandrov, smoked together. Frank remarked, “You and I are smoking Polish cigarettes to symbolise the fact that we have thrown Poland to the wind.”

ONCE INSTALLED ON POLISH TERRITORY, THE TWO REGIMES WASTED little time in formalizing arrangements between themselves. On September 27, Ribbentrop returned to Moscow to sign a supplementary agreement, the Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which tied up some of the loose ends left by the signing of the pact a month previously. In those discussions, the newfound friendship between the Nazis and the Soviets was given full expression. As Ribbentrop himself reported, it was like being in a “circle of old comrades.” Stalin stated that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union together represented such a force that no combination of powers would be able to resist them. Moreover, he promised that “should Germany unexpectedly get into difficulties, it could be sure that the Soviet people would come to Germany’s aid and would not allow it to be strangled.”

The practical business of the meeting was to regulate Nazi-Soviet relations in the wake of Poland’s looming defeat. To this end, both parties agreed not to resurrect any Polish state and to collaborate in combating any agitation to that end. They also agreed to a framework within which an exchange of populations could take place, enabling ethnic Germans to travel west and Byelorussians and Ukrainians in German-occupied areas to move east. Most importantly, perhaps, the demarcation line previously agreed between the two regimes in eastern Europe had to be revised, with the Soviet frontier in occupied Poland being moved eastward to the line of the river Bug and Lithuania being awarded to Moscow as compensation. In this way, Poland was neatly divided almost in half, with Germany taking 72,800 square miles of territory and 20 million citizens and the USSR receiving 77,720 square miles and 12 million inhabitants. Although Stalin publicly claimed that the shift was intended to remove any potential source of friction with Berlin, he clearly had one eye on London and Paris, as the revised frontier was much more readily defensible to Western opinion, coinciding as it did, very broadly, with the ethnographic limit of Polish habitation. For the sake of clarity, a map was produced from the Soviet High Command, and a black line was added to mark the new German-Soviet border. Next to it were appended the signatures of Ribbentrop and—in a flourish of thick blue crayon—Stalin. The Soviet leader quipped to his German guest, “Is my signature clear enough for you?”

Once the formalities were agreed, the two regimes set about remaking their respective parts of the conquered territory in their own image. On the German side of the line, the former Polish lands were divided into two parts: the northern and western districts were annexed directly to the Reich and renamed the Warthegau; the southern and central areas were established as a separate entity, the Generalgouvernement (General Government), which included both Warsaw and Kraków and, though nominally autonomous, was nonetheless entirely dependent on the whim of Berlin. In both areas, the native Polish population enjoyed scant civil rights, being deliberately reduced to the status of an underclass whose sole purpose was to dutifully serve the new German overlords.