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

Starting in the summer of 1940, Soviet foreign trade commissar Anastas Mikoyan began submitting sizeable orders to German firms—such as Reinecker, which had been Europe’s largest machine tool manufacturer in 1939—for sundry heavy engineering items, including mills, forges, presses, and cranes. The KV factory at Chelyabinsk alone took over four hundred German machining tools, while an order from mid-July 1940 contained a request—worth 11.5 million rubles—for the import from Germany of 117 metal-processing tools, twenty-two presses, forges, and a complete bearing assembly plant. The collaboration was not confined to the tank industry. When Factory 292 was set up at Saratov in 1941 for the production of the mainstay Yakovlev Yak-1 fighter, it was established with 40 percent of its machine tools coming from Germany. And when factories were retooled at Kirov and Kharkhov in 1940 for the production of the M-30 and M-40 aircraft engines, nearly 20 million rubles were spent on machinery from German suppliers. Total figures and volumes of such orders will probably never be known, but it is surely no exaggeration to say that German engineering was one of the unacknowledged godfathers of the Red Army’s later military prowess.

For the Germans, however, the economic advantages brought by the connection with the Soviet Union are more difficult to discern. It is often lazily assumed, for instance, that supplies of Soviet fuel were paramount in German thinking. Certainly, the thirst for fuel shown by Hitler’s war machine would ultimately prove its Achilles’ heel, but one should be wary of projecting such problems back to the opening phase of the conflict. Germany went to war in September 1939 with over 2 million tons of oil stocks, and by the start of the campaign against the Soviet Union, in June 1941, that figure had dropped by only about a quarter. Total oil supplies from the Soviet Union, meanwhile, amounted to less than 1 million tons—that is, less than the monthly German reserve stock and barely 3 percent of the USSR’s total annual production—over that same period.

More significantly, perhaps, the Soviet Union was not Germany’s only source of oil; Hitler’s troops confiscated around 1 million tons of French oil stocks following the fall of France in 1940. Romania, too, put its oil wells at Hitler’s disposal, and with greater generosity than Stalin did, quickly emerging in 1940 as Germany’s most important supplier of crude oil. In the same period that the USSR supplied barely 1 million tons of oil to Germany, Romania supplied over four times that amount. Every drop would ultimately be crucial, of course, but the idea that Hitler was dependent on Soviet oil between 1939 and 1941 simply does not withstand scrutiny.

It’s a similar story with iron ore, essential for the creation of steel. The Soviets supplied Germany with 750,000 tons of it under the terms of the Commercial Agreement of February 1940, a figure far larger than those stipulated for other ores, such as manganese, chrome, and copper, though it represented less than 3 percent of Soviet annual production. Yet Swedish supplies of iron ore to Germany would dwarf those of the Soviet Union. A memorandum to a German-Swedish trade treaty in December 1939 noted that the projected Swedish export of iron ore to Germany in 1940 alone would reach 10 million tons, over thirteen times the total Soviet figure. Germany would get more iron ore from Sweden every month than it would receive from the USSR in over a year.

Rubber is another area of Soviet supply that appears to have fallen short of expectations. The importance of rubber to the modern military should not be underestimated, and Germany’s prewar supply came largely from British-controlled sources in Southeast Asia. Once war broke out in 1939 and those sources dried up, Germany hoped to source its rubber via the USSR, with the latter serving as a proxy buyer and transporting the goods to Germany.

In the event, Soviet-sourced rubber would be symptomatic of the wider shortcomings of Germany’s economic relationship with the USSR. Already at the outbreak of war, Germany was a world leader in the production of synthetic rubber, known by the trade name Buna and being produced in three plants. Heightened wartime demand, however, projected at around 9,000 tons per month, required alternative resources, mainly from the USSR. Yet Soviet-sourced rubber could not make up the shortfall. Soviet deliveries, totaling only 18,000 tons—less than Germany’s annual production of synthetic rubber—would barely ease the shortage.

In the circumstances, it is not surprising that German technocrats were keen to expand domestic synthetic rubber production, so in the winter of 1940 a new state-of-the-art chemicals facility was planned close to the little-known Upper Silesian town of Auschwitz. The resulting Buna Works and the associated labor camp at Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, as it became known, opened in May 1942, with the target production of 25,000 tons per annum. The plant would consume some 600 million RM of investment—a similar figure to the export trade associated with the Nazi-Soviet Pact—and around 30,000 lives. One of those who survived Monowitz was the Italian Jewish chemist Primo Levi, who later in life often recalled his experiences as a slave laborer in the factory:

Buna is as large as a city; besides the managers and German technicians, forty thousand foreigners work there, and fifteen to twenty languages are spoken. It is desperately and essentially opaque and grey. This huge entanglement of iron, concrete, mud and smoke is the negation of beauty. Its roads and buildings are named like us, by numbers or letters, not by weird and sinister names. Within its bounds not a blade of grass grows, and the soil is impregnated with the poisonous saps of coal and petroleum, and the only things alive are machines and slaves—and the former are more alive than the latter.

One of the few areas where a tangible economic benefit to Germany can be discerned is in foodstuffs. Hitler’s paladins were highly sensitive to the issue of food supply, mindful as they were of the morale-sapping shortages on the German home front during World War I. Consequently, the Nazi regime was keen to shore up domestic morale by ensuring that food supply was prioritized, which it achieved through the setting of artificially high rationing allocations and by lifting restrictions on what German troops could bring home from abroad.

In this regard, the supply of Soviet animal feed could play a vital part, helping Germany’s farmers to maintain domestic deliveries of meat—an important influence on civilian morale. As a result, the supply of 1 million tons of “feed grains and legumes” from the Soviet Union was duly included in the February 1940 Commercial Agreement, an estimate later revised upward to 1.5 million tons, with a further million tons anticipated for the second year. Although German reserves remained stable at around 4 million tons for most of 1940, they dwindled rapidly in 1941, such that, by the middle of the year, Germany was effectively reliant on supplies from the Soviet Union. By that point, just as the Germans and the Soviets clashed on the battlefield, Stalin’s collective farmers were keeping Hitler’s people fed.

From the German perspective, then, the economic aspects of the Nazi-Soviet Pact were something of a mixed bag, with a few positives arguably outweighed by more serious shortcomings. This naturally would have been a profound frustration and disappointment to the Nazi regime, for Hitler’s negotiators had clearly entertained high hopes of tapping into the raw material riches promised by the Soviet Union. Realizing that ambition, however, had proved a more difficult prospect.

To some extent, Soviet negotiating methods, which one German participant described simply as “chicanery,” had stymied German ambitions. Moscow married exorbitant demands and unrealistically high prices for its own goods to constant haggling over the tiniest details, deliberate delays, and outright stubbornness. In addition, Soviet negotiators could be bizarrely unpredictable—uncooperative one day, genial the next—leaving their German counterparts often confused and frustrated. This, of course, was doubtless part of the plan, but there were also concrete reasons for such peculiar behavior.