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

This apparent convergence of Nazi and Soviet aims was not merely theoretical. In the United States in October 1940, a British merchant seaman was arrested in Boston after offering to supply the local German spy network with information on the Atlantic convoys. Thirty-nine-year-old George Armstrong was a communist from Newcastle who had been motivated by a speech in which Molotov encouraged all Allied merchant seamen to desert as soon as they reached a neutral port. Deported to Britain, Armstrong was tried for aiding the enemy—the first Briton of the war to be prosecuted for spying—and sentenced to death. He would doubtless have been bemused to learn that, by the time of his execution in July 1941, the Nazi-Soviet “friendship” in whose name he had committed treason was already a thing of the past.

WHILE COMMUNISTS IN BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES ENJOYED the comparative luxury of indulging in the theoretical, the abstract, and the downright contrarian, for some of their comrades elsewhere the events of that autumn and winter had a more perilous immediacy. For instance, the pact threw the French Communist Party into chaos. At the outset, it gamely attempted to convince its followers that Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler changed nothing and in fact marked a “new success of the Soviet Union” and “an incomparable service to the cause of peace,” which would “not deprive any people of its freedom” or “hand over a single acre of any nation’s land.” Yet few were convinced. As the journalist Adam Rajsky recalled, news of the pact’s signing “resounded like a thunderclap,” leaving communist intellectuals like himself to attempt to “explain the inexplicable.” In due course, despite stressing its patriotisme , the party found itself under investigation by the French government, on the charge that Stalin’s pact with Hitler had rendered the communist movement a passive ally of the Nazis and thereby, potentially, a fifth column. Even before August 1939 was out, the party’s newspaper, L’Humanité , was closed down.

If that were not difficult enough, the Muscovite change of line subsequently threw many into despair. According to one former party member, French communists reacted to Stalin’s directive with “extraordinary discipline, unique in the history of humanity.” Once the new line was given, he claimed, there was a “sudden reorientation towards a policy diametrically opposed to the policy of the day before.” But such obedience was far from universal. Some members tore up their party cards in disgust, and a number of high-level defections included twenty-one of the Communist Party’s seventy-three parliamentary deputies. A group of dissidents even made a public appeal condemning the Nazi-Soviet Pact and pledging to continue resisting the Nazi aggressor and supporting the democracies. The main French trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail, or CGT, was also resolute, deciding to expel all those of its members who refused to repudiate the pact. Finally, the French government banned the Communist Party, and the dissemination of its propaganda was declared an offense, with a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment. With some of his members now facing arrest, party leader Maurice Thorez fled to Moscow. Tried in absentia for desertion from the army, he was sentenced to death.

The party that Thorez left behind was in crisis. By the spring of 1940, the government clampdown had resulted in over 3,000 arrests, with a further 2,500 party members being dismissed from their posts in municipal administrations. Forced underground, the party was obliged to propagate the new Muscovite line through clandestine means such as flyposting and pamphleteering. Communist propaganda was no less effective for being underground, with industrial slowdowns and even incidents of sabotage resulting, but its defeatist tone got dangerously close to implying collaboration with Hitler’s Germany. Even on May 15, 1940, as Hitler’s panzers were already on French soil, the underground communist press was still attacking the “imperialists of London and Paris.” By performing such contortions, the French Communist Party, the largest sister party outside the Soviet Union, had thoroughly disgraced itself.

The German Communist Party (KPD) was in an even more parlous state. Outlawed since the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, it had been forced underground; its members were subject to arrest and persecution, and given only limited succor via often tortuous lines of communication with their superiors in Moscow. The fate of its leader, Ernst Thälmann, indicated how far the party had fallen. Once a giant of the political scene who had campaigned for the Reich presidency in 1925 and 1932, Thälmann was arrested by the Gestapo barely a month after Hitler came to power. Kept in solitary confinement, he was repeatedly questioned, abused, and beaten—losing four teeth in one interrogation—but was never granted the dignity of a trial. He simply disappeared, shunted between a succession of prisons and concentration camps from which he would never reemerge.

By 1939, the German communists had already been reduced to an underground fringe movement, isolated and largely swimming against the tide of public opinion, with its lines of command fractured, compromised, and unreliable. Little wonder then that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was initially viewed with utter bewilderment in German communist circles. Officially, at least, it was greeted as a potential lifeline, with the party announcing its approval of the pact as a “blow for peace” and expressing the hope that further, similar pacts would follow. Some German communists went further, speculating that the pact would signal an end to the persecution, with the expectation that they would soon be able to hold their meetings without hindrance and that Thälmann and other prisoners would be released. There was even a rumor that the Nazi Party itself was to be wound up and that Mein Kampf would be withdrawn from publication.

Such daydreams aside, news of the pact’s signing caused a serious split in communist ranks between those Moscow loyalists who welcomed it as the precursor to the desired war between the Nazis and the British and French imperialist and those communist idealists who were dismayed by what they saw as Stalin’s betrayal of the international working class. The future East German leader Erich Honecker was firmly in the former camp, receiving the news with equanimity in his prison cell outside Berlin and declaring the pact to be a “diplomatic success” for the Soviet Union in its struggle against the West. Others reacted with outrage and incredulity, however. Exiled novelist Gustav Regler, for instance, despaired, asking, “How could Stalin do that to us?” Thorwald Siegel, a German communist émigré in Paris, was so distressed by the Soviet invasion of Poland that he committed suicide.

Undoubtedly, a good many German communists and their sympathizers were simply confused. The playwright Bertolt Brecht was evidently one. A longtime Marxist, Brecht had fled Germany in 1933 for a life in exile in Denmark, then in Sweden and finally in Finland before emigrating to the United States in 1941. While in exile, Brecht enjoyed a creative boom, penning many of the works that would make his name and by which he expressed his visceral opposition to National Socialism and fascism. Yet it is far too neat to describe Brecht simply as a mouthpiece of Soviet propaganda. Although a convinced communist, he remained equivocal about the Soviet Union; indeed, he famously cut short a trip to Moscow in 1935, claiming—rather disingenuously—that he could not find enough milk and sugar there to go with his coffee.

In fact, Brecht’s concerns went deeper and were expressed, privately at least, late in 1939 around the time of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Like many communist sympathizers across the globe, Brecht was disillusioned and clearly had little time for the official line, noting of the pact simply, “I do not think one can say more than that the [Soviet] Union is saving itself at the cost of leaving the world proletariat without watchwords, hope or assistance.” The Soviet invasion of Poland later that month would test his faith still further. In his journal he raged about “the stripping of ideological pretencesthe abandonment of the principle that ‘the Soviet Union doesn’t require a single foot of foreign soil,’ the adoption of all that fascist bullshit about ‘blood brotherhood’ the entire nationalist terminology. This is being spouted to the German fascists, but at the same time to the Soviet troops.”