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

IT WAS PROBABLY NOT THE RATTLE OF TANKS THAT SURPRISED THE citizens of Brest that chill September morning in 1939. German forces had already occupied their city in eastern Poland for the best part of a week, so they were accustomed to the din of barked orders and military traffic. Rather, it was the accompanying voices that shocked them, speaking not in the harsh, guttural intonations of German but in the slurred singsong of a language much closer to their own and instantly recognizable: Russian.

For some in Brest, the arrival of the Red Army was a liberation. Many among the city’s Byelorussian and Jewish communities viewed the Soviet Union as their protector against what they saw as the intolerant nationalism of the Polish state. In some eastern suburbs, therefore, there was a celebratory atmosphere, with the traditional Slavic greeting of bread and salt being extended to the arriving soldiers, while a band played the “Internationale.”

Others were warier. The city’s Polish population had endured a torrid few weeks, fretting over the military situation, fearing the arrival of German troops or the use of poison gas, and worrying that their Byelorussian neighbors might turn against them. Those with long memories recalled the bitter 1920–1921 Polish-Soviet War and the long decades of Russian occupation that had preceded 1914, only a generation or so earlier. For them, the arrival of Soviet troops was an echo of dark times and an ominous portent of bad days to come.

The Soviet troops themselves did little to ease tensions. Generally shabby and unkempt, they were evidently under orders not to interact with the locals, although it seems that some had little choice but to ask the peasantry for food or to change their exhausted horses. Nonetheless, they were sometimes approached by the brave or curious. One of the latter was fifteen-year-old Svetozar Sinkevich, a Byelorussian, who was initially excited by the arrival of what he called “his” people. He was quickly disillusioned: “‘Their faces were grey, unshaven,’ he recalled, ‘greatcoats and short quilted jackets looked baggy, the tops of their boots were made of a canvas-like material. I went up to one of the trucks and tried to talk to the soldiers, yet all of them kept silent, averting their gaze from me. Finally one of them in a uniform cap with a star on his sleeve said that the Party had sent the Red Army to liberate us from the Polish landlords and capitalists. I was perplexed.’”

Many in Brest would have shared his confusion. Historically, at least, the city was used to the violent intrusion of the outside world. In the nine hundred years since its foundation, Poles, Mongols, Russians, Swedes, and Teutonic Knights had fought over it repeatedly. Within living memory, too, it had seen considerable upheaval. In 1915, the Russians had abandoned the city to a German occupation that lasted until the end of World War I. Then, with the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, the city had made headlines worldwide for the first time. As Brest-Litovsk, it had played host to the German-Soviet negotiations and the signing of the peace treaty between the two that would bear its name.

In 1939, however, events had moved with a rapidity unimaginable a generation before. Far from the plodding, stalemated immobility of World War I, Germany’s Polish campaign of 1939 had witnessed something of the revolution in military tactics. Although it was developing organically and had yet to earn the status of an official doctrine, the blitzkrieg, with fast-moving armored spearheads penetrating far into the enemy’s rear to disrupt defenses, heralded a new era in tactical thinking. So, although located deep in eastern Poland, Brest had quickly found itself a focus of the German advance, primarily because of the formidable nineteenth-century fortress on its western fringe that might feasibly serve as a defensive strong point for hard-pressed Polish forces. Such had been the speed of the German advance that when German armies first appeared before Brest, on September 13, less than two weeks after the opening of the invasion, some within the city believed that the soldiers had to be paratroopers dropped behind Polish lines.

Confusion was still the order of the day when the Red Army arrived in the city five days later. Aside from those citizens who hurried to greet the Soviets as liberators, others fervently hoped that the Red Army was coming to their aid against the invading Germans, a fiction evidently propagated by elements of the Polish military. Yet official declarations by the Soviet authorities issued in Polish translation by the local Wehrmacht command—a cozy example of collaboration between the two—would dash all such hopes by stating categorically that the Red Army’s invasion was merely the result of Poland’s supposed military and political collapse and was intended solely to protect the Ukrainian and Byelorussian peoples living there. Far from rushing to engage the invading Wehrmacht, then, those Soviet soldiers—riding on the open backs of trucks or clinging to the sides of their tanks—were heading west through the city to greet their German counterparts.

Late on the morning of September 18, the first contacts were made. Across the city, German and Soviet troops began fraternizing: olive green met “field gray”; the vanguard of Joseph Stalin’s communist revolution came face to face with Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Cautiously at first, mindful of their previously strained relations, the two sides shared rations and communicated as best they could, using sign language and good will. An easy entrée was the sharing of cigarettes: papirosi , crude, hand-rolled examples from the Soviet side, would be exchanged for German manufactured articles, much prized by the Red Army men. Tanks and armored cars were clambered upon and inspected, with the ever-present rejoinder from both sides that “ours are better.” For all their ideological differences, the smiles that day seem to have been genuine. One eyewitness recalled seeing Wehrmacht soldiers on one side of the street greeting their Soviet counterparts on the other with the words, “Communists! Good!”

Contact was also made at more senior levels. At around 10:30 a.m., a young Soviet officer arrived in an armored car at the German headquarters in the city. According to contemporary German records, the discussions that followed were “friendly” and mostly concerned delineating a demarcation line between the Soviet and German forces. The local German commander, General Heinz Guderian, was less enthusiastic. He had endured a difficult few days, losing his adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Braubach, to a Polish sniper—a “painful loss”—and then being obliged to assist the bishop of Danzig, Edward O’Rourke, who had found himself in the war zone and been eager not to fall into Soviet hands. Consequently, Guderian was frustrated that the deadline agreed for a German withdrawal from Brest, only two days later, gave his men too little time to evacuate their own wounded or recover their damaged vehicles. Nonetheless, the Soviet officer was given lunch, and an agreement was made that a formal cession of the city to Soviet control would follow on the afternoon of September 22.

On the morning of the handover, preparations went smoothly. According to the agreement, Soviet forces took sole control of the city and its fortress from 8 a.m. Two hours later, a joint commission met to clarify any remaining points of confusion or friction. Soon after that Guderian met with his opposite number, Brigadier General Semyon Krivoshein, commander of the Soviet 29th Light Tank Brigade. An impassioned Communist and a Jew, Krivoshein was short and wiry and incongruously sported a Hitler-esque toothbrush moustache. Like Guderian, he was a pioneer in the use of tanks; indeed, the two may have known each other from their time at the Kama tank school at Kazan in the 1920s, during an earlier blossoming of German-Soviet collaboration. Speaking together in French, he and Guderian discussed staging a joint military parade to mark the formal handover of the city. Although less than keen, stating that his men were weary after their long march west, Krivoshein nonetheless agreed to release a couple of units to take part in a march-past of Wehrmacht and Red Army forces for that afternoon.