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

Thus, just as Soviet negotiators were pushing for solutions to long-stalled disputes with the Germans and floating the possibility of increasing raw material deliveries, Stalin was inviting the German military attaché and other senior personnel on a trip to the Urals and western Siberia to visit the factories producing the most modern Soviet tanks and aircraft, particularly T-34s and the Petlyakov Pe-8 long-range bomber. According to Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, there could be “no doubt” from this visit that the USSR was “arming on a grand scale.” At the same time, Soviet agents in the German Ministries of Aviation and Economics began to spread the opinion that war against the Soviet Union would be a catastrophe for the Nazi leadership. Stalin clearly did not want any underestimation of the enormity of a decision for war.

A week or so later, Stalin had another chance to impress the Soviet Union’s martial preparedness on the outside world. On May 4, he had himself appointed chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars by the Politburo. It was a largely symbolic change—previously Stalin’s official position had simply been that of general secretary of the Communist Party—but with this appointment, he effectively became head of state, formally concentrating power in his own hands. He was thereby sending a message of determination and resolve, demonstrating, as the official announcement put it, “absolute unity in the work of the leadership” during “the present tensions.”

The following day, he made his first speech in his new capacity as Soviet premier to an audience of 2,000 military academy graduates and senior military personnel gathered in the Andreevsky Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace. Introduced by Timoshenko, Stalin spoke without a script for around forty minutes, addressing the current difficulties. The Red Army had learned much, he said, from the Finnish War and the war in the west: “We possess a modern army, equipped with the latest weapons. We have tanks of the first order, which will break through the front.” The Red Army, he explained, “is very different from the way it was. It’s much larger and better equipped. It has grown from 120 to 300 divisions. One third are mechanized, armored divisions. Our artillery has been transformed, with more cannon and fewer howitzers. We didn’t have mortars and now we do; until recently we lacked anti-aircraft artillery and now we have a decent amount.” The Germans, he said, had “become conquerors,” shifting from the task of reversing the Treaty of Versailles to that of waging aggressive war. Their army was “dizzy with success,” but Stalin reminded his listeners, “There is no invincible army in the world and, from a military point of view, there is nothing special about the German army with regard to its tanks, artillery or air force.” Yet, he acknowledged, war was now likely.

At the reception that followed the speech, Stalin extrapolated on Soviet policy in reaction to an external threat. Intoxicated by the moment—and perhaps by the inevitable round of toasts—he may have said more than he had meant to. “Defending our country,” he stressed, “we must act offensively. From defence to go to a military doctrine of offensive actions. We must transform our training, our propaganda, our agitation, our press in an offensive spirit. The Red Army is a modern army, and a modern army is an offensive army.” According to one eyewitness account, Stalin was even more explicit. Responding to an ill-judged toast from a general who had praised his leader’s policy of peace, an enraged Stalin waved away the applause:

This general has understood nothing. He has understood nothing. We Communists are not pacifists; we have always been against unjustified wars, against imperialistic wars for dividing up the world, against slavery and exploitation of the workers. We have always been for just wars for freedom and independence, for revolutionary wars to free the people from the colonial yoke, for the most just war to defend the socialist Fatherland. Germany wishes to destroy our socialist state, which the workers won under the leadership of Lenin’s Communist Party. Germany wishes to destroy our great Fatherland, Lenin’s Fatherland, the results of October, to wipe out millions of Soviet people and enslave those who are left. Only a war with fascist Germany and a victory in that war can save our Fatherland. Raise your glasses and drink to the war, to aggression in that war, and to our victory in that war.

With that, it was reported, Stalin drained his drink and sat down while his audience stood in silence.

Understandably, the events of that night have proved highly controversial. At the time, the speech was given fairly wide coverage, with extensive front-page reports appearing in both Pravda and Izvestia the following day, the former printing a large, full-width photograph of Stalin addressing the ranks of academy graduates. Although the press outlined the broad theme of the speech—the readiness and competence of the Red Army—a verbatim text was not reproduced, as usual, and the subjects of the informal toasts that followed were not reported, so rumors duly swirled around Moscow about precisely what had been said. Indeed, no official record of the speech exists to this day, so details of its contents have to be pieced together from a number of sometimes unreliable eyewitness accounts. This uncommon secrecy has led to some wild speculation, and the speech became a key piece of evidence in the dubious theory that Stalin was himself planning a preemptive strike against Hitler in the summer of 1941.

Yet it is more plausible to see the speech not as proof of any supposed offensive plan but rather as a vital component in Stalin’s defensive armory. At the very least, Stalin was giving a pep talk to new military academy graduates, telling them that the Red Army was making good progress and that they had nothing to fear from any enemy. But by his show of brazen, saber-rattling confidence and his conscious inflation of the Red Army’s strength and capability, Stalin may well have also been seeking to deter Hitler. As one account has put it, Stalin’s speech had very clearly “been prepared for export.” Barely a week later, however, Stalin’s newfound confidence—or belligerence—would be tested anew and in an unexpected way.

ON THE NIGHT OF MAY 10, 1941, THE PILOT OF A LUFTWAFFE AIRPLANE, a Messerschmitt Bf-110, bailed out over Eaglesham in the Scottish lowlands, south of Glasgow. Coming to earth in a farmer’s field, he identified himself as Hauptmann Alfred Horn when apprehended by a farm laborer and was promptly taken to a nearby cottage, where he was offered a cup of tea. In due course, “Hauptmann Horn” would be revealed as Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, apparently on a mission to negotiate peace with Britain.

Hess’s precise intentions in flying solo to Britain in the middle of a war are still under contention, not least the fraught issue of whether he was lured and with whom he was intending to negotiate. He brought few concrete proposals with him beyond the broad idea that Britain should give Germany a free hand in Europe, and in return Germany would leave Britain to its empire. Through his interrogation and sounding out by a number of senior British figures—Foreign Office advisor Ivone Kirkpatrick and former foreign secretary Sir John Simon most prominent among them—his grand plan quickly foundered between the rock of German arrogance and the hard place of British intransigence. Hess would be interned in Britain for the remainder of the war, a sorry figure, increasingly viewed as a crank or lunatic even by his former comrades in Germany. As Goebbels exclaimed in his diary, “It is all too stupid. A fool like [Hess] was the Führer’s deputy. It is scarcely conceivable.”