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

Most bizarre of all, perhaps, was the Soviet economic mission that toured Germany in late October 1939, essentially to draw up a shopping list of German military and technological wares required by Moscow. “Shopping list,” in fact, was the appropriate term. When the forty-five-strong Soviet delegation arrived—all decked out in brand-new brown coats, hats, and yellow shoes—each member carried empty suitcases to accommodate the myriad consumer goods unavailable at home. Once they got down to work, other peculiarities quickly manifested themselves, not least an inveterate suspicion of their German counterparts. According to the later memoir account of one of their number, Lieutenant General and Vice Minister of Aviation Alexander Yakovlev, the Germans were generous and “genial hosts,” putting the Soviet delegation up in the best hotel in Berlin, the Adlon, and treating them to a number of tours and displays of equipment. Yakovlev recalled with incredulity—his memory doubtless colored by postwar sensibilities—that “they smiled at us, shook our hands, paid us compliments, and tried to create an atmosphere of friendship and sincerity.” He went on to describe a meeting with his counterpart, General Ernst Udet, and Hermann Göring at the Johannisthal airfield outside Berlin, where a demonstration of German materiel was held: “In strict order, as though on parade twin-engine Junkers-88 and Dornier-215 bombers, single-engine Heinkel-100 and Messerschmitt-109 fighters, Focke-Wulf-187 and Henschel reconnaissance planes, a twin-engine Messerschmitt-110 fighter, a Junkers-87 dive bomber, and other types of aircraft. The crews—pilots and mechanics—stood rigidly at attention by each airplane.” Yakovlev recalled Udet taking the head of the Soviet delegation, Ivan Tevossian, up for a turn in a Fiesler Storch reconnaissance plane and making a “splendid landing, stopping exactly where it had started from.” When Tevossian expressed his satisfaction, Göring presented the plane to him as a gift. As Yakovlev wrote of the display, “Everything was impeccably organised and made rather a good impression. We returned to the Adlon strongly impressed by what we had seen.”

Not everyone in the group was quite so impressed, however. General Dmitri Gusev, for instance, appeared to believe that the Germans were taking them for fools and were only showing obsolete items. After all, he queried, “how could they show us the true state of their air force equipment?” On reflection, Yakovlev, too, was uneasy, concerned strangely by the “candidness with which the most secret weaponry data had been revealed to us.” He would later suggest that the Germans seemed more interested in intimidating their guests with their military power than anything else. However, when these complaints were passed on to their host, Ernst Udet, he was indignant, replying, “I give you my word as an officer. We’ve shown you everything; if you don’t like what you saw, don’t buy. We are not pressuring you—do what you think best.”

Yet, although Gusev’s comment arguably said more about Soviet than German attitudes, he had a point. For all the affability of their hosts, the Soviet delegation was not being shown the true state of German technology. As interpreter Valentin Berezhkov recalled, precautions were put in place to prevent members of the Soviet delegation from seeing verboten items. For his part, Berezhkov was sent to the Krupp factory at Essen to oversee the construction of the outstanding main turrets intended for the Lützow ; yet the area was separated from the rest of the factory by a thick tarpaulin curtain, leaving so little space that the Krupp engineers could barely work. Berezhkov was thus prevented from even seeing the remainder of the workshop.

Sensitive air technology was similarly shielded from view. Despite touring the country and visiting countless sites—including BMW in Munich, Messerschmitt in Augsburg, Junkers in Dessau, Focke-Wulf in Bremen, and Arado, Henschel, and Siemens in Berlin—the Soviet delegation was not shown either the Focke-Wulf 190, which was then in development, or the new jet engine technology being prepared by BMW and Junkers. Moreover, a measure of disinformation was employed. The Germans made great claims about the Heinkel He-100 fighter, for instance, which, despite having vied for the airspeed record earlier that year, was known to be dogged by design glitches and consequently had not even been accepted for operational use by the Luftwaffe.

Perhaps sensing that their German partners were not being entirely open, the Soviet naval delegation was especially demanding, arriving with a lengthy list of requests, including access to inspect the battleship Scharnhorst , the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper , a minelayer, a destroyer, and a type VIIB U-boat. Indeed, Soviet requests seemed to grow almost exponentially, including everything from torpedo fuses and detonators to binoculars and radios—as well as many items that the Germans did not even have. Interestingly, the German naval attaché in Moscow was not accorded reciprocal privileges. Little wonder, then, that one German admiral concluded that the entire process was merely a cover for a concerted campaign of Soviet espionage.

Negotiations in other spheres were just as fraught and complex. While the various Soviet delegations were perusing German wares, German businessmen streamed to Moscow to open talks of their own, many of them ending up hopelessly entangled in Soviet red tape and achieving little beyond provoking a suspension of trading applications and further eroding an already fragile trust. Meanwhile, the civil servants and bureaucrats attempted to thrash out a mutually acceptable agreement, and it was far from easy.

Believing that the relationship was far more critical to the German side than to their own, the Soviet negotiators drove a very hard bargain, demanding huge amounts of the most advanced German technology while obstructing their own reciprocal deliveries. The Germans were shocked, for instance, when they received a forty-eight-page list of Soviet demands at the end of November 1939—including everything from cruisers to fighter aircraft, artillery pieces, and complete industrial plants—amounting to a massive 1.5 billion RM. Moreover, Soviet negotiators were working to turn the original agreement upside down by demanding German finished items in advance of their own supply of raw materials, while at the same time invoking every obstacle possible to hinder German requests, inflating prices on a whim or arguing that infrastructure or rolling stock were insufficient to handle the volumes required. Indeed, senior German negotiator Karl Ritter was obliged to invoke the positive spirit of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, “fully approved by Stalin,” in an effort to persuade the Soviets to return to those original terms as the basis for their talks. In a later memorandum, Ritter was more critical, noting, “Negotiations are not proceeding favourably. Both in general and in detail, the other side is not showing the gratitude that should result from the new political situation. Instead they are trying to get all they think they can.” If the Germans had imagined that they could easily tap into the Soviet Union’s vast natural resources, they were sorely mistaken.

In fact, some on the German side began to tire of the endless negotiations and exorbitant Soviet demands. Ribbentrop delivered a rebuke to the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Alexei Shkvartsev, reminding him, “Germany is at war,” and adding that “everything humanly possible has been done [from the German side] and beyond that one could not go.” Others were less conciliatory. The German military was growing frustrated with the Soviets’ “voluminous and unreasonable” demands, and the negotiators, Ritter and Schnurre, increasingly had to contend with objections and refusals from their own side. Rumors of German discontent even reached the ears of the American chargé in Berlin, who reported back to Washington that German officials were “less sanguine” about the relationship with the Soviets than they had been hitherto.