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

The frustrations ran both ways, of course. For one thing, Stalin’s pride would not allow him to let the USSR assume a subordinate position to Hitler’s Germany—as he put it, to become “Germany’s tail.” Yet, beyond that, the Soviets had many similar concerns to the Germans about the loss of their traditional markets and suppliers. By signing the pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin had so isolated himself internationally that Hitler’s was almost the only other state willing to do business with him. Whereas 60 percent of Soviet machinery and technology imports had come from the United States in 1938, for instance, those dwindled to nothing after the signing of the pact and the invasion of Finland late in 1939, with President Roosevelt even imposing a “moral embargo” on trade with the Soviet Union. The idea that Moscow was simply stringing the Germans along, therefore, intent on a bit of industrial espionage and military pilfering, simply does not correspond to reality. The Soviets had as much invested in the relationship, economically, as the Germans, maybe more so. Indeed, if anything, their intransigence in negotiating with Berlin was as much a symptom of desperation as of anything else.

In addition, where Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were now sharing a border, new points of friction emerged. As the Soviet ambassador in London had confessed to Lord Halifax in September 1939, German military success had been a “great surprise” to the USSR, which was now concerned by the prospect of having a “powerful and victorious Germany” as her next-door neighbor. One of the resulting points of friction was the so-called Lithuanian Strip, a small parcel of land along the Šešupė River in southern Lithuania, which, but for finding itself on the fault line between two totalitarian rivals, would doubtless have remained in total obscurity. However, despite its being assigned to Germany in the September 1939 Boundary and Friendship Treaty, the Soviets annexed the strip wholesale, along with the rest of Lithuania, the following summer. When the Germans raised the issue in subsequent negotiations, Moscow offered to retroactively purchase the territory for around 16 million RM, to which Berlin made a counterdemand of 54 million RM, which Moscow duly rejected. As the talks descended into acrimony, Ribbentrop attempted to excise the issue from the wider negotiations, but the spat rumbled on, poisoning already fraught relations as it went.

The squabble over Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina would prove even more divisive. The Soviet occupation of the provinces, in the summer of 1940, caused profound disquiet in Berlin. Although Moscow and Berlin had agreed in 1939 to Bessarabia falling into the Soviet “sphere of interest,” when Stalin came to collect the following summer, his lieutenants demanded nearby Bukovina as well, which had not previously been slated to fall under Moscow’s rule, as “compensation” for historic Soviet losses at Romanian hands.

Stalin’s motives were complex. Russia had a long-standing claim to Bessarabia, going back to the Crimean War and beyond, and its annexation provided a vital depth of defense to the port of Odessa, which was only forty kilometers from the old Romanian frontier. But Stalin’s overriding motivation was that the annexation extended Soviet influence into the Balkans, with the ultimate goal—in echo of imperial Russia’s old nineteenth-century ambition—being to establish Moscow’s control over the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, without which the Black Sea was potentially little more than a Soviet lake.

However, such ambitions ran very much counter to Hitler’s desire to preserve the Balkans, particularly Romania, as his own economic and strategic hinterland. Romanian oil was crucial to Berlin, and as Hitler would confess to the Finnish leader Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim two years later, he had “always feared that Russia would attack Romania in the late autumn of 1940and occupy the petroleum wells.” Had they done so, he said, “we would have been helpless”: without Romanian oil, Germany “could not have fought the war.” Yet, beyond that, there was a broader strategic concern: Berlin interpreted Stalin’s move into the Balkans as a worrying westward shift, a challenge to Germany’s continental hegemony.

So, though Berlin did not object in principle to the cession of the Romanian provinces—indeed, it urged the government in Bucharest to comply with Soviet demands—it nonetheless lodged a protest with Moscow. In late June, Ribbentrop wrote a long memorandum to Molotov, via ambassador Schulenburg, reminding him that Germany was “abiding by the Moscow agreements” but that the Soviet claim to Bukovina was “something new.” Not only did Bukovina present complications regarding the local ethnic German population, he explained, but it was also close to Germany’s “very important economic interests” in the rest of Romania; consequently, Germany was “extremely interested in preventing these areas from becoming a theatre of war.” As concerns were raised in Berlin that Moscow was overstepping the limits of the 1939 pact and unilaterally demanding territories beyond the agreed-on spheres of influence, Ribbentrop’s memorandum was something like a warning shot.

Stalin’s move south went unchecked, however, and though condoned by Berlin, it nonetheless set alarm bells ringing and increased Hitler’s determination to ensure his own control over the region. What followed would be an unseemly scramble for the Balkans, in which Romania and Bulgaria would tumble from sovereign nationhood to become desperate clients and petitioners.

Romania was the first to implode. Following Stalin’s annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the government in Bucharest abandoned its previous policy of uneasy neutrality and actively sought an alignment with Germany, disavowing the Anglo-French guarantee of 1939, abandoning the League of Nations, and finally announcing her desire to join the Axis in mid-July 1940. Such obeisances were not enough to save her from her neighbors, however, as Bulgaria and Hungary both lodged territorial claims—to Southern Dobrudja and Transylvania, respectively—which were granted following German and Italian arbitration. The subsequent, and arguably inevitable, collapse of King Carol’s government—with the king himself fleeing into a life of exile—ushered in a tense alliance between a pro-German senior general, Ion Antonescu, and the homespun fanatics of the Romanian fascist movement, the Iron Guard. At the end of all that, shorn of its disputed territories and in political ferment, Romania slipped definitively into the German orbit. Bulgaria would be next.

BY THE LATE SUMMER OF 1940, THE GERMAN-SOVIET RELATIONSHIP was in trouble. Strategically, the two regimes appeared to be on a collision course. The mood of collaboration of late 1939 had shifted increasingly to one of confrontation, with growing suspicions on each side that the other was acting in bad faith. Typical in this regard, perhaps, was an NKVD assessment, drawn up for the first anniversary of the pact in 1940, which drew the following stark conclusion: “Intoxicated by victory, the German Government together with the Italians and without the consent of the USSR, violated the agreement of 23 August 1939 by deciding the fate of the Balkan peoples.” The irony and the root of the problem was that Berlin could just as easily have accused Stalin of the very same thing.

In economics, too, the relationship was faltering. Despite the not inconsiderable benefits that had accrued for both sides over the previous year or so, both Moscow and Berlin were feeling dissatisfied. The Germans, frustrated that the connection with Moscow was not bearing the rich fruit they had expected, were well aware that other sources, such as occupied France or Romania, were proving more bounteous than the USSR. The Soviets, meanwhile, knew that their relationship with Germany, turbulent at best hitherto, was in need of recalibrating to acknowledge the huge changes that the intervening year of warfare had brought. Trade, which both sides had regarded as an essential component of the political arrangement, had become merely an indicator of a deeper malaise.