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

Other German deliveries to the USSR were rather less involved. By the late spring of 1940, after the German campaign in Scandinavia had got underway, Soviet obstructionism eased somewhat, and negotiations that previously had dragged on for months could be smoothed over in a matter of days or weeks. Preparations were then swiftly made for the delivery of many of the other items stipulated in the February 1940 agreement. Many of the aircraft that had been ordered were simply flown via Königsberg directly to Moscow, where the Soviets had laid on full ground support, accommodation, refueling, and meteorological facilities for the incoming crews. Military and industrial items were sent by train as their delivery deadlines, stipulated by the various agreements, fell due. After a sluggish start with the wrangling over terms and payments, German exports to the USSR rose to a monthly total of 15 million RM in May 1940, peaking at 37 million RM in December.

Soviet deliveries to Germany were theoretically easier to handle, being predominantly bulk cargoes of oil, grain, and foodstuffs. However, the Soviet Union’s creaking infrastructure did throw up occasional bottlenecks and obstacles, not least at the two main transit points into German-occupied Poland—at Brest-Litovsk and Przemyśl—where a change of rail gauge further complicated matters. Consequently, most of the oil was shipped from the Soviet Caucasus by sea to Varna in Bulgaria, then by rail to Germany, thereby avoiding the problem areas. Nonetheless, Soviet deliveries to Germany rose from a value of around 10 million RM per month in the spring of 1940 to peak at nearly ten times that in September of that year.

After initial teething troubles, therefore, German-Soviet trade grew impressively through 1940, with Soviet exports to Germany estimated at 404 million RM over the year, compared to German exports to the USSR of 242 million RM. A glance at German foreign trade figures for 1940 shows that, in the latter half of the year, exports to the Soviet Union consistently amounted to over 60 percent of monthly totals. At first blush, then, the economic relationship appears to have been delivering on its promise to provide the Soviet Union with vital examples of the latest precision engineering with which to continue its ongoing industrialization program, while supplying Nazi Germany with essential fuel and foodstuffs for the home front. Some have made even grander claims, suggesting that Soviet supplies made the decisive difference to German forces in their invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940. As one author has eloquently suggested, “Guderian’s tanks operated largely on Soviet petrol as they dashed for the sea at Abbeville, the bombs that levelled Rotterdam contained Soviet guncotton, and the bullets that strafed British Tommies wading to the boats at Dunkirk were sheathed in Soviet cupro-nickel.”

The truth is more mundane. Soviet deliveries of fuel and other military supplies were only trickling into Germany by the early summer of 1940. By May, total deliveries of oil had barely topped 100,000 tons, contributing only one-seventh of German oil stocks, with a similar figure for grain of 103,000 tons. Such modest amounts were unlikely to have made much noticeable contribution to the French campaign.

In fact, the wider economic arrangement hammered out between the Nazis and the Soviets was much less influential than the casual observer might imagine. It is easy to be misled by the figure for September 1940, for instance—when German exports to the USSR made up 76 percent of the monthly total—into assuming that the economic relationship had undergone a significant change for the better. Such large percentages are deceptive, however, and merely demonstrate that German export trade had virtually collapsed following the outbreak of war, leaving the Soviet Union as practically Berlin’s only serious trading partner. Germany’s total export figure for September 1940 was less than a quarter of the total for March of that year, when the last prewar orders were being filled. Over the year as a whole, German exports to the USSR were decidedly modest, amounting to less than 1 percent of German GDP. Although an increase on the immediately preceding peacetime years, such volumes were broadly in line with those from the early 1930s and less than import totals from the USSR for the years 1927 to 1930. For all its promise, then, the much vaunted Commercial Agreement barely restored the economic status quo that had preceded Hitler.

For the Soviet Union, meanwhile, the relationship was a little more vital, comprising 31 percent of its total imports for 1940 and contributing to a brief boom in export trade in which exports of oil doubled, grain increased fivefold, and the total figure rose by 250 percent. In 1940, nearly 53 percent of the USSR’s total exports were destined for Nazi Germany. But, as in the German case, the paucity of Soviet trade in the immediately preceding years means that such apparently impressive increases can be deceptive. In truth, the new relationship was barely reaching parity with the volumes of trade that had gone before. The volume of Soviet imports from Germany in 1940, for example, was quantitatively less than the annual totals from the decade between 1924 and 1933, while Soviet exports in the other direction fell short of the peak of the 1926–1930 period. Thus, although the Nazi-Soviet Pact marked a very definite political departure, its economic aspects were much less remarkable, hardly matching the volumes of German-Soviet trade that had already existed a decade earlier.

Of course, it wasn’t just sheer volumes that were supposed to be decisive; it was also the specifics. The economic relationship was intended to address particular shortcomings, such as the Soviet deficiency in precision engineering and Germany’s dependence on the world market for essential supplies. For the Soviets, the results were rather mixed in this regard. In some spheres, the benefits from the relationship with Germany are hard to perceive. It is clear from the nonplussed reaction of the Soviet aeronautical delegation to Berlin, for instance, that its members were expecting to see far more advanced technology than they were actually shown. After all, Soviet engineers had already independently developed both a delta-wing aircraft and a functioning prototype jet engine by 1938, which perhaps explains why their buying delegation was less than wholly impressed when the Germans showed them conventional, piston-engine examples the following year.

In other areas, such as precision machine tools, the benefit is much easier to divine. Soviet industry was endeavoring to close the gap with its rival economies via the third Five Year Plan from 1938 onwards, and the German connection can only have helped in that respect, despite the exports of raw materials that it demanded. Indeed, after plateauing through 1939, Soviet industrial production very clearly rose again in 1940, with a couple of sectors—such as high-grade steel—showing particularly impressive increases. Moreover, such advances appear to have saved the Five Year Plan, which, despite a poor start, was well on the way to being fulfilled and even overfulfilled by the middle of 1941. Although economic historians of the period rarely mention the German connection, it seems plausible to attribute these increases, at least in part, to the influence of the commercial agreements.

A clear—indeed a vital—benefit is perceptible in the area of military production. The Soviet tank industry is a salient example. Soviet tank production was in flux in 1940, with the obsolete T-26 and BT series tanks being phased out and production switching to the more modern T-34 and KV models. In addition, a simultaneous expansion of the sector entailed the building of new plants and the retooling of existing plants to produce the new models. A natural partner in these processes was German heavy industry, which could provide both the hardware and the know-how to assist, and the Soviets were not shy in exploiting this resource.