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

For all its fantasy and verbosity, Cripps’s memorandum certainly had an effect. For one thing, the chilly reception that he was already receiving in Moscow cooled still further. Generally snubbed by Molotov and forced to deal with his deputy, Vyshinsky, Cripps now found himself cast out altogether. His memorandum, it seemed, had so irritated the Soviets that they were now terminally distrustful of him, seeing him as unpredictable and unorthodox, lacking the delicacy required for the task. Such was Moscow’s rejection of him, indeed, that the Soviet ambassador in London, Maisky, became the preferred channel for subsequent communication. Despite his commitment and endeavor, Cripps appeared to have failed entirely. By his own admission, he was left with “nothing to do no chance of influencing events one way or the other.”

THUS, BY THE SPRING OF 1941, BRITAIN WAS AS ESTRANGED FROM the Soviet Union as it had been in the autumn of 1939. Negotiation had failed; trade talks had failed; flattery had failed; even flagrant, if unrealistic, saber rattling had failed. Stalin was sticking by his pact with Hitler, and Churchill’s Britain was alone in a geopolitical wilderness.

Part of the reason for that failure, of course, was that Britain had precious little to offer that might tempt the Soviets away from their tactical accommodation with the Nazis. Platitudes, good will, and vague expressions of future support could scarcely compete with the very real territorial and material benefits that Stalin had already accrued courtesy of his relationship with Berlin. In addition, the Foreign Office made sense of its failure to woo the Soviets with the reasoning that the distrustful, unnatural relationship between Stalin and Hitler was so riven by mutual suspicion that neither party would be brave enough to disavow it. “Neither dictator,” one memorandum noted, “dare[d] turn away lest the other stab him in the back.” The image might have come from a David Low cartoon.

Whatever the truth of Whitehall’s assumptions, there was clearly a fundamental ideological obstacle—on both sides—to any sort of rapprochement. As numerous asides and marginal comments in the British files show, the political establishment in Whitehall never seriously saw the USSR as a possible ally, only as a potential enemy to be guarded against and tactically exploited if possible. This fundamental inability to seriously contemplate an amicable arrangement with Moscow had arguably led to flights of fantasy such as Operation Pike.

For their part, the Soviets were similarly blinkered by their own ideology. Unwilling to view Britain as anything other than the archimperialist, their long-term ideological opponent, they would be fundamentally unable to seriously contemplate any arrangement with London, even had the latter been able to offer anything of substance. To a large extent, therefore, and despite the efforts of Stafford Cripps and others, the story of Anglo-Soviet relations prior to the summer of 1941 was very much one of “never the twain.”

Most seriously perhaps, the suspicion and paranoia resulting on both sides from these failed negotiations made the Anglo-Soviet relationship almost as difficult as it could have been and in practice achieved little beyond propelling Stalin further into Hitler’s embrace. Cripps fully appreciated this counterproductive aspect at the time: “It was all so mad,” he said, to see the Soviet Union “literally being pushed into the arms of Germany.” It would take the catastrophe of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941 to alter that self-defeating dynamic.

ON THE LAST DAY OF MAY 1940, THE CITIZENS OF LENINGRAD spotted a peculiar sight. Amid the unremitting grayness of a Baltic late spring day, a German heavy cruiser was being towed into a shipyard on the western edge of the city. There was no bunting, no military band, and little ceremony. No mention was made of the arrival in the Soviet press; instead Izvestia and Leningradskaya Pravda reported the Anglo-French collapse at the other end of the European continent. Consequently, the huge gray monster attracted little attention as it was nudged and cajoled into place by puffing black tugs. Nonetheless, its arrival was an event of profound significance.

The ship in question was the Lützow . Named in honor of Ludwig Freiherr von Lützow, a Prussian hero of the German wars of liberation who had raised a militia in 1813 to fight alongside the Russians against the French, she had been constructed in Bremen and launched in July 1939. As one of the Admiral Hipper class of heavy cruisers, she was larger and heavier than Germany’s famed “pocket battleships,” over two hundred meters from stem to stern, with a displacement of just under 20,000 tons.

In their finished form, the Admiral Hipper –class cruisers were formidable vessels. Powered by three Blohm & Voss steam turbines, they boasted a top speed of thirty-two knots and carried a crew of over 1,300. Armament was provided by an array of weapons, with the main battery consisting of four 8-inch twin gun turrets, each weighing approximately 250 tons, with a range of around thirty-three kilometers. The most famous of the class would be the Prinz Eugen , which entered service in August 1940 and came to prominence with its role in the sinking of HMS Hood in 1941 and the audacious “Channel Dash” of the following year, when a German naval squadron forced the Dover Strait en route to its home ports. Despite numerous engagements with Allied forces, the Prinz Eugen would be the only one of Germany’s large surface vessels to survive the entire war.

For all its impressive pedigree, however, the few Leningraders watching events in 1940 would have noticed that the Lützow had not been finished. In fact, despite her sleek lines and impressive size, she looked rather unlike a warship, with little finished superstructure above firstdeck level and only two of her four turrets completed. Below decks she was similarly incomplete, with no secondary antiaircraft armament and, crucially, no propulsion system. Indeed, if the time taken to fit out her sister ships were any guide, the Lützow would not be ready for commissioning for at least another year.

Despite such shortcomings, the delivery of the Lützow to the Soviets was a remarkable event. For one thing, German engineers had originally devised the Admiral Hipper class to meet the threat posed by the Soviet Kirov class of cruiser, first launched in 1936. So, if nothing else, there was a certain irony in the Lützow ’s delivery to Leningrad. Moreover, the German navy was not exactly awash with large surface ships. Alongside its four battleships—the Bismarck, Tirpitz, Gneisenau , and Scharnhorst —it possessed only two smaller “pocket battleships” of the Deutschland class, the Deutschland and the Admiral Scheer (the third of that class, the Graf Spee having been scuttled in the South Atlantic the previous winter). Beyond that, there were only the five heavy cruisers of the Admiral Hipper class. And, of these, the Blücher had been sunk only a few weeks earlier, when she had succumbed to shellfire in Oslofjord during the Norwegian campaign; the Seydlitz and the Prinz Eugen were still unfinished; and the Lützow was now being handed over to the Soviets, leaving only the Admiral Hipper in German service. In the circumstances, many Germans would have seen the delivery of the Lützow as an act of foolhardy generosity.

Officially, however, the transfer of the Lützow to the Soviets was trumpeted as a significant step in the improvement of Nazi-Soviet relations—all the more so as it was only the headline transaction in a burgeoning commercial relationship between the two, which had accompanied the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact the previous August. Indeed, as the Lützow was eased into her berth at the Baltic Shipyard, German and Soviet representatives were busy finalizing a host of commercial deals in Moscow and Berlin covering the supply of all manner of raw materials and finished goods. To those few Leningraders watching, the Lützow must have seemed symbolic of a new age of détente and cooperation between Europe’s two primary totalitarian powers. In truth, however, she would become the symbol of a relationship whose rich potential, mired in mistrust and political machinations, would never be realized.