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

The RAF’s raid on Berlin that night was relatively short. According to Churchill, it had been deliberately timed to coincide with Molotov’s presence in the German capital. “Though not invited to join in the discussion,” the British prime minister later joked, he “did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.” It is possible, of course, that this is an example of Churchill rewriting history to suit his purposes, but it is certainly clear that the raid started very early, with the siren sounding shortly after 8:30 p.m., and that the center of the city was targeted.

As Molotov and Ribbentrop discussed their division of the world beyond the bunker, therefore, they would most certainly have heard the ongoing cacophony of the air raid, particularly the undulating wail of the sirens and the outgoing firing of Berlin’s flak batteries. In such circumstances, Ribbentrop’s repeated assertions that the British were finished and that the war against Britain had “already been won” must have seemed rather premature. According to Stalin, Molotov halted Ribbentrop’s boasts with a well-aimed riposte: if Britain really is defeated, he asked, “why are we in this shelter, and whose are those bombs that fall?” Ribbentrop was finally silenced; he had no answer.

The following morning, as Molotov and his entourage left the German capital, the same Wehrmacht honor guard as had been present two days before was drawn up in the square outside the Anhalter Station, and the same train—complete with its German saloon and restaurant cars—raised steam beneath the huge glass and steel frame of the station canopy. Yet this time there were few fanfares, and only Ribbentrop himself appeared to see his Soviet counterpart off. It would be their last meeting.

DESPITE THE APPARENT FINALITY OF MOLOTOV’S DEPARTURE FROM Berlin, there was little sense in the immediate weeks afterward that a die had been cast. In fact, though Molotov claimed that he had found it difficult to interrupt Hitler, he was nonetheless rather pleased with himself and, at a party thrown for his return to Moscow, was described as “swollen-headed and puffed-up.” He had good reason for satisfaction. Having rebuffed German efforts to deflect the USSR southward and firmly stated the Soviet Union’s strategic ambitions in Europe, he had carried out the task outlined for him by Stalin to the letter. Stalin, naturally, was more critical and expressed his dissatisfaction with Molotov’s inflexible attitude during the meeting, suggesting that his minister ought to have been more accommodating. But, as far as Moscow was concerned, the negotiations would continue. The Berlin talks were merely the opening stage in that ongoing process.

Hitler, meanwhile, was not quite so sanguine. Having become increasingly exasperated with the Soviet alignment as the year progressed, he was clearly beginning to think that the connection with Moscow had run its course and that a final reckoning with Bolshevism was in the offing. More seriously, he was also under the impression that Stalin was somehow spurring continued British resistance. As Chief of the Army High Command General Franz Halder noted in his diary, in the front of Hitler’s mind that summer and autumn was Britain’s puzzling unwillingness to make peace in the face of apparently insuperable odds. Hitler’s answer to that conundrum was that Churchill was holding out in “some hope of action on the part of Russia,” and with this assumed nexus, the issue of “what to do” with the Soviet Union had begun to climb the agenda. On July 22, for instance, General Halder recorded Hitler as stating that “the problem of Russia must be dealt with,” and “we must begin thinking about this.” Hitler would reiterate this sentiment before his generals at the Berghof on July 31, giving those present a brief rundown of his views on the main operations involved in the “destruction of the power of Russia.”

This exchange is traditionally taken as the moment when Hitler made his unalterable decision to attack the Soviet Union. Yet that interpretation is too neat. After all, as any politician would attest, an order for preparatory planning is not the same thing as an irrevocable decision, and as we know, Hitler was a supreme opportunist who had made his career reacting to events rather than committing himself long in advance, wholeheartedly and irrevocably, to a specific policy. Moreover, as General Staff officer Walter Warlimont noted, the planning that followed this meeting was initially rather desultory and halfhearted, resulting in “no carefully thought-out plan as a basis for action.”

It makes better sense, therefore, to view Hitler’s July order to prepare for an attack on the Soviet Union as part of a multitrack policy, with the military option a backup to a diplomatic approach that had not yet been abandoned. Certainly, at the time of the July conference at the Berghof, the summit meeting with Molotov still lay more than three months in the future. And though the Berlin summit was engineered primarily by the Russophile “Easterners” of the German Foreign Office, who had gotten wind of Hitler’s growing belligerence toward Moscow and sought to bring Molotov to Berlin to smooth tensions, one should not imagine that Hitler was completely disingenuous in his negotiations.

Hitler was clearly still considering all possibilities. Indeed, two weeks before Molotov’s arrival, he had sent a letter to Stalin personally in an attempt to enroll his help in the war against the British, raising the prospect of a joint division of the empire’s spoils. “If the plan succeeds,” Halder wrote in his diary, “we could go all out against Britain.” Another option was aired by the “Easteners” of the German embassy in Moscow, to be circulated among the upper levels of the Foreign Ministry. As the senior official Ernst von Weizsäcker noted, within Wilhelmstrasse at least, the idea of a military attack on the USSR, far from being fixed, was not considered especially favorably. After all, there were other ways to ensure Moscow’s subjugation, not least by containing the USSR and allowing it to slowly collapse: “It is argued that without liquidating Russia there will be no order in Europe. But why should it not stew next to us in its damp Bolshevism? As long as it is ruled by bureaucrats of the present type, this country has to be feared less than in the time of the tsars.”

Even as Molotov was being shuttled around Berlin on that rainy Tuesday, Hitler was issuing a war directive reviewing the various strategic possibilities available to him. His short paragraph on “Russia” is instructive: “Political discussions for the purpose of clarifying Russia’s attitude in the immediate future have already begun,” he wrote; yet, “regardless of the outcome of these conversations, all preparations for the East for which verbal orders have already been given will be continued.” As much as the military planning then ongoing, therefore, the Berlin talks formed part of a multitrack German effort to neutralize the Soviet Union and leave Germany as the undisputed master of all of Europe.

This is made further evident by the deal that Molotov was offered in the German capital. Hitler clearly wanted Stalin’s Soviet Union out of Europe, unable to meddle any further in Balkan affairs or in those of the Baltic Sea or the Bosporus. By turning the USSR south, to direct her ambitions toward the Indian Ocean and the “bankrupt” British Raj, he would not only attain that goal but also lure the Soviet Union into conflict with the British, thereby destabilizing the USSR and rendering any putative Anglo-Soviet rapprochement impossible. In all, it was a rather ingenious solution to the predicament that Hitler imagined he faced, achieving both of his strategic ambitions in one fell swoop. The Berlin negotiations, therefore, should not be seen as a bizarre charade or a diplomatic veneer to hide preparations for war; rather they were a genuine—if cynical—exchange of views between two treaty partners. Indeed, a couple of days after Molotov’s departure, on November 18, General Halder noted in his diary that the “Russian operation” had apparently been “pushed into the background.” The negotiated solution, it seems, was still very much on the table.