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

Hitler was not above responding to such waverers with threats. At his mountain retreat above Berchtesgaden in August 1939, he defended the pact to his military chiefs of staff, claiming, “Stalin and I are the only ones who visualise the future. So in a few weeks I shall stretch out my hand to Stalin at the common German-Russian frontier, and with him undertake to redistribute the world.” By way of a warning, he added, “I have given the command and I shall shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism.”

Industrialist Fritz Thyssen might have been one to taken such threats seriously. A longtime financial and political supporter of the Nazis, Thyssen had begun to have second thoughts before 1939. Although he had welcomed the crushing of the Left, he had been increasingly perturbed by the criminality and violence of the SS and of Hitler’s “Brown-shirts,” the Sturmabteilung (SA). The events of autumn 1939—not least the death of his nephew in the Dachau concentration camp and Hitler’s chilling declaration in the Reichstag that “he who is not with me is a traitor, and shall be treated as such”—would prove the last straw. Consequently, Thyssen took his family and began a life of exile in Switzerland. The news of the pact had troubled him deeply. As he wrote to Hermann Göring that September from his Swiss refuge, he found it “grotesque” that “National Socialism has suddenly discarded its doctrines in order to hob-nob with communism.” The policy, he argued, amounted to suicide, and the only beneficiary would be the Nazis’ “mortal enemy of yesterday Russia.” Writing to Hitler the following month, he was no less conciliatory: the pact and the war, he wrote, meant nothing less than the “Finis Germaniae.”

Such heretical opinions could not be expressed openly within Germany. Public discourse was uniformly positive about the pact, with German newspapers immediately altering the tone with which they reported Soviet current affairs or Russian culture. Where reporters and editors had once been unable to resist inserting—at the very least—a derogatory adjective or a critical aside, they now reported events with scrupulous evenhandedness. On the morning of the pact’s announcement, the newspapers seemed desperate to make the case for the new arrangement. Every title carried almost verbatim reports and commentaries, scripted under Goebbels’s supervision, rejoicing at the restoration of the “traditional friendship between the Russian and the German peoples.” In the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter , Ribbentrop congratulated himself by lauding his achievement as “one of the most important turning points in the history of our two peoples.” Even the in-house newspaper of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps , toed the optimistic line, reminding its readers, in a gallop through Russian and Soviet history, that the empire of the tsars had originally been a Germanic state, that it had twice “saved” Prussia, and that it had “paid dearly” for its enmity with Germany in World War I. Echoing Ribbentrop, the newspaper concluded that the two countries had always flourished when they were friends and so looked forward to a new era of collaboration.

With the outbreak of war, the positive attitude continued. The Völkischer Beobachter carried extended extracts from Molotov’s speech to the Supreme Soviet, justifying and praising the Nazi-Soviet Pact, on page two. And, following the Red Army’s invasion of Poland on September 17, Soviet military communiqués were given similarly exalted status, with editorial comments dutifully echoing the Soviet line. Rosenberg was predictably disgusted. “Our press is lacking all dignity,” he wrote, “Today they rejoice over the traditional friendship between the German and Russian peoples. As if our struggle against Moscow had been a misunderstanding and the Bolsheviks had been the real Russians all along, with the Soviet Jews at their head! Cuddling up like this is worse than embarrassing.”

Cultural content in the newspapers was also swiftly coordinated, albeit with a clear preference for Russian subjects over those with a narrower Soviet context. Already on August 26, for instance, a sympathetic article explored the Russian view of the Battle of Tannenberg, the twenty-fifth anniversary of which Germans were about to mark. A week later, on September 3, a whole page of the Völkischer Beobachter was devoted to the history of the Kremlin. Similar articles followed, covering such diverse subjects as Russian publishing, history, literature, and music. Those raised on a diet of sneering contempt for all things emanating from Moscow must have found such revelations more than a little disconcerting. In time, Pravda and Izvestia would be available on Berlin’s streets, containing, as one reader recalled, “a lot of negative stuff about the English and nothing against fascism.”

If one were to believe the American William Shirer, however, Hitler needn’t have worried about the popular reaction to the Nazi-Soviet volte-face. According to the renowned radio journalist and commentator, the people of Berlin—though “still rubbing their eyes” at the news—were at least enthusiastic. “You may be surprised,” he announced to his American listeners, “but the fact is that they do like [the pact]. Judging from the reaction of the people in the street it is a very popular move. I rode around Berlin today on buses, street-cars, the elevated and the subway. Everyone had their head buried in a newspaper. And in their faces you could see they considered that what they read was Good News.”

Many certainly would have agreed instinctively with Shirer’s assessment. After hearing the announcement on the radio, one eyewitness wrote in his diary about the pact’s positive reception. “Everyone beaming with joy,” he recorded. “Wherever one goes, everywhere people speak excitedly of the Agreement with Russia!” Part of that excitement lay in the erroneous belief that the pact, rather than heralding war, might actually prevent it. But others were less optimistic. In Berlin, diarist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich reacted with resignation that the tension had finally been broken and war now seemed inevitable. News of the pact, she wrote, had been a “bombshell,” and she was not sure “whether to heave a sigh of relief or to gasp with horror.” Having long deduced that Hitler wanted his war, she believed that he would finally have his wish. She concluded that an “end with horror seems almost more bearable to us than horror without end.”

The only uniform reaction to the news, perhaps, was surprise. A Bavarian doctor summed up the thoughts of many when he wrote, “I just could not believe it, that Hitler had made a pact with the Bolsheviks; with the very same power that—for as long as I could remember—had been evil personified for the National Socialists. I began to marvel that the Führer had changed his spots to carry off this amazing diplomatic chess move.” The thoughts of Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer were understandably darker. The pictures of Ribbentrop shaking hands with Stalin, he wrote, were “the maddest thing”; he added, “Machiavelli is a babe in arms in comparison.”

Many in the military establishment were similarly dismayed. As intelligence officer Hans Gisevius noted, the army commanders were “thunderstruck indignant beyond words”; “the vision of Hitler and Stalin walking arm in arm was too much, even for our unpolitical generals.” Colonel General Ludwig Beck, the former army chief of staff, spoke for many when he expressed his profound disquiet at the new arrangement. In November 1939, he voiced the opinion that Germany’s victory over Poland had been diminished by the fact that the “Russian colossus” had been “set in motion” westward in the process.