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

So it was that agreement was finally found. Crucially, the Soviet Union recognized that the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 had “lost their validity” regarding territorial changes in Poland. This was not quite the “null and void” renunciation that Sikorski had wanted, but it was close. In addition, diplomatic relations between the two powers were to be restored and ambassadors exchanged, and a Polish army would be formed on Soviet soil under a commander appointed by the Polish government in accord with Moscow. As was the fashion, the agreement was appended by two protocols: one public, stating that an amnesty would be granted to all Polish citizens still detained in the USSR once diplomatic relations were restored, and one secret, declaring that all public and private claims to compensation would be postponed until subsequent negotiations.

In essence, the Polish-Soviet Agreement was a classic diplomatic fudge. Like the Nazi-Soviet Pact, whose formal demise it signified, it was an exercise in realpolitik: a strategic necessity, an uneasy marriage of convenience between two parties with a history of conflict, in which most of the contentious points were put off until a later date. The British secured the alliance that they had wanted between their newest ally and the country for which they had gone to war, the Americans had an agreement that they could sell to a domestic electorate rightly wary of Soviet intentions, and Stalin had—to some extent at least—reestablished his bona fides before the Western world, albeit while making few genuine concessions. For Sikorski and Poland, meanwhile, it was probably the best they could realistically achieve at the time, though it left them—as Churchill had feared—almost entirely dependent on Stalin’s good will.

The Polish-Soviet Agreement was signed in the secretary of state’s room at the Foreign Office in London on July 30, 1941. Sikorski and Maisky sat at opposite ends of a long covered table covered with paperwork, blotters, and inkwells, Sikorski sitting erect in full dress uniform, Maisky—this time—in a dark pinstripe suit. Eden and Churchill were seated on one side, the latter grinning broadly and treating himself to his trademark Romeo y Julieta cigar. On the other side of the table were photographers and gentlemen of the press, invited to record the event for posterity and for the purposes of Allied propaganda. Surveying the scene was a white marble bust of an earlier British prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, who—according to Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville—“looked down rather disapprovingly.”

THE NAZI-SOVIET PACT WAS CLEARLY AN EMBARRASSMENT FOR both its signatories, and they subsequently sought to explain it away as best they could. On October 3, 1941, in Berlin, Hitler gave his verdict. With his armies embarking on the final push for Moscow and the Red Army apparently smashed, he was already envisaging victory over Stalin and referring to Russia as “our India.” That evening, in the cavernous Sportpalast, speaking without notes, he addressed the assembled masses in a speech broadcast live by radio. “On June 22,” he said, “the greatest battle in the history of the world started.” “Everything since then has proceeded according to plan.” German troops, he said, were

1,000 kilometres beyond our frontier. We are east of Smolensk, we are before Leningrad and are on the Black Sea. We are before Crimea and the Russians are not on the Rhine. The number of prisoners has now risen to roughly 2,500,000 Russians. The number of captured or destroyed guns in our hands is, in round figures, 22,000. The number of captured or destroyed tanks in our hands amounts to over 18,000. The number of destroyed and shot-down planes is over 14,500. Behind our front line is a Russian area twice as large as the German Reich four times as large as England.

“The enemy is already broken,” he assured them, “and will never rise again.”

In the circumstances, it was a good time to reflect on the decision to make a pact with Stalin. It had been difficult, Hitler acknowledged, “the most bitter triumph over my feelings.” But he had been “betrayed”: “You yourselves know best how honestly we observed our obligations. Neither in our press nor at our meetings was a single word about Russia mentioned. Not a single word about Bolshevism. Unfortunately, the other side did not observe their obligations from the beginning. This arrangement resulted in a betrayal which at first liquidated the whole northeast of Europe. You know best what it meant for us to look on in silence as the Finnish people were being strangled, what it meant to us that the Baltic States were also being overpowered.”

In private, Hitler was more forthright. In a letter to Mussolini on the eve of Barbarossa, he gave the strategic rationale behind the coming attack and explained why he was bringing the “hypocritical performance” with the Kremlin to an end. “The partnership with the Soviet Union was often very irksome to me,” he wrote, “for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts, and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.” For Hitler, therefore, the Nazi-Soviet Pact had been an ugly strategic necessity, forced upon him by the West’s plans to encircle Germany. Stalin’s subsequent betrayal, he claimed, had made its demise inevitable.

The Soviet interpretation was naturally rather different. As noted earlier, when he addressed the Soviet people three months earlier, soon after the German invasion, Stalin had stood by the pact, stating that it had not been an error and that the Soviet government could not have declined Hitler’s proposal. What was more, he claimed that the USSR had thereby secured eighteen months of peace in which she had had “the opportunity” to rearm. This rationale, thrown in by Stalin in 1941 almost as an afterthought, quickly became the dominant Soviet explanation.

In the months and years that followed, the pact faded from view, obscured by the more pressing daily concerns of waging the most costly and deadly conflict the world had ever known. Only when the war was over did it come under scrutiny once again. At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT), which opened late in 1945 to try the surviving Nazi leaders, the pact—and its consequences—briefly came under scrutiny. The prosecutors at Nuremberg knew very well that part of the defendants’ case would rest on the appeal of tu quoque: you did it too. It was an inadmissible defense—arguably more suited to the playground than a court of law—but it nonetheless had the potential to damage the Soviets, whose territorial expansions of 1939 and 1940, under the auspices of the pact, had violated many of the principles that the Western Allies now sought to apply to German actions. As one British Foreign Office advisor predicted, it was inevitable that the Nazi defendants would seek to “bring out as much Russian dirty linen as they can to mix with their own.” Consequently, given that the Allied prosecutors had no wish to discredit their Soviet ally, the item at the very top of that “laundry list,” the Nazi-Soviet Pact, was scarcely mentioned in the tribunal’s opening statements.

Thereafter, the Soviet legal team fought a desperate action to prevent the pact—and particularly the damning secret protocol—from emerging as evidence. Typical in this regard was an exchange on May 21, 1946, when the defense counsel for Rudolf Hess tried to raise the protocol but met with protests from the Soviet chief prosecutor, General Roman Rudenko, who howled, “We are examining the matter of the crimes of the major German war criminals. We are not investigating the foreign policies of other states.” In any case, Rudenko went on, the protocol was “a forged document,” which was of no value whatsoever. The issue of the pact itself was marginally less sensitive for Moscow. Derided by the Soviet judge Iona Nikitchenko as “irrelevant” and “nothing but propaganda,” it upset the Soviet team at Nuremberg most when it was suggested, however obliquely, that in signing the pact Stalin might have been fooled or misled by German cunning. In contrast, the team would argue, the USSR had been fully aware of Germany’s nefarious intentions from the very beginning. Clearly, Stalin preferred the charge of cynicism to that of gullibility.