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

As General Heinz Guderian recalled, Hitler appears to have expected objections from this quarter. Seated next to the Führer at a Reich Chancellery luncheon in late October 1939, after he had been awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, Guderian was asked directly “how the army reacted to the Russian pact.” When the general replied that the soldiers had “breathed a sigh of relief” as they would not have to fight a two-front war, Hitler stared at him “in amazement,” and he got the distinct impression that the Führer was rather displeased by his answer. Hitler was disappointed, he believed, because “he had doubtless expected me to express astonishment at his having ever agreed to sign a pact with Stalin.”

Among the German political class there was also disquiet. Former diplomat Ulrich von Hassell wrote in his diary that he well understood the idea behind the pact—what he called “using Beelzebub to drive away the Devil”—but he believed that it would be “regarded by the whole world as proof of the absolute unscrupulousness and lack of principle of Hitler and Stalin.” The final straw for Alfred Rosenberg, meanwhile, was when Ribbentrop returned from his second visit to Moscow and proclaimed that the atmosphere in the Kremlin was “like being amongst old comrades.” “That,” Rosenberg raged in his diary, “is just about the most impudent affront that can be inflicted upon National Socialism.”

Such was the discontent in German diplomatic circles that word of it even reached British ears. In the autumn of 1939, the foreign secretary, Viscount Halifax, prepared a secret memorandum on German-Soviet relations citing sources in Berlin that suggested there was “growing dissatisfaction and disillusionment in Germany—in naval and military circles, among diplomats, on the part of Göring and his entourage, and in the Party—over the Russo-German Pact.” Those sources were not far wrong. On the morning after the announcement of the pact, it was said that the garden of the “Brown House” in Munich—the Nazi Party headquarters—had been littered with the discarded party badges of disgruntled members. Hitler would later acknowledge that the “maneuver” of the pact with Moscow “must have appeared to be a rare old muddle” to the convinced National Socialist, but he was confident that the about-face had been accepted “without misgiving.” He was mistaken. He and his propagandists clearly still had some considerable explaining to do.

To this end, the Nazi state had a number of tools at its disposal. Cinema, ever the bellwether in totalitarian culture, was quickly coordinated. Although Nazi filmmaking had been obsessed with highlighting the “Bolshevik menace” only months before, the signing of the pact caused it to move seamlessly to showing Germany’s eastern neighbor in a more positive light. Typical was the fate of the film Friesennot , released in 1935 and still circulating in Germany in the autumn of 1939. Set in an ethnic German village in the Soviet Union, the film portrays the villagers’ brutal persecution at the hands of the Red Army and its political commissars, culminating in a bloodbath and the murder of a local girl who had fallen in love with a Soviet officer. Despite its critical and commercial success —Friesennot had even found its way into Hitler’s personal film collection—its anti-Bolshevik motifs were profoundly at odds with the change in political climate in 1939, and the film was duly banned in September.

In place of such works, a new program of films with themes more in tune with the new constellation of power was swiftly commissioned. An obvious subject for cinematic treatment was the nineteenth-century statesman Otto von Bismarck, a hero to German nationalists, who had nonetheless been careful to cultivate a healthy alliance with Russia. The film Bismarck , commissioned by Goebbels personally, appeared in Germany’s cinemas in December 1940. Rather more popular, however, was Der Postmeister , a tale of doomed love in St. Petersburg, adapted from a short story by Pushkin and featuring the former communist Heinrich George in the title role. But, despite receiving rave reviews and winning the Mussolini Prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 1940, Der Postmeister enjoyed only a brief heyday. By the following summer it had disappeared from German cinema screens, damned by its sympathetic view of the Russian people.

Pro-Russian activity in other cultural spheres was much less evident. Music was an area in which one might expect to have heard an echo of the new era of Nazi-Soviet friendship; yet little change was apparent. Russian music was not banned in Germany until 1942, but there had been an active campaign to Germanize the Third Reich’s cultural output since the mid-1930s, and radio playlists, concert programs, and repertoires all naturally tended to reflect and perpetuate that bias. There were exceptions, of course. Soon after the pact was signed, Munich Radio marked the occasion by replacing a scheduled discussion titled “I Accuse Moscow—the Comintern Plan for World Dictatorship” with thirty minutes of Russian music. But beyond such instances, the tone was one of continuity. It is telling, perhaps, that the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra devoted concerts during the Third Reich to the music of many foreign lands—including Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Finland, and even Britain—but never to that of Russia. Opera was a little more ecumenical, with works by Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and Mussorgsky all being performed in Germany during the twenty-two months of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but these were the exceptions to a solidly Germanic norm.

Germany’s vibrant cabaret scene showed similar prejudices, with a few Russian, or “Cossack,” choirs circulating, leavening the traditional music hall fare by offering what one newspaper advertisement described as the “unique experience” of “Russian melodies.” One such group, which called itself the Ukrainian National Choir, had the misfortune to be in residence at the Wintergarten music hall in Berlin in June 1941, at the very time that their homeland was being invaded. Their show was cancelled two days after the German invasion. The fate of the performers is unknown.

IN RETROSPECT, IT IS SURPRISING NOT THAT SO LITTLE EFFORT WAS made to propagate a genuine friendship between the Nazis and the Soviets but that any effort was expended at all. Given the ideological enmity between the two, it is remarkable that cultural exchanges, political education, and the might of the respective propaganda machines were all harnessed, at least temporarily, in the interests of improving German-Soviet relations. Of course, as Stalin clearly recognized, any such improvement required sustained effort and engagement, and it got neither. The political will was lacking, on both sides, to make any more than token gestures.

But the domestic reactions to the Nazi-Soviet Pact in Germany and the USSR demonstrated rather well the limitations of propaganda. Although both sides were acknowledged masters of the dark arts of political persuasion, neither could claim any particular success in convincing its respective public about the sincerity of its partner’s newfound benevolence. It may be, of course, that this lack of success was in some sense deliberate, reflecting the temporary, tactical nature of the relationship and the desire on the part of both regimes not to dilute public distrust of a potentially dangerous enemy. And ideology was not abandoned entirely, of course. Both sides attempted to put an ideological gloss on the pact in an effort to make events comprehensible to the faithful. The Germans tried to convince themselves that the two sides were converging, that the Bolshevik excesses of the past had given way to a more nationally minded agenda. The Soviets, for their part, could paint their collaboration with Hitler as a tactical masterstroke in the wider struggle against Western imperialism and capitalism.