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

100 a new “party line” had quickly crystallized: Ivo Banac, ed., The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov , 1933–1949 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 114.

100 calling for a “two-front war” against Hitler: The Daily Worker , September 2, 1939, 3.

100 “The Communist Party supports the war”: Harry Pollitt, “How to Win the War” (London: CPGB, 1939), passim.

101 “The Soviet leaders had a responsibility”: Douglas Hyde, I Believed (London: Heinemann, 1950), 68.

101 “a bombshell: We just did not know what to do”: Quoted in Nigel Jones, Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton (London: Abacus, 1991), 219.

101 “one of the finest things”: Francis King and George Matthews, eds., About Turn: The British Communist Party and the Second World War (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 91.

102 “Communist Parties which acted contrary to these tactics”: Quoted in ibid., 69–70.

102 The party had “failed to understand”: Ibid., 73–77 passim.

102 “the Party is now on trial”: Ibid., 86–87.

103 “more unscrupulous and opportunist speech”: Ibid., 91–93 passim.

103 So he declared his resignation: Ibid., 197–209 passim.

104 Ten days later, the Times reported: “Communist Split,” Times , October 12, 1939, 10.

104 it became the duty of every Communist Party: Fridrikh I. Firsov, Harvey Klehr, and John Earl Haynes, Secret Cables of the Comintern , 1933–1943 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 146.

105 “complete destruction of left-wing orthodoxy”: George Orwell, “London Letter,” January 3, 1941, in Orwell and Politics , edited by Peter Davison (London: Penguin, 2001), 101–102.

105 “would be the end of Germany”: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939), 538.

106 war was “not the war we had expected”: Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 153.

106 “No wonder Stalin prefers to keep his 170 million”: Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, eds., “The Wheel of Life,” in The Diaries of Beatrice Webb (London: Virago, 1985), 4:438–440.

106 “the blackest tragedy in human history”: Ibid., 441.

107 “knocking the bottom out”: Dorothy Sheridan, ed., Among You Taking Notes: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison , 1939–1945 (London: Gollancz, 1985), 40.

107 “Bugger Uncle Joe, bugger Molotov”: Quoted in Hyde, op. cit., 69.

107 “they will have to suffer for it”: Mackenzie and Mackenzie, op. cit., 444–445.

107 “spat upon and assaulted in the streets”: Hyde, op. cit., 71.

107 newer recruits and the less ideologically convinced becoming disillusioned: James Eaden and David Renton, The Communist Party of Great Britain Since 1920 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 75.

107 “inter-Imperialist aspect of the struggle”: Quoted in Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 1991), 79.

108 “You regarded Hitler-fascist aggression”: Victor Gollancz, Where Are You Going? (London: Gollancz, 1940), 1–2.

108 “running the terrible risk”: Ibid., 30.

108 Moscow-sponsored opposition to American entry: Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 359.

109 “redeeming more than half of Poland”: Earl Browder, Whose War Is It? (New York: Workers Library, 1939), 7–8, 13.

109 new memberships virtually collapsing in 1940: Fraser Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 198.

109 temporarily disappeared from the political stage: James G. Ryan, Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 182.

109 still saw themselves broadly as socialists: See George Watson, “Hitler and the Socialist Dream,” Independent on Sunday, November 22, 1998, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/hitler-and-the-socialist-dream-1186455.html.

110 Stalin “has a contempt for all arguments”: Kingsley Martin, “The Man of Steel,” New Statesman and Nation , December 9, 1939.

110 “effete liberalism of the pluto-democracies”: Henry Brailsford, quoted in George Watson, “The Eye-Opener of 1939,” History Today (August 2004): 51.

110 “friendship” in whose name he had committed treason: Nigel West, MI5: British Security Service Operations, 1909–1945 (London: Bodley Head, 1981), 254–255.

110 “new success of the Soviet Union”: From a declaration of the French Bureau Politique, quoted in Edward Mortimer, The Rise of the French Communist Party , 1920–1947 (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), 281.

111 “resounded like a thunderclap”: Adam Rajsky, Nos Illusions Perdues (Paris, 1985), 64; English text from Wolfgang Leonhard, Betrayal: The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 110–111.

111 “extraordinary discipline, unique in the history of humanity”: François Furet, quoted in Gellately, op. cit., 358.

111 A group of dissidents even made a public appeal: Leonhard, op. cit., 115.

112 “imperialists of London and Paris”: Mortimer, op. cit., 292.

112 “blow for peace”: Quoted in Allan Merson, Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), 213.

112 Mein Kampf would be withdrawn from publication: Illustrated by contemporary reports on German public opinion in Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich: 1938–1945 (Herrsching, DE: Pawlak, 1984), 400, 415, 365.

113 declaring the pact to be a “diplomatic success”: Erich Honecker, From My Life (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981), 102.

113 “How could Stalin do that to us?”: Leonhard, op. cit., 96–97.

113 could not find enough milk and sugar: Egbert Krispyn, Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 72.

113 “I do not think one can say more”: Quoted in Klaus Völker, Brecht: A Biography (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 265.

113 “the stripping of ideological pretences”: Brecht journal entry for September 18, 1939, quoted in John Willett, Brecht in Context (London: Methuen, 1984), 193.

114 “the troubler of this poor world’s peace”: Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (London: Methuen, 2013), 7, 59.

114 “a lurking suspicion of the similarities”: Katharine Hodgson, “The Soviet Union in the Svendborg Poems,” in Brecht’s Poetry of Political Exile , edited by Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 79.

114 “there was no fundamental difference between the two”: Quoted in Horst Duhnke, Die KPD von 1933 bis 1945 (Cologne, DE: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1972), 343.

115 “strongest guarantee” for the hindrance: Quoted in Gollancz, op. cit., 30–35.

115 “starve Germany and extend the conflict”: Quoted in Duhnke, op. cit., 345.

115 “the baleful politics of the ruling classes”: Rote Fahne, “Macht Front gegen die imperialistischen Bestrebungen!” June 1940, reproduced in Margot Pikarski and Günter Uebel, Der Antifaschistische Widerstandskampf der KPD in Spiegel des Flugblattes, 1933–1945 (Berlin: Dietz, 1978).

116 Arrests followed a similar pattern: Statistics quoted in Detlef Peukert, Die KPD im Widerstand (Wuppertal, DE: Hammer Verlag, 1980), 333n.

116 “no longer speak of organised resistance”: Boberach, op. cit., 1305.

116 “the most shameful of Hitler’s accomplices”: H. R. Trevor-Roper, in his foreword to Terence Prittie, Germans Against Hitler (London: Hutchinson, 1964), 13.