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

SOON AFTER MIDDAY ON AUGUST 23, 1939, TWO FOCKE-WULF Condors emerged from the clouds and began their descent toward Moscow’s Khodynka airfield. The planes—sleek, modern, with four engines—had begun their journey the previous afternoon, stopping overnight at the eastern German city of Königsberg before continuing their route to the Soviet capital. Each contained around twenty officials: advisors, translators, diplomats, and photographers. The party was led by the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

As the planes circled, preparing to land, the passengers whiled away the time as best they could. It had been a five-hour flight from Königsberg, and many of them were restless. The vain, pompous Ribbentrop had endured a rather stressful night, fretting about his task, poring over official documents and making copious notes. Others were more relaxed. Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, for instance, was sleeping off the excesses of the previous night. Renowned as something of a drinker and bon viveur , he had earned the nickname of “Reichssäufer,” or “Reich Drunkard,” and, true to form, he had taken the opportunity of the hotel stay in Königsberg to spend a “cheery night” in a nearby bar. Woken just prior to landing, he was delighted to have “slept like a babe” for the entire flight.

Most of those on board peered down at the airfield and the city below. For all of them, flying was still a novel experience, and the bird’s-eye view could be both thrilling and terrifying. Moreover, Moscow itself had more than a whiff of the exotic about it. Not only was the Soviet capital geographically far removed from all that most of them knew, but it was also laden with sinister political connotations as the home of proletarian revolution: the fountainhead of world communism. “There was a feeling of ambivalence,” one of the party later wrote, “that fate should lead us to Moscow, which we had previously fought bitterly as the enemy of European culture.”

Once the two aircraft landed, it became clear that a substantial welcome had been arranged, as both the airfield and its two-story terminal building were bedecked with German and Soviet flags, the swastika juxtaposed incongruously with the hammer and sickle, a sight that Heinrich Hoffmann—like many others—had considered inconceivable only days before. Evidently, the Soviet authorities had considered it similarly implausible and encountered considerable difficulty in finding sufficient swastika banners for the purpose, finally requisitioning them from local film studios, where they had recently been used for anti-Nazi propaganda films.

As Ribbentrop descended the steps from the plane, a military band struck up “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” then the Soviet anthem, the “Internationale.” Introductions followed, with smart handshakes and smiles all round for the Soviet welcoming delegation and their German guests. A few of the German participants remembered the welcome with more than a dash of cynicism. Johnnie von Herwarth, a junior diplomat at the German embassy in Moscow, stood with a colleague watching a group of Gestapo officers shaking hands with their counterparts from the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. “They’re obviously delighted finally to be able to collaborate,” his colleague said, adding, “But watch out! This will be disastrous, especially when they start exchanging files.” Hitler’s senior interpreter, Paul Schmidt, meanwhile, was amused to see that they were being met by the Soviet deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Potemkin. An educated man, Schmidt knew that an eighteenth-century namesake of Potemkin, one of Catherine the Great’s regional governors, had constructed fake settlements in the Crimea to impress the visiting empress, and they became known as “Potemkin villages.” So, for Schmidt, the name Potemkin was neatly symbolic of the unreality of the scene. Pilot Hans Baur was less cynical. Watching Ribbentrop inspect a guard of honor taken from elite Soviet air force squadrons, he was simply struck by the surreal sight of watching the German foreign minister marching briskly along the line with his arm outstretched in the Hitler salute. “My God,” he said to himself. “Wonders will never cease!”

That sense of amazement would have been widespread on both sides. After all, the Nazis and the Soviets had spent most of the previous decade insulting one another. As an opposition politician in the later 1920s, Hitler had made political capital by portraying both communism and the Soviet Union as malevolent, alien forces threatening the German people and their way of life. He had persistently railed against Moscow, habitually referring to the “Jewish tyrants” and “bloodsuckers” in the Kremlin, and decrying Bolshevism as “an infamous crime against humanity” and an “infernal abortion.”

Once established in power in 1933, Hitler had scarcely softened his anti-Soviet rhetoric. In time, a tone of unremitting hostility had developed, with few opportunities being missed to deliver violent condemnations of Moscow and its agents and to laud Nazi Germany’s role in the front line of the fight against communism. Hitler’s keynote speech to the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg in September 1937 was perhaps typical. In it, he was keen to stress the community of civilized nations: the “great European family of peoples” who had “given each other models, examples and lessonspleasure and many things of beauty” and in whose company “we have every reason to harbour mutual admiration instead of hate.” Against this, he countered with the image of a “Bolshevist plague,” a “totally alien element which has not the slightest contribution to make to our economy or our culture, but instead wreaks only havoc.” Hitler was an opportunist politician, certainly, but anticommunism was one of his guiding principles.

The Soviets had reciprocated. As relations soured between Berlin and Moscow from the mid-1930s, an increasingly Germanophobic tone emerged, in which Stalin and his paladins competed to criticize Hitler and Nazi Germany in the press and in public speeches. Hitler was often portrayed as a lunatic, an “idiot,” or a man “possessed by a demon.” Members of the Nazi regime, too, were pilloried as “modern-day cannibalsthe descendants of Herostratus,” who would “drown in their own blood.” Blood, indeed, was a common leitmotiv, and rarely was fascism or Nazism mentioned in the Soviet press in the 1930s without the adjective “bloody” being appended to it.

The enmity was not merely cosmetic or tactical: it was underpinned by ideology. As the world’s first communist state and one that openly espoused the spreading of revolution, the Soviet Union had originally seen territorial expansion against a hostile outside world not only as desirable but as crucial to its survival. And though it had, in time, evolved less overtly bellicose ideas, Moscow still held a special place in its geopolitical ambitions for Germany. According to the precepts of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the establishment of communism in preindustrial Russia had been anomalous, the accidental product of the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution. In order to secure a future for itself, therefore, communism had to be exported to Europe’s industrial heartland—Germany—where it was expected that an advanced, ideologically sound proletariat was itching to throw off the shackles of bourgeois democracy and embrace the heirs of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.

German thinking, meanwhile, was also couched in geopolitics but drew on dubious theories of race, rather than the dry precepts of socioeconomics. Long before the Third Reich, German statesmen and generals had liked to envision the vast expanses of Russia and Ukraine as an area ripe for German expansion and colonization—a modern reimagining of the medieval Drang nach Osten , or “drive toward the East.” This attitude had been amply expressed by the punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918, which had ended Russian involvement in World War I and forced Bolshevik Russia to cede vast swathes of territory—including Ukraine and the Baltic states—along with a quarter of its population, to the victorious Germans. Although the cessions proved short-lived, being superseded by Germany’s defeat on the western front later that year, the idea of German expansion at Russia’s expense refused to die.