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

It is not inconceivable that this inchoate rage found its way into Brecht’s work; after all, he wrote two of his most famous plays, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Mother Courage and Her Children , at this time. While both are quite rightly considered archetypes of the antifascist genre, neither can be construed as uncritically toeing the Muscovite line. Mother Courage , with its critique of profiteering from war, was written in response to the invasion of Poland in the autumn of 1939 and is ostensibly and obviously anticapitalist. Yet, given the circumstances in which Stalin’s Soviet Union had entered that conflict—as an aider, abettor, and economic supplier of Hitler’s Germany—the critique might just as plausibly have been targeted toward Moscow. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui , meanwhile, is more unequivocally anti-Nazi: a parody of Hitler’s rise, its antihero is a talentless Chicago gangster who is hoisted into power by corrupt commercial interests and his own ruthless, criminal nature. Yet, it is perhaps instructive that the play was written in March 1941. Brecht was criticizing Hitler in the most brutal, blood-curdling terms—as “the troubler of this poor world’s peace” and “the lousiest of lice”—at a time when Stalin and the German leader were still exchanging pleasantries. Brecht, it seems, never agreed with the “change of line” dictated by Moscow as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Indeed, it is tempting to wonder whether he did not harbor “a lurking suspicion of the similarities” between the two regimes.

From the vantage point of 1939 or 1940, this would not have been an unreasonable conclusion to draw. It was certainly the view of German socialist Rudolf Hilferding, who summed up the feelings of many of the disillusioned when he wrote that the collaboration between Hitler and Stalin had demonstrated that “there was no fundamental difference between the two.” In truth, there was more to Hilferding’s comment than mere fraternal socialist spite. The line emanating from Moscow that autumn came perilously close to advocating a political truce with Nazism, with communist energies instead to be focused on attacking the Western powers as the true enemies of world revolution. This certainly was the tone of one of the foremost German communists in Moscow, Walter Ulbricht. An early member of the German Communist Party, Ulbricht had risen to prominence in the interwar years before fleeing into exile upon Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933. Once safely ensconced in Moscow, from 1937, he emerged as a convinced and uncompromising Stalinist and became the leading German representative on the committee of the Comintern. So when he spoke to his countrymen, he did so with considerable authority.

Ulbricht communicated with his communist brethren inside Germany—known as the “comrades in the country”—primarily via the pages of Die Welt , the Comintern’s German-language journal. Typical was an article that appeared in February 1940 in which he blamed the war squarely on capitalism and “big business” and branded British imperialism as more reactionary and more dangerous than Nazi imperialism, indeed as “the most reactionary force in the world.” Given that the British and the French were the most determined to engage in a political crusade against the Soviet Union, he argued, they now superseded the Nazis—who had, after all, made a pact with Moscow—as world communism’s primary opponent. “The fight for democratic liberties,” he wrote, “cannot be waged in alliance with British imperialism,” adding that those who disagreed would “share responsibility for realising the predatory plans of [the] British and French.” The “strongest guarantee” for the hindrance of such plans, he concluded, was the German-Soviet Pact.

Ulbricht’s was not a lone voice. Izvestia also put in its penny’s worth, ridiculing the West’s “war on Hitlerism” in an editorial, while Ulbricht’s comrade Wilhelm Pieck (like him, a future leader of the communist East German state, the German Democratic Republic) went further, criticizing the West’s war in the most emotive terms as nothing more than an attempt to “starve Germany and extend the conflict to women and children, the sick and the old.” Even in June 1940, with France and the Low Countries invaded, German communists were still toeing the line of damning the “imperialist war” and blaming everything on the Western powers. As the Rote Fahne (Red Flag)—the underground newspaper of the German Communist Party—cynically explained, it was “the baleful politics of the ruling classes in England and France, and their social democratic lackeys, that has led to this slaughter.”

Given that the German Communist Party’s lines of communication with Moscow were often interrupted and its hierarchy was in utter disarray, the degree to which its domestic membership heeded such convoluted ideological leads is unclear. Moreover, the Gestapo’s attentions had scarcely lessened, so many party members preferred to adopt something like a holding pattern: waiting for clarity and biding their time until a more favorable and more easily explicable political climate developed. A few German communists argued for continued agitation against the Nazi regime, and there were some instances of leafleting in Berlin and elsewhere following the outbreak of the war, but the general trend thereafter was toward inaction. By way of illustration, the monthly average of communist leaflets registered by the Gestapo in 1938 was 1,000. In December 1939, it was 277; in April 1940, 82, the level at which it would remain for the rest of the year. Arrests followed a similar pattern, sinking from over 950 in January 1937 to 70 in April 1940. Clearly, German communists were staying their hand. Such was their inactivity that an internal SS report from June 1940 noted that within Germany one could “no longer speak of organised resistance from communist and Marxist circles.” Little wonder that one prominent historian of the period described the German communists of that era as “the most shameful of Hitler’s accomplices.”

For all the clarion calls to compliance with the new line, there were many dissenting voices within the communist movement, not least in Moscow itself. The primary hotbed of such opinions, paradoxically, was the Hotel Lux in the heart of the Soviet capital, which served as home to hundreds of foreign communists who had come to seek refuge, serve the Comintern, or learn at the feet of their masters. Yet, the Lux was not quite the safe haven that it appeared. Many of its residents had already fallen afoul of Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s, suffering torture, execution, or exile to Siberia for their supposed transgressions. At its peak, the purge had cut a swathe through the hotel’s guest list, with residents rising each morning in trepidation to enquire who had been taken by the NKVD the previous night. In all, some 170 Lux residents would disappear in this way. By the autumn of 1939, the six hundred who remained were the most loyal and most desperate of Stalin’s foreign acolytes.

Understandably, then, many within the Lux at that time were willing to go along with Stalin’s policy of friendship with Germany without question. Some were persuaded by the ideological case: that Hitler could be turned west to defeat Britain and France as an unwitting tool of the Soviets. As one of their number commented on hearing news of the pact, “Marvellous, marvellous!They should destroy one another. [T]hat way our job will be easier. Fantastic, marvellous!” Others, motivated more by personal fealty or fear, told themselves that Stalin could do no wrong, that his about-face, however shocking, had to be justified.

Yet a few were unable to square events with their political consciences, and as a result the mood within the hotel soon became fractious. Spanish communist Castro Delgado rose late on the morning of August 24, 1939, and when he reached the bus stop for the trip to Comintern headquarters, he was unaware of the signing of the pact the previous night. “The scene I saw at the bus stop was different from that on most days,” he later recalled. “Today people didn’t pile on board to get a seat. They stood in groups on the sidewalk and talked animatedly. Some were almost shouting. I looked at one and then another. No one noticed me. I said ‘good morning’ and no one answered. Everyone continued to talk, gesticulating and waving their arms. I was the only one who wasn’t talking and gesticulating.” Like many of his fellows, Delgado was torn. He told himself that “Stalin never errs”; yet, as a Spaniard, he could not forget the civil war and his antifascist principles. “From Almeria to Guernica,” he wrote, “from Badajoz to Barcelona I hear the word ‘but.’” Disbelief was a common reaction. Another Spaniard recalled being “stupefied” by the news that morning: “We had to rub our eyes to assure ourselves that we were in fact reading Pravda .”