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

After an initial exchange of introductions and pleasantries, in which Stalin was “simple and unpretentious,” behaving with “jovial friendliness” toward his guests, the four principal players—Stalin and Molotov, Ribbentrop and Schulenburg—seated themselves around a table and proceeded to the business at hand. To Stalin’s rear sat his translator, the youthful Vladimir Pavlov, while Hilger, acting as Ribbentrop’s interpreter, positioned himself between his foreign minister and Ambassador Schulenburg. The negotiations they began that afternoon would cause something like a political earthquake.

THE PROCESS HAD STARTED IN EARNEST A FEW MONTHS EARLIER. Despite the opprobrium that both sides had heaped upon one another during the mid-1930s, contacts between the Nazis and the Soviets had never been entirely broken off, and talks—first on economic ties, then political matters—had tentatively begun in May 1939. Hitler’s position had been fairly clear. He had been irritated by what he saw as Western meddling in frustrating his ambitions the previous autumn at Munich, where the British and French had contrived to dismember Czechoslovakia to satisfy his demands and preserve the peace. Consequently, he had resolved to accelerate Germany’s expansion—by force if necessary—while his perceived advantage in armaments and trained personnel still held good. And if that meant thinking outside of the ideological box, then so be it.

To this end, Ribbentrop had initially courted the Poles with a view to enticing them away from the Anglo-French camp. The flirtation had begun in October 1938, when Ribbentrop had sought to open up a dialogue with Warsaw, requesting the disputed Free City of Danzig—German in character and tradition but severed from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles—in return for a twenty-five-year guarantee of the German-Polish border. The following January, the Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, had been invited for talks with Hitler at the Berghof above Berchtesgaden, and German support for Polish ambitions in Ukraine had been dangled as an incentive to broker a deal over Danzig. The flirtation was no ruse. Hitler initially directed toward the Poles little of the hatred that he reserved for the Czechs and had lauded Poland’s role as a bulwark against communism. Indeed, true to his anti-Soviet instincts, he had even floated the idea of a joint anti-Soviet alliance, with Poland—naturally—as Germany’s junior partner. “Great possibilities” existed in Polish-German cooperation, Ribbentrop minuted optimistically to the German ambassador in Warsaw, above all in the pursuit of “a common Eastern policy” against the USSR.

Yet the Poles would not be swayed, either by German offers or by veiled threats. Poland’s territorial integrity and independence, newly restored only a generation before after 123 years of foreign occupation, were far too precious to her politicians to be bartered away in return for dubious promises and vassal status, so a strict policy of even-handedness—the so-called Doctrine of Two Enemies—governed her relations with her two largest neighbors. Thus, while Warsaw was willing to negotiate on minor details, neither the seizure of Danzig nor the surrender of the Polish Corridor was open to discussion, and any attempt to take them by force would be interpreted in the Polish capital as an act of war.

This brief, aborted dalliance with Poland would not be without consequence. That same spring, as Ribbentrop was flirting with Warsaw, Hitler had designs on another European capital. On the morning of March 15, German troops had marched—at Czech “invitation” and unopposed except by a snowstorm—into the Czechoslovak capital, Prague. Hitler, following in their wake, had proclaimed the final dissolution of the Czechoslovak state—Slovakia had been persuaded to declare its independence the previous day—and announced that the remaining Czech lands, Bohemia and Moravia, would henceforth become a “protectorate” of the Greater German Reich.

Hitler’s motives for invading the rump of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939 are not entirely clear. He certainly seems to have wanted to thumb his nose at the Western powers, whose representatives, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Édouard Daladier, had so frustrated him the previous autumn. As he commented to an aide at the time of Munich, “That fellow Chamberlain has spoiled my entry into Prague.” Hitler was not a man to be denied his wishes for long. There were other, more cogent, justifications, however. Bohemia and Moravia were rich in raw materials and industry, and the two territories represented a vast salient protruding into Greater Germany’s southeastern flank. But the move was also calculated to intimidate Poland. At a time when Poland’s intransigence in negotiations was stymying Hitler’s strategic ambitions, the taking of the Czech lands demonstrated both German power and—Hitler hoped—Western impotence. Hitler gambled that the British and French would do nothing to aid the state that they had “defended” barely six months before at Munich, and the clear implication was that the Poles should accede to German demands.

Yet the West would not be nearly as supine as Hitler had hoped. The annexation of Bohemia and Moravia served belatedly to galvanize Western opinion, representing as it did Hitler’s first acquisition of a substantial non-German population and thereby giving the lie to his earlier protestations that he was merely righting the historic wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles and returning ethnic German populations “home” to the Reich. Those in London, Paris, and elsewhere who had been skeptical of the appeasement of Hitler’s Germany were now clamoring for a much more robust response.

Consequently, on March 31, 1939, the British government extended a guarantee to Poland, which it considered to be the next target of Hitler’s aggressive intentions, stating that “if any action clearly threatened Polish independence, and if the Poles felt it vital to resist such action by force, Britain would come to their aid.” Of course, Britain could do very little practically to aid Poland in the event of a German invasion: her resources of men and material simply did not make active intervention in central Europe a realistic proposition. But the guarantee was nonetheless an expression of solidarity and support intended not only to bolster Polish resolve but also to reassure the French that Britain remained committed to continental European affairs. Most importantly, it drew a line in the sand for Hitler, signaling that further German aggression would not be tolerated. It was the diplomatic equivalent of a game of “chicken.”

Hitler was predictably furious at this British checkmate. When he received word of the guarantee, he was in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and—as Admiral Wilhelm Canaris reported—he could barely contain his annoyance: “Hitler flew into a passion,” Canaris recalled. “With features distorted by fury, he had stormed up and down his room, pounded his fists on the marble table-top, and spewed forth a series of savage imprecations. Then, with his eyes flashing with an uncanny light, he had growled the threat: ‘I’ll brew them a devil’s potion.’”

The following day, before a mass rally at Wilhelmshaven, Hitler gave his public response. “No power on earth,” he warned, would be able to break German might, and if the Western Allies thought Germany would stand by while they marshaled their “satellite states” to act in their interests, then they were sorely mistaken. Hitler concluded ominously that “whoever declares himself willing to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the great powers should expect to burn his fingers.”

At this point the idea of a new rapprochement with Moscow seems to have occurred to the leadership in Berlin. Initially intended as a petit jeu to intimidate the Poles, it was first aired in mid-April, with Hitler’s confederate Hermann Göring, rather than Ribbentrop, playing a key role. In his diary, Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg wrote that he had spoken with Göring about the possibility of an alignment such as this. “When Germany’s life is at stake,” he wrote, “even a temporary association with Moscow must be contemplated.” Hitler was also lukewarm on the idea, reminding his ministers that he had “fought communism” all his life, but according to Ribbentrop, he changed his mind in early May, when he was shown footage at the Berghof of Stalin reviewing a military parade. Thereafter, Ribbentrop alleged, Hitler was intrigued, taking “a fancy” to Stalin’s face and saying that the Soviet leader looked “like a man one could do business with.” With that, Ribbentrop got permission to pursue his negotiations. It remained to be seen, however, whether the idea would gain any traction with the Soviets.