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

It is, of course, invidious to attempt any comparison of the Nazi and Soviet occupation regimes in this period; yet, as these accounts demonstrate, it was a comparison that many Poles and Polish Jews were forced to make. In truth, Poles of all faiths and classes faced an impossible choice: to remain where they were and accept the inevitable hardships that their occupiers would impose or to attempt to better their situation by moving to the other zone. In weighing this decision, they had little information beyond rumor and hearsay. Few made their decision on political or ideological grounds; rather they were motivated primarily by self-preservation, seeking a modicum of security for themselves and their families. The dilemma was neatly summed up in one story from the period, which told of two trainloads of Polish refugees encountering each other crossing the Nazi-Soviet frontier—one going east, the other going west—with each group astonished that the other was fleeing into the zone from which it was trying to escape.

Even Polish communists, it seems, could be less than totally enamored of life in the Soviet zone. Some were disappointed by the apolitical avarice of the Red Army. “We waited for them to ask how was life under capitalism,” one complained, “and to tell us what it was like in Russia. But all they wanted was to buy a watch. I noticed that they were preoccupied with worldly goods, and we were waiting for ideals.” Marian Spychalski’s complaints were more immediate. He had fled to Lwów in the Soviet zone in November 1939 but was so shocked by Soviet treatment of the Poles there that he lasted barely two weeks before escaping back into the German zone and heading for Warsaw. Organizing resistance in the capital, Spychalski was joined by another prominent Polish communist, Władysław Gomułka, who had also fled from Lwów to take his chances with the Germans in the General Government. For all the hardships that they endured, Spychalski and Gomułka would have counted themselves fortunate. Some 5,000 of their fellow Polish communists—practically the entire active membership of the party—had already fallen victim to Stalin’s purges. The only members spared had been those who had found themselves in Polish jails. Despite their sobering experiences, however, the two would later become senior politicians of the postwar Polish communist state: Spychalski as minister of defense, Gomułka as first secretary of the Communist Party.

Berlin would soon target other communists. Already in November 1939, Ribbentrop had stated to Molotov that the continued imprisonment of German citizens in the Soviet Union was incompatible with good political relations between Moscow and the Reich. He was referring to the five hundred or so political emigrants from Germany, mainly communists, thought to have found refuge in the Soviet Union after the Nazi seizure of power. Ironically, by 1939 many of them had also fallen afoul of the NKVD’s terror machinery, and those who had escaped execution in the purges often found themselves in the myriad labor camps of the Gulag. Now, after enduring the NKVD’s attentions, they were to be returned to the clutches of their original tormentors, the Gestapo.

German officials would provide lists to their Soviet counterparts with the details of those German, Austrian, and Czech citizens believed to have escaped to the Soviet Union. The NKVD would check its own records to determine the precise fate of the individuals in question, and any survivors would be rearrested and deported. Peculiarly, some of the prisoners were granted a period in Moscow during which they could be “fattened up” after the rigors of the Gulag. Otto Raabe recalled a sojourn in Moscow with feather pillows, bedsheets, and good food, as well as an in-house tailor and a cobbler, to prepare him for his return to Germany. Unsurprisingly, many of the prisoners did not want to leave, but they were told that they had no choice. At German insistence, they would be taken by train direct to crossing points on the new German-Soviet border in occupied Poland to prevent possible escape attempts. In total, around 350 individuals were delivered back to the Reich in this way.

One of those affected was Margarete Buber-Neumann, the wife of a prominent German communist, Heinz Neumann, who had fled to the Soviet Union in 1935. After her husband was arrested and shot by the NKVD in 1937, Buber-Neumann had been sentenced to five years labor in the Gulag before she was arrested once again in January 1940 and brought for questioning to the infamous Butyrka prison in Moscow. The following month, she was deported with a group of twenty-nine others back to Germany, being taken by train to Brest-Litovsk. “We got out on the Russian side of the Brest-Litovsk bridge,” she recalled. After a while, a group of NKVD men crossed the bridge, returning with some SS officers: “The SS commandant and the NKVD chief saluted each other. The Russian took some papers from a bright leather case and began to read out a list of names. The only one I heard was ‘Margarete Genrichovna Buber-Neumann.’” With that, she was handed back to the SS. As she was crossing the bridge, she could not resist a glance back to the communist refuge that had betrayed her: “The NKVD officials still stood there in a group watching us go. Behind them was Soviet Russia. Bitterly I recalled the Communist litany: Fatherland of the Toilers; Bulwark of Socialism; Haven of the Persecuted.” Already a veteran of the infamous Soviet camp at Karaganda, she would spend the next five years in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

One group crossing the German-Soviet frontier that is not often considered is Allied POWs. From the summer of 1940, many prisoners, mainly British, found themselves in German POW camps, some located in the eastern provinces and the Polish lands annexed directly to the Reich. For them, Soviet-occupied Poland represented the closest “neutral” territory, and therefore potential refuge, available. The prisoners of Stalag XXA at Thorn (Toruń) northwest of Warsaw are a good case in point. Fifteen of their number made successful escapes to Soviet territory, only 150 miles to the east, in 1940. One of those who attempted the feat was Airey Neave, who “dreamed of [his] triumphant arrival in Russia” and believed that, should he reach the demarcation line at Brest-Litovsk, he would be “ushered into the presence of the British ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps.” Neave would be disappointed, however. Posing as an ethnic German, he was captured en route to Brest at Iłow near Warsaw in April 1941. He might have considered himself lucky. According to the official report of MI9, the arm of British Military Intelligence responsible for POW affairs, the reception escaped prisoners received from the Soviets was “always cold,” and many were even maltreated. Most of them were subsequently sent to Siberia. Neave would later make a successful escape from the high-security POW camp at Colditz Castle in Saxony.

Although they were obliged to intern escapees, the Soviets’ treatment of escaped POWs could be positively hostile. One escapee who swam the river San to present himself to Soviet authorities in March 1941 was promptly arrested and spent the next year in a succession of NKVD jails, usually in solitary confinement. In some cases, escapees were even handed back to the Germans. Polish underground couriers, for instance, were bemused to discover that sixteen Allied airmen whom they had spirited out via Kiev in the winter of 1940 had returned to Warsaw as prisoners of the Gestapo. “Internment,” it seems, could have various definitions.

The question of coordination between the Nazis and the Soviets still raises fevered speculation in some quarters about high-level meetings between the NKVD and the Gestapo, supposedly with the likes of Adolf Eichmann in attendance. Tantalizingly, Khrushchev states in his memoir that Ivan Serov, head of the NKVD for Ukraine, had “contacts with the Gestapo.” Of course, given that both sides were united in their common efforts to exchange refugees and destroy Poland’s elite, a degree of cooperation is to be expected, and to this end it should not be surprising that a number of planning meetings would have been held. It is certainly notable in this regard that both the NKVD’s Katyn massacres and the Gestapo’s AB Aktion were ordered within a few days of each other, suggesting at least an element of imitation, if not concerted action. As yet, however, broader high-level collaboration between the Gestapo and the NKVD finds no echo in the documentary record.