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

The British had clearly arrived at the same conclusion. And although they evidently believed there was nothing to be gained by negotiation, they nonetheless saw an obvious propaganda coup to be scored with Hess’s arrival and capture. Churchill, who attached little importance to the deputy Führer’s escapade, was minded to play the affair with a straight bat, making only a public statement of the facts surrounding the case. But Whitehall’s mandarins, who saw it as too good an opportunity to miss, persuaded him otherwise. Consequently, only the barest details were made public while a whispering campaign was begun through covert channels, intended not only to unnerve Hitler and undermine German morale but also to stoke up Soviet anxieties about what the Hess mission might signify.

The British had long wanted to detach Stalin from his relationship with Berlin, seeing such a course of action as a prime weapon in the struggle against Hitler. But they had been perennially frustrated by their inability to make any headway in Moscow. As Alexander Cadogan, permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, noted bitterly, diplomacy toward the USSR was “completely hamstrung”: “unless you can (a) threaten (b) bribe it you can do nothing, because Russia has (a) no fear of us whatever and (b) we have nothing to offer her.” The Hess affair, however, appeared to provide a way out of the impasse, giving the British an opportunity, by adroitly managing the story, to exert a favorable influence on Stalin. The line spun to Moscow, therefore, was that Hess’s flight was a symptom of a split in the Nazi Party, with the purists (represented by Hess) displeased by Hitler’s collaboration with the Soviets and eager to clear the way—by securing British neutrality—for a final reckoning with communism. By stressing Nazi perfidy and the probability of an attack, the British hoped to turn Stalin against his former partner in crime and fatally undermine the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

This plan, though not entirely wrongheaded, was nonetheless fundamentally flawed. It not only underestimated the extent of Stalin’s paranoia but also failed to recognize that his distrust of British motives was just as great as his fear of German intentions. As the archetypal “imperialist power,” Britain held a special place in Soviet demonology, particularly as it had taken the lead in the Allied intervention against Soviet rule in the 1918–1919 Russian Civil War and Churchill himself had famously said at the time that Bolshevism was a baby that should be “strangled in its cradle.” Clearly, any story emanating from British sources was to be treated with the utmost circumspection.

The information on Hess came to the Soviets via a number of channels, among them British ambassador to Moscow Stafford Cripps, Cambridge spy Kim Philby, and the extensive Soviet intelligence network. It was fairly thin on detail, and most of it was managed in some way by Whitehall. Yet, rather than deducing a split in the Nazi Party, Stalin and his cohorts duly gleaned that Hess, and by extension Hitler, was trying to woo the British, and if Moscow were not careful, it could find itself facing the Nazis alone. As Khrushchev noted in his memoirs, the idea of Hess’s flight being unauthorized by Berlin was unthinkable. In addition, the news that Sir John Simon had been involved in the debriefing of Hess would have worried Moscow deeply; after all, many on the left viewed Simon as one of the architects of appeasement, an avowed “man of Munich.” Stalin would have been forgiven for wondering whether another round of appeasement was in the pipeline.

In fact, he thought the situation was much more serious than that: for Stalin, the Hess episode represented a dangerous anti-Soviet conspiracy. In a speech to the party’s central committee some days after Hess arrived in Britain, he outlined his thoughts on the subject: “On the one hand,” he said, “Churchill sends us a personal message in which he warns us about Hitler’s aggressive intentionsand on the other hand, the British meet Hess, who is undoubtedly Hitler’s confidant, and conduct negotiations with Germany through him.” The only obvious answer for Stalin was that the British wanted to provoke a war between Russia and Germany. “When Churchill sent us his personal warning,” he explained, “he believed that we would activate our military mechanism. Then Hitler would have a direct and fair reason to launch a preventive crusade against the Soviet Union.”

So, rather than galvanizing Stalin in his dealings with Hitler—as London had hoped—the leak of the Hess story did the opposite, confirming Stalin’s pathological distrust of the British as eternal meddlers and dissemblers. The imminent threat, Stalin concluded, came not from the Germans but from the British. As he explained to Zhukov, “Don’t you see? They are trying to frighten us with the Germans, and to frighten the Germans with us, setting us against one another.”

Thus, beyond deepening Stalin’s suspicion of the outside world, the Hess episode altered little. Golikov’s intelligence reports for May still gave an accurate assessment of the German military buildup on the Soviet western frontier—on May 5, it was estimated at 102 to 107 divisions; on May 15, at 114 to 119; and on May 31, at 120 to 122—but Stalin dismissed this as disinformation or an attempted provocation. Indeed, by this point, Stalin was growing so impatient with his subordinates that they increasingly tended to submit their reports “in fear and trepidation.” Golikov, meanwhile, was learning to present a deliberately ambiguous reading of his information, so as not to earn Stalin’s displeasure. On May 15, for instance, he chose to focus his report on those German forces earmarked for action against the British in the Middle East and Africa rather than those massing on the Soviet border.

Nonetheless, Soviet military preparations continued. In mid-May, mindful of Stalin’s recent call for a more offensive attitude, Zhukov revised the Red Army’s war plan to include a proposal for a preemptive strike against the Germans. The so-called Zhukov Plan argued that it was “necessary not to give the initiative to the German command” and advocated an attack on the Wehrmacht “at that moment when it is still at the deployment stage and has not yet managed to organise a front.” It ended with a request for Stalin to permit a “timely mobilization.”

That permission would not be forthcoming. Indeed, some have doubted whether Stalin even saw the Zhukov Plan at all. At the same time, defensive preparations continued. By the mid-summer of 1941, around 2,000 strongpoints had been completed along the Molotov Line, of which around half were armed and equipped. In addition, all of the “fortified areas” were ordered brought up to combat strength as soon as possible. In mid-May Zhukov succeeded in securing a “partial mobilization,” with reservists being called up and over 50,000 troops from the Caucasus and other interior districts of the Soviet Union being relocated to the western frontier areas. “Train after train began to arrive,” the general recalled in his memoirs. “It was gratifying. The apprehension that in the event of war we would have no troops in depth was dispersed.” The sobering truth, however, was that many of those new cadres lacked officers and basic materiel and would be no match for the battle-hardened Wehrmacht.

In economic affairs, too, the same pattern of behavior that had characterized the early months of 1941 continued into May and June. As the Germans had stepped up their deliveries to the Soviets over the previous few months, the Soviets followed suit, with Stalin using economics to appease Hitler as best he could. From April to June alone, the Soviet Union delivered over 500,000 tons of grain, nearly a third of the total delivered over the entire life of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In addition new contracts were agreed in April for 982,500 tons of oil, 6,000 tons of copper, 1,500 tons of nickel, 500 tons of zinc, and 500 tons of molybdenum.