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

Yet Nazi-Soviet collaboration found expression in other spheres. In the first week of the war, the luxury ocean liner SS Bremen found an emergency berth at Murmansk after escaping internment in New York and playing hide-and-seek with the Royal Navy in the Atlantic. With Soviet assistance, most of the ship’s complement were evacuated by train back to Germany, and the captain later sneaked the Bremen back to German territorial waters under cover of the polar night, narrowly avoiding a British submarine on the way.

The Bremen was not an isolated case. Indeed, in the opening three weeks of the war alone, eighteen German ships sought refuge from the attentions of the Royal Navy in Murmansk. Mindful, therefore, that a friendly port in the Soviet Arctic might be beneficial, in October 1939 the German admiralty submitted a request to the Soviets for a naval base in the Arctic North, for the service and supply of U-boats. After some wrangling and a few shifts of location, the request was granted, and Basis Nord (Base North) was established that December on a sheltered inlet, away from all prying eyes and all semblance of civilization. Although the base never became fully operational and was rendered superfluous by the Nazi conquest of Norway the following summer, its brief existence was fraught with difficulties. Not only was the terrain utterly inhospitable that winter, but the reflexive paranoia and secrecy of the Soviets served to exacerbate the already trying conditions for the German sailors stationed there. According to a ship’s doctor on a German supply vessel, the provision of food was “terrible,” causing cases of scurvy, while the sense of isolation and futility fostered a pervasive atmosphere of depression. Matters were not helped by the hostile attitude exhibited by Soviet liaison officers, one of whom the doctor described as “mentally malnourished, disingenuous” and “an unusually evil subject [who] mistrusts and harasses us whenever possible.”

That Soviet mistrust was not merely force of habit. As Allied seamen aboard the Arctic convoys would discover later in the war, the Soviet authorities could be astonishingly inhospitable when it came to foreign servicemen trespassing on their soil. Another factor fed the psychosis. Stalin was very eager to maintain the outward fiction of Soviet “neutrality” in the war, and any military action that openly assisted his German partners risked jeopardizing that cover. Fear of discovery, then, seems to have spurred the already unhelpful Soviet authorities to new heights of obstructionism.

Other joint ventures proved more fruitful, not least in exploiting Soviet “neutrality” to German advantage. In December 1939, for instance, the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran evaded the British naval blockade of Germany by disguising herself as a Soviet merchantman; appropriately enough, the name chosen for her was the Vyacheslav Molotov . In the following spring, Soviet assistance was more active, providing Germany with access to the Pacific via the Northern Passage, through the ice-bound Arctic North of the USSR. An ex-merchantman was duly refitted as a surface raider, complete with torpedo tubes, an array of weaponry, and a crew of 270. The Komet , as she was named, sailed from Gdynia in July 1940, skirting Scandinavia en route for the Soviet Arctic, where she was met by the icebreaker Stalin of the Red Fleet. By September, with Soviet assistance to clear a path through the ice floes, the Komet crossed the Bering Strait into the Pacific Ocean, where she attacked Allied shipping disguised as a Japanese merchant vessel, the Manyo Maru . In this guise, she would sink eight ships, totaling over 42,000 tons, including the RMS Rangitane , before being torpedoed in 1942.

This story would be remarkable by any measure, not least for the sheer chutzpah and the feats of seamanship involved. Yet the war diary of the Komet’s captain reveals an amicable collaboration with the Soviets that stands in stark contrast to the grim experience of those at Basis Nord . “The relationship was good,” he noted at the outset. “We liked them. We saw they were good people.” In due course, the connection would strengthen further still. Indeed, when the German crew celebrated a success against the British, their Soviet counterparts joined in. “You can’t fake that,” the captain recorded in his diary, “that was real. The Russians were on our side.” When the Komet ’s Arctic adventure was at an end, the commander of the German navy, Admiral Erich Raeder, wrote personally to thank his Soviet opposite number, Admiral Nikolai Kuznetzov: “It falls to me to have the honour of expressing the German Navy’s sincerest thanks to you, esteemed Commissar, for your invaluable support.”

IN MID-DECEMBER 1939, ADOLF HITLER SENT BIRTHDAY GREETINGS to his new ally, Joseph Stalin, expressing his “most sincere congratulations [and] very best wishes for your personal good health and for a happy future with the peoples of a friendly Soviet Union.” Ribbentrop’s note, predictably, was more effusive and more labored, recalling the “historic hours at the Kremlin which marked the beginning of a decisive change in the relations of our two countries” and ending with his “most cordial congratulations.”

The hyperbole aside, Hitler had every reason to be pleased with the political and strategic developments of the previous few months. In collaboration with the Soviet Union, his forces had crushed and dismembered Poland, leaving his eastern frontier secure and allowing him to devote his energies to confronting the British and the French in the west. In concert with the Soviets, his forces had begun the racial reorganization of the Polish lands and set in motion exchanges of political prisoners and ethnic Germans. Economic agreements forged with Moscow would also prove beneficial, it was hoped, not least in enabling Germany to avoid the worst effects of the British blockade.

Stalin, too, would have been satisfied. Collaboration with the Germans was proceeding well. Poland, one of Moscow’s historic enemies, had been wiped off the map, and territory had been gained at her expense, which made good many of the losses sustained by the Soviet Union during the chaos of the revolution and its aftermath. Beyond that, Stalin could be well pleased with the Soviet Union’s strategic situation. From a position of almost perpetual insecurity only a few months before, he was now allied to the preeminent military and economic power on the Continent, with a freshly minted economic arrangement promising vital German military hardware in return for Soviet raw materials. What was more, the Soviet Union was at peace, having declared itself neutral in the war that had broken out between his German partner and the Western powers. In his more hawkish moments, Stalin could doubtless envisage the Germans and the West becoming embroiled in a costly, murderous rerun of World War I, after which he would be the one to pick up the pieces, remaking all of Europe in the Soviet image in the process.

Little wonder, then, that Stalin’s reply to Hitler’s birthday greeting was similarly effusive, proclaiming that “the friendship between the peoples of the Soviet Union and Germany, cemented in blood, has every reason to be solid and lasting.” He might have added that it was a friendship cemented largely in Polish blood.

RIBBENTROP WAS THOROUGHLY FETED IN MOSCOW ON HIS SECOND visit to the Soviet capital on September 27 and 28, 1939. Although he was there for the serious business of negotiating and signing the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, the prevailing mood of success infecting both parties after their joint destruction of Poland was so pervasive that he was treated with all the pomp and ceremony that the Soviet state could muster, including a performance of Swan Lake and a twenty-four-course gala banquet.