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

Yet, regardless of such contortions and convoluted justifications, we must also consider that, for many of their adherents, Nazism and communism were fervently held creeds whose principles they could not simply jettison at will, regardless of which way the political wind was blowing. As Harry Pollitt put it, “I do not envy those comrades who can so lightly go from one conviction to another.” Pollitt refused to recant. Although he continued, after his removal, to campaign publicly for the new line of Dutt and the Comintern, he did not change his personal view. Indeed, as one account has it, he once attended a communist meeting brandishing a copy of his controversial pamphlet “How to Win the War” and, when challenged, exclaimed that he stood by every word of it. Although they might have disagreed about almost everything else, many—fascists and communists alike—would doubtless have applauded such steadfastness.

AS WINSTON CHURCHILL WOULD LATER RECALL, NEWS OF THE Nazi-Soviet Pact “broke upon the world like an explosion.” Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha struck a similar metaphor, describing the event as “a complete bombshell.” Strangely, considering their information-gathering prowess, Britain’s intelligence services had provided little suggestion of any imminent Nazi-Soviet rapprochement. Germany’s desire for closer relations with Moscow was known but thought to run counter to Hitler’s instincts and to have found little reciprocity on the Soviet side. Accordingly, a Foreign Office briefing of that very week had judged a Nazi-Soviet pact “unlikely.” If the intelligence community was surprised, the shock for many in Britain beyond those circles was almost palpable. On all sides of the debate, the bitter enmity between the Nazis and the Soviets had been considered a given, one of the fixed points of political life. Now, overnight, it had apparently been consigned to history. The signing of the pact was one of those rare moments in history when the world—with all its norms and assumptions—appears to have been turned on its head.

The specter of those two nefarious regimes now in harness could be a profoundly disconcerting one. For the Anglo-American diarist and politician Henry “Chips” Channon it presaged something like an apocalypse. “Now the Nazis and the Bolsheviks have combined to destroy civilisation,” he wrote, “and the outlook for the world looks ghastly.” Member of Parliament (MP) Harold Nicolson, who had persistently warned of the threat posed by fascism, would have concurred. He confided to his diary, “I fear it means we are now humbled to the dust.” Veteran diplomat Sir Alexander Cadogan was merely exhausted. Sitting down to dinner on the night that the pact was announced, he mused on its significance but found only weariness: “These crises really are too tiresome. We can’t go on living like this in Europe. There’s no point in it.”

Public opinion in Britain was less doom laden and more colored by a popular respect for the USSR, which many still saw in rosy terms as the “workers’ paradise” of Moscow propaganda. A public opinion poll of April 1939 had returned an 87 percent preference for a military alliance with Moscow, and figures had shifted little by the summer. Consequently, after news of the pact broke in the United Kingdom in August, the general public was reluctant to interpret events prejudicially toward the Soviet Union. The opinion most often expressed was that Stalin was merely biding his time, protecting the USSR, and that he would eventually come in on Britain’s side.

Beyond that, there was nonetheless a growing certainty of the imminence of war. One British intelligence officer sent a postcard to his wife on the very day that the pact was signed, warning, “I don’t want to seem alarmist, but I really think that the Germans will invade Poland this weekend or early next week.” He was not far wrong. Hugh Dundas, a Royal Air Force’s (RAF) pilot with 616 Squadron, then stationed at Manston on the Kent coast, summed up the same realization more pithily. When he heard the news of the pact, Dundas was sitting with Teddy St. Aubyn, an old Etonian and ex-Guards officer who had been one of the squadron’s founders. St. Aubyn’s reaction was less than gentlemanly: “Teddy put down his soup spoon and said in a loud, clear voice: ‘Well that’s fucked it. That’s the start of the fucking war.’” “I heard his words,” Dundas later recalled, “and knew they were true.”

For all the justified fears, Britain presented a calm determination to the world in that last week of peace. A leading article in the Times of August 23 was perhaps typical of the stoical mood. It began by withholding judgment on the pact until precise details were known but expressed doubts that “the Nazi-Soviet deal would make any material difference to the balance of power either in peace-time or in war.” Nonetheless, it went on, Britain’s position was clear: as Downing Street had announced, the pact would “in no way affect [Britain’s] obligations to Poland,” which had been “repeatedly stated in public” and which the government was “determined to fulfil.” Furthermore, as if to head off the charge that British negotiators had been too halfhearted in their efforts of that summer to win the Soviets over, the editorial suggested that “the consistency and trustworthiness of Russian and of German diplomacy [had] been thrown into graver doubt than ever before.” The clear implication was that the duplicitous Soviets were not worthy treaty partners and were welcome to their new German friends.

Britain, meanwhile, was busy cementing existing relationships. At 5 p.m. on August 25, Foreign Secretary Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax, met with the Polish ambassador Count Edward Raczyński in his oak-paneled study in London’s Whitehall. Now fifty-eight, Halifax had served as viceroy of India and held a succession of ministerial posts before being appointed secretary of state for foreign affairs early in 1938. He was a striking individual. Immensely tall, with a gaunt frame upon which clothes appeared to hang rather too loosely, he had a starkly receding hairline that appeared to accentuate his height. Calm and rational in character—possessed of an “Olympian manner,” as one biographer put it—he had sad, hooded eyes, a lugubrious expression, and a slight lisp.

His opposite number was of a similar stamp. Raczyński came from a Polish aristocratic family whose ancestors had served in both the Saxon and the Prussian courts. A fluent English speaker who had studied at the London School of Economics, he had been appointed Poland’s ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1934. Ten years younger than Halifax, he had a professorial bearing, with a high forehead and wire-rimmed spectacles perched upon an aquiline nose.

The discussion between Halifax and Raczyński was short, lasting about fifteen minutes. At issue was Britain and Poland’s response to the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, announced barely thirty-six hours earlier. Before the two men was a draft treaty, an Agreement of Mutual Assistance, intended to give permanence to the existing collaboration between the two countries and reiterate British resolve to assist Poland in the event of German aggression. In truth, the agreement had been under discussion for some time, but events in Moscow had given it added urgency. It was only a short document—eight articles totaling around five hundred words—but it would be highly significant, not least in its provision that should either party “become engaged in hostilities with a European Power in consequence of aggression by the latter,” the other party would lend “all the support and assistance in its power.” After the two men read the terms over once more, copies were signed, exchanged, and countersigned; the business was done. The “war of nerves,” Raczyński would later recall, appeared to be drawing to an end. Poland had secured an ally.