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

May was similarly bountiful, with 14 percent of the total value of Soviet exports to Germany being transacted that month alone and the usual squabbles over pricing and terms curiously absent. Such was the Soviet enthusiasm for trade in the early summer that the German infrastructure on the western side of the border in occupied Poland—already overburdened as it was by the enormous military preparations—was unable to cope with the increased volume, and hundreds of wagons containing grain, fuel, metal ores, and other raw materials were backed up on the Soviet side of the frontier.

It is telling that by June, when the Germans had all but halted reciprocal deliveries, Stalin still did not appear unduly worried. On June 13, for instance, Admiral Nikolai Kuznetzov reported to him that spare parts deliveries for the cruiser Petropavlovsk (the ex- Lützow ), still being fitted out in Leningrad, had mysteriously stopped. In response, Stalin raised no concerns. “Is that all?” he asked.

Given the apparent alacrity with which the Soviets were still fulfilling their economic obligations, one might imagine that less hawkish opinions were being voiced in Berlin’s corridors of power. Certainly, it had long been the position of the Easterners in the German Foreign Office, such as Karl Schnurre and Ambassador Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, that Germany should not seek to slaughter the cow that it wanted to milk. Others now joined their chorus, however, most notably Finance Minister Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, who argued that Germany would certainly lose out in the event of war because of the inevitable dislocation and destruction. Schnurre went further, suggesting that the Soviet desire to appease Berlin was such that additional economic demands beyond the scope of the existing agreements could be made. Why make war when the Soviets were already willing to deliver almost everything requested?

There were shortcomings to this argument, however. For one thing, in their zeal to avoid conflict, Schnurre and others painted an excessively rosy picture of Soviet fulfillment. Moscow was still less than entirely forthcoming in certain areas of the relationship, and experience suggested that as soon as any crisis had passed, Stalin would revert to his old obstructionist ways.

As much as he might once have understood the complexities of the economic relationship with the USSR, by 1941 Hitler had moved on to much more seductive motivators, such as ideology and geopolitics. Indeed, he had so tired of those warning of economic doom following his planned invasion of the Soviet Union that in the spring of 1941 he complained to Hermann Göring that “from now onwards” he was going to “stop up his ears” so as not to have to “listen to any more of that talk.” Like many of his more ideologically minded countrymen, Hitler was by this stage motivated more by his prejudices than by hard facts. To his mind, Stalin was devious, a “cold-blooded blackmailer” waiting for his opportunity to spread communism westward. Only war against the Soviet Union, he believed, would decide the vital question of hegemony in Europe, and it was a war that Germany had to win. Goebbels elaborated on his master’s strategic thinking in his diary after a meeting in the Reich Chancellery that June. “We must act,” he wrote. “Moscow intends to keep out of the war until Europe is exhausted and bled white. Then Stalin will move to bolshevise Europe and impose his own rule. We shall upset his calculations with one stroke.” With such grand concepts at stake, the minutiae of economics found little purchase.

Hitler also needed the coming campaign against the Soviets to help solve the population problems that he had stored up for himself in eastern Europe. The process of ethnic reorganization in occupied Poland, initiated in the winter of 1939, had thus far proceeded only fitfully, its progress hindered by the exigencies of war and the lack of any coherent overarching plan. Indeed, by the winter of 1940, a renewed impatience among senior Nazis was forcing the question of “resettlement” back up the political agenda.

In the first instance, the question of the fate of the Volksdeutsche “liberated” from eastern Europe following the Nazi-Soviet Pact still had to be satisfactorily addressed. Over the second half of 1940, Poles and Jews had been deported en masse from the Warthegau into the General Government to make way for the Volksdeutsche arriving from Volhynia, the area of southeastern Poland annexed by Stalin. In March 1941, Nazi propaganda would boast that over 400,000 “Poles and Jews” had already been “resettled.” This resettlement process, though chaotic and hampered by logistical shortcomings, together with official disappointment over the ethnic “quality” of some of the new arrivals, sparked something of a “deportation fever” in Nazi circles as many regional potentates elsewhere sought to follow suit. As a result, late in 1940, some 70,000 “undesirables”—including Jews, criminals, homosexuals, and the mentally ill—were deported into Vichy France from Alsace and Lorraine, which had been annexed by the Reich. A further 6,000 Jews were deported west from the regions of Baden and the Saarland in October, making these the first Gaus of Nazi Germany to be officially declared Judenfrei (Jew free).

Following the lead of Baden and the Saarland, the gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, petitioned Hitler directly to request permission to deport 60,000 Viennese Jews. Permission granted, he began the action in February 1941, deporting 5,000 unfortunates to the district of Lublin, southeast of Warsaw, before logistical difficulties forced a halt to the operation. Although large-scale deportations of Jews from the Reich would not begin until October 1941, the Vienna Aktion provided a sinister portent of what was to come.

Those affected were brought, by night, to the Aspang Station in Vienna and loaded into passenger wagons. All heads of households had already signed away their remaining property and possessions to the German Reich and declared that they were being deported of their own volition. After a lengthy journey to rural Poland, the deportees—many of them urbane, cultured Viennese—were astonished by the conditions that they found. They faced little other than a slow death. As one desperate deportee wrote home, “You can imagine what our prospects are; no source of income whatsoever! I can only say to you that it would have been better if they had put us up against the wall in Vienna and shot us. It would have been a good death, but we have to die in misery.”

Some of Germany’s allies were similarly enthusiastic about ethnic cleansing. In Romania, still reeling from the territorial losses and the ensuing political collapse of the previous year, tensions were running particularly high, and it was widely believed that the nation’s Jews were primarily responsible for the catastrophe. Consequently, the country’s native fascist movement, the Iron Guard, which had been elevated into the government the previous autumn, was waiting for an opportunity to settle scores with its perceived foe. That chance came in January 1941, when the Guard revolted against its government partners and embarked on a three-day rampage, venting its anger upon the Jews of Bucharest. The results shocked even those who had been hardened to Romania’s recent crises and atrocities. “The stunning thing about the Bucharest bloodbath,” one commentator noted, “is the quite bestial ferocity of it. [N]inety-three persons were killed on the night of Tuesday the 21st. It is now considered absolutely certain that the Jews that were butchered at Straulesti abattoir were hanged by the neck on hooks normally used for beef carcasses.” Such violence was a grim foretaste of what would follow across much of eastern Europe, particularly in those areas that Moscow had annexed and Germany would “liberate” in the war against the Soviet Union. Throughout the region, blameless Jewish populations would be forced to pay the blood price for nearly two years of Soviet rule.