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

After vainly protesting Moscow’s innocence, Dekanozov and Berezhkov were escorted from the Foreign Ministry. As they left, Ribbentrop hurried after them; in a hoarse whisper told them that he had disagreed with the decision to invade and that he had tried to dissuade Hitler. “Tell Moscow I was against the attack,” he said. Returning to the Soviet embassy on Unter den Linden, they turned on the radio to hear what Moscow was saying about the offensive then raging. To their surprise, they heard only the morning calisthenics spot, as usual, followed by mundane news items about agriculture and hardworking laborers. They wondered if Moscow even knew what was going on.

A couple of hours later, Hitler announced the attack to his own people. At 5:30 a.m. Joseph Goebbels read the Führer’s declaration from his office in the Propaganda Ministry, to be broadcast simultaneously across all radio stations. “Weighed down with heavy cares,” he began, reading Hitler’s words, “condemned to months-long silence, the hour has now come when at last I can speak freely.” What followed was a study in Nazi sophistry, as Hitler recast the history of the war to date as a tale of Anglo-Soviet machinations to encircle Germany. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, he suggested, had been his effort—undertaken “only with great difficulty”—to undo that encirclement, but its success had only been fleeting: London’s “Mr. Cripps,” he said, had been sent to Moscow to restore the relationship, and Stalin thereafter began his “menacing” expansion westward into the Baltic states and Bessarabia. In response, Hitler had kept his own counsel and had even invited “Herr Molotoff” to Berlin for talks, but such was the Soviet Union’s “miserable betrayal” of the pact that he was now obliged to act against the “Jewish Anglo-Saxon warmongers.” Consequently, he had decided to “lay the fate and future of the German Reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers.” For Goebbels, reading the declaration was “a solemn moment” when one could “hear the breath of history.” But it was also a liberation: “The burden of many weeks and months falls away,” he wrote in his diary. “I feel totally free.”

Churchill felt a similar emotion. He had spent the night at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence in leafy Buckinghamshire, where he had dined the previous evening with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the new American ambassador John Winant. The party awoke Sunday morning to news of the German attack, producing—as Churchill’s private secretary Jock Colville recalled—a “smile of satisfaction” on the faces of all three. Eden received the message accompanied by a large celebratory cigar on a silver salver. Putting on a dressing gown and hurrying to Churchill’s room, he savored the relief—if not the cigar—and the two discussed what was to follow. Churchill was not surprised by the news. It merely “changed conviction into certainty,” he later recalled, adding, “I had not the slightest doubt where our duty and our policy lay.”

Fifteen hundred miles to the east, meanwhile, Moscow was in denial, lulled into a curious calm. Strangely, that very morning, Pravda had reprinted Lermontov’s famous poem about the Battle of Borodino, which spoke of Moscow burning at French hands in 1812:

It was not some peculiar presentiment of war that caused the publication, however, but the looming anniversary of the poet’s death. The Soviet capital was in ignorance of the war raging far to the west. Indeed, when reports first came in of the German attack, Red Army troops were instructed not to resist. On the vital southwestern front, for instance, General Dmitry Pavlov had ordered that while “provocationist raids by Fascist bandits were likely,” there was to be no response: the attackers were to be captured, but the frontier was not to be crossed. The order clearly came right from the very top. When General Georgy Zhukov telephoned Stalin early that morning to ask permission for Soviet forces to return fire, he was told, “Permission not granted. This is a German provocation. Do not open fire or the situation will escalate.” Blinded still by his faith in the pact and his expectation of the long-awaited negotiations with Berlin, Stalin stayed the Red Army’s hand.

Arriving in Moscow that hot, sunny Sunday morning, Admiral Nikolay Kuznetsov recalled that the Soviet capital was resting peacefully, apparently unaware that “a fire was blazing on the frontiers.” Entering the Kremlin, Kuznetsov noticed that everything looked as it would on any normal Sunday; the guard saluted smartly, and there was “no evidence of anxiety. Everything was silent and deserted.” He imagined that the Soviet leadership must have gathered somewhere else to confer and so returned to the Defense Commissariat. “Has anyone called?” he asked an aide. “No,” he was told. “No one has called.”

In fact, for all the apparent lack of reaction, Stalin had not been idle. Having conferred with Molotov and other members of the Politburo early that morning, he had issued a new directive, authorizing Soviet forces to attack the invader “with all means at their disposal,” and ordered the removal of countless factories as well as 20 million people from the area adjacent to the front. In addition, he had responded to Hitler’s betrayal in the most effective way he knew—with terror—ordering NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria to secure Moscow by flooding it with agents and arresting over a thousand Muscovites and foreigners suspected of “terrorism, sabotage, espionage, Trotskyism” and sundry other offenses. Yet, despite the momentous developments, Stalin evidently found it hard to adapt to the new situation. According to Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov, he complained that day that the Germans had attacked “like gangsters,” without first presenting any demands or an ultimatum, confounding his expectations.

Stalin also delegated to Molotov the task of addressing the Soviet people—possibly because he did not wish to be associated with the ongoing catastrophe, possibly because Molotov had signed the treaty with Germany. Either way, the Soviet people heard the foreign minister’s clipped, nasal voice announce the outbreak of war over the radio and public address systems later that day. Echoing the sense of injured innocence of his superior, Molotov described the German attack as “perfidy unparalleled in the history of civilized nations” and referred repeatedly to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and to the absence of any German complaints:

The attack on our country was perpetrated despite the fact that a treaty of non-aggression had been signed between the U.S.S.R. and Germany, and that the Soviet Government most faithfully abided by all provisions of this treaty.

The attack upon our country was perpetrated despite the fact that during the entire period of operation of this treaty, the German Government could not find grounds for a single complaint against the USSR as regards observance of this treaty.

Warming to his task, Molotov stressed Soviet innocence of any border violations and the “unshakeable conviction” that the forces of the Soviet Union would “deal a crushing blow to the aggressor.” The “bloodthirsty Fascist rulers of Germany,” he went on, had “enslaved the French, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Greece, and other nations,” neglecting to mention that the Soviet Union had been similarly rapacious. Nonetheless, he vowed that “the Red Army and our entire nation will once again wage victorious war for the fatherland, for our country, for honour and for liberty.” Mendacious to the last, Molotov claimed that Soviet casualties numbered “over 200 persons.” He closed by providing the line that would become one of the mottos of the German-Soviet war: “Our cause is just,” he solemnly intoned. “Pobeda budet za nami” (Victory will be ours). It was a competent performance, but no more. Stalin told his underling, rather cruelly, that he had sounded “a bit flustered.”