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

At 4 p.m., the two generals reconvened on a small, hastily constructed wooden platform in front of the main entrance to the former German command, the regional administration building on Union of Lublin Street. Standing before a flagpole bearing the swastika’d German Kriegsflagge , Guderian grinned broadly, looking resplendent in his red-lined greatcoat and black leather jackboots. At his side, Krivoshein was similarly attired, in a belted leather coat and leather boots to keep out the autumn chill.

Surrounding the two, beyond a knot of senior German military personnel, a mixed crowd of Wehrmacht and Red Army soldiers thronged the route of the parade, pockets of German field gray mingling with the black leather coats of Soviet officers, the olive drab of the infantry, and the dark overalls of the tank crews. Beyond them, civilians lined the street. Among them was twenty-year-old Raisa Shirnyuk, who remembered how word of the parade had spread: “There was no official announcement,” she recalled, “but the rumour mill had worked well; already that morning everyone in the town knew that the troops would be marching there.” According to one German account, the crowd was lively, consisting primarily of Brest’s non-Polish communities—Byelorussians and Jews—who welcomed the Red Army with flowers and cheering.

To the blare of a military band, the parade began. German infantry led the way, their smart uniforms and precision goosestep drawing admiring comments from the assembled crowds. Raisa Shirnyuk was impressed by their military bearing, noting that their commanding officer kept the men in line, shouting, “Langsam, langsam, aber deutlich!” (Slowly, slowly, but clearly!). Motorized units followed: motorcycles with sidecars, trucks and half-tracks laden with soldiers and towing artillery pieces. Tanks also clattered along the cobbled street. As each group filed past the reviewing stand, it drew a crisp salute from both Guderian and Krivoshein, who spent the moments between in amiable conversation.

Inevitably, some of those watching drew comparisons between the two forces on display. The somewhat primitive Soviet T-26 tanks, for instance, contrasted rather obviously with more modern Wehrmacht vehicles, especially when one of the former slithered off the road not far from the reviewing platform. Stanislav Miretski noticed other differences: the Soviets’ belts were canvas rather than leather, like the Germans’, and whereas the Germans employed trucks to haul their artillery, the Red Army used “stunted and unsightly” horses with inferior harnesses. Raisa Shirnyuk concurred, recalling that the Red Army men, with their “dirty boots, dusty greatcoats and stubble on their faces,” compared unfavorably with their German fellows. Another eyewitness drew a chilling conclusion from the poor appearance of the Soviet infantry. Boris Akimov was accustomed to seeing elegantly dressed Polish officers, so the “poverty and slovenliness” of the Red Army troops struck him. But their smell and dirtiness prompted a much more profound question: “What sort of a life will they bring to us?” he wondered. An answer of sorts was provided when an elderly lady with tears in her eyes pushed her way through the crowd to approach the Soviet soldiers, muttering, “My kin, my boys.” To the astonishment of those watching, a soldier roughly pushed her away, shouting, “Get back, woman!”

As the military hardware trundled past and the future was pondered, the attention of the crowd turned skyward as two dozen or so Luftwaffe fighters made a low pass over the dais. Guderian, struggling to make himself heard over the roar of their engines, shouted, “German aces! Fabulous!” “We have better!” Krivoshein replied, determined not to be impressed by the display of German airpower. Soon after, with the parade drawing to a close, Guderian, Krivoshein, and the senior officers around them all turned to face the flagpole. As the military band struck up the German national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles,” and the assembled officers solemnly saluted, the blood-red war ensign, or Kriegsflagge , was lowered, to be replaced by the deeper red of the Soviet hammer and sickle. With that, the band played the “Internationale”—out of tune, as one eyewitness recalled—before Guderian and Krivoshein shook hands for the last time. Then, the German general joined his men as they departed westward, across the river Bug, the new German-Soviet frontier. “At last,” Krivoshein recalled sourly, “the parade was over.”

In his postwar memoir, doubtless mindful of the compromising nature of events that day at Brest, Krivoshein made much of his reticence in his dealings with Guderian and the Germans, giving the impression that he had been “holding his nose” throughout. He claimed to have set his men to various maintenance tasks, thereby leaving only one battalion to take part in the parade, and mischievously suggested that Guderian’s men and machines were looping around the block to make them appear more numerous than they really were. Despite such protestations of reluctance, however, the account of a couple of German war reporters who caught up with him the following day at his nearby field headquarters perhaps indicates Krivoshein’s true sentiments that day. They noted that the Soviet brigadier general was in high spirits, treating the two to a lavish lunch and raising a toast to both Hitler and Stalin as “men of the people.” As the reporters left, he even gave them his Moscow address and invited them to visit “after the victory over capitalist Albion.” Politics, one might conclude, can do strange things to people’s memories.

Although the Soviet media appears not to have mentioned the parade at Brest, the German propaganda machine made much of it, describing it as a “meeting on the boundary of peace.” Grainy footage of the tanks and vehicles rumbling past the reviewing stand was duly included in the weekly newsreels shown in cinemas across Hitler’s Reich that autumn. The propaganda value of the images was immense, providing as they did a startling visual confirmation of the Nazi-Soviet agreement forged the previous month. As if to hammer the point home, the newsreel commentary taunted Germany’s enemies by stating that the meeting with the Soviets at Brest had “scuppered the pious plans of the Western Democracies.”

One German news reporter went further. Writing in the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter , Kurt Frowein described the scene in lyrical terms—the “keen autumn day,” the “rising crescendo of tank tracks,” the homage to a city “captured with German armsnow being returned to its rightful owners.” For him, the handshake between Guderian and Krivoshein was “a symbol of the friendly coming together of two nations” and an announcement “that Germany and Russia [were] uniting in order to jointly decide on the fate of Eastern Europe.” Frowein was right to employ hyperbole. The events of that day signified such a seismic political shift that his words would have been unthinkable barely a month before.

For those who had taken to heart all the fulminations and insults that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had hurled at one another over the previous six years, these were strange days indeed. The parade at Brest vividly demonstrated the reality and currency of the pact signed a month earlier in Moscow, tanks and soldiers now replacing the images of smiling men in smoky Kremlin offices. As events at Brest demonstrated, Europe’s two mightiest dictatorships—whose bitter enmity had largely defined the 1930s—now stood side by side as allies, collaborating in a joint conquest of their mutual neighbor. Contemporary observers were bewildered. Communists around the world balked at the ideological gymnastics that they were suddenly obliged to perform, while many Nazis harbored deep misgivings about their country’s new collaborator and bedfellow. In the West, meanwhile, there was profound disquiet, as though the world had shifted slightly on its axis and the old political certainties had proved merely transient. Many would have wondered just how this peculiar turn of events could have come to pass.