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

^{CHAPTER 4} CONTORTIONS

IN THE FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 1939, HARRY POLLITT SAT DOWN in his office in London’s bustling Covent Garden to write a pamphlet. Round-faced with a receding hairline and prominent dark eyebrows, the forty-eight-year-old Pollitt was general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and it was part of his role as leader to provide a commentary on current events that not only delineated the position of the Communist International but also explained matters in terms that the thousands of ordinary workers who made up the party’s membership could readily digest. To this end, he had penned numerous titles in previous years, including “Towards Soviet Power,” “Save Spain from Fascism,” and “Czechoslovakia Betrayed.” This, however, would be his most controversial piece of work.

Pollitt was certainly well regarded within the communist movement. Growing up in Manchester, he had imbibed his socialist radicalism with his mother’s milk, trained as a boilermaker, and graduated as an industrial militant working in the Southampton docks during World War I. Joining the nascent Communist Party upon its foundation in 1920, he was a talented and impassioned public speaker, so much so that he was even kidnapped briefly by his fascist opponents in 1925 to prevent him from attending a party meeting in Liverpool. Rising through the ranks, propelled by the power of his oratory as well as by his unswerving loyalty to the communist cause and the Soviet state, Pollitt was appointed general secretary in 1929.

Through the 1930s, then, Pollitt had charted the course of British communism. Aided by the more arid, theoretical abilities of Rajani Palme Dutt, the party’s senior ideologist, he spearheaded an impressive rise in communist fortunes in Britain, skillfully exploiting the economic and social woes of the age and showing a natural capacity for leadership. Pollitt was especially passionate about events in Spain, which he would visit regularly in the late 1930s to galvanize British volunteer battalions. As one of his later biographers would suggest, his antifascism was not mere communist orthodoxy; it stemmed from a deep emotional commitment, derived largely from the Spanish Civil War. Yet, by the summer of 1939, the ideological clarity of that bipolar world of communist versus fascist seemed to be fading. Pollitt did not yet realize it, but he was approaching something of a personal and political watershed.

Initially, the events of the first week of September 1939 had appeared to conform to the old, comfortable idea of a Left-Right conflict. Pollitt had not been unduly perturbed by the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact a week previously, contriving to see that agreement as “a victory for peace and socialism” and as damning proof of the unwillingness of Britain’s ruling class to deal fairly with the USSR. The German invasion of Poland on September 1 and the British declaration of war two days later had then surprised many on the left; they had expected to see some sort of accommodation reached between the semifascist government of Neville Chamberlain, as they saw it, and the überfascist government of Hitler. Nonetheless, a new “party line” had quickly crystallized, sanctioned by the Comintern and penned by Pollitt himself, calling for a “two-front war” against Hitler abroad and Chamberlain at home.

To clarify this rather complex position, Pollitt resolved to write his pamphlet, titled “How to Win the War.” In thirty-two closely typed pages, he laid out the British Communist Party’s position on the war then beginning. In one memorable passage, he proclaimed that “to stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases, while the fascist beasts ride roughshod over Europe, would be a betrayal of everything our forebears have fought to achieve in the course of long years of struggle against capitalism.” Just as the Abyssinians had been right to fight the Italians, he wrote, and just as the Spanish had been right to take up arms against Italian and German invaders, so “the Polish people are right to fight against the Nazi invasion that is now taking place.” Although Pollitt reiterated the policy of a “two-front” conflict to combat Chamberlain politically and Hitler militarily, he was nonetheless absolutely unequivocal: “The Communist Party supports the war,” he wrote, “believing it to be a just war which should be supported by the whole working class and all friends of democracy in Britain.” Priced at one penny, with a rather unappealing portrait of its author on the cover, “How to Win the War” was published on September 14, with a print run of 50,000 copies.

The reception among the party’s rank and file was mixed. As good Marxists, they had interpreted the travails of the 1930s as the death throes of capitalism, with fascism seen as the purest expression of that demise. So the sight of Stalin cozying up to Hitler would have been rather disquieting—an apparent refutation of the entire political constellation as they had previously understood it. Of course, to the hardened communists among them, this was not a problem. True to their convictions, they were unperturbed, safe in the knowledge that the Soviet Union knew best how to protect the communist experiment. As party member Douglas Hyde explained, “The Soviet leaders had a responsibility to the working-class of the world to defend the USSR and could, if necessary, for this reason make an alliance with the devil himself.”

Others, however, were more perplexed, and for them Pollitt’s pamphlet restored a modicum of clarity, providing a line that they could defend both to the wider world and to themselves. As the future Labour minister Kenneth Robinson recalled, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was “a bombshell: We just did not know what to do. But I remember that we all welcomed a statement by Harry Pollitt that we must now fight a war on two fronts—one against Nazi Germany, and one against the Establishment.” Even Pollitt’s comrade Dutt was enthused, describing the pamphlet as “one of the finest things” that the leader had ever produced, “so clearly and simply presented.”

Yet Pollitt’s problems began almost as soon as the pamphlet was published. That same day, a telegram arrived from Moscow explaining the new line on the war to be adopted by all fraternal communist parties and made known to every member. “The present war,” it proclaimed, “is an imperialist and unjust war for which the bourgeoisie of all belligerent states bear equal responsibility. In no country can the working class or the Communist Parties support the war.” “Tactics must be changed,” it went on; “under no conditions may the international working class defend fascist Poland.” The telegram added that in the light of the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, “the division into fascist and democratic states has now lost its former sense.” The message ended with an ominous warning: “Communist Parties which acted contrary to these tactics must now correct their policy.”

Pollitt must have been dismayed, and his first instinct was to suppress the telegram in the hope, perhaps, that he could ride out the crisis. But he couldn’t. Dutt had also got wind of the new line from Moscow, and he was too much of an opportunist and a loyal Stalinist to allow the matter to go unchallenged. He asked that the party’s Political Bureau reconvene to reconsider its position. Pollitt tried to resist, holding out for his line, but when Dave Springhall—the party’s representative at the Communist International in Moscow—returned in late September with specific instructions, he was doomed. Consequently, the Central Committee was convened to resolve the issue on October 2.

At the meeting, called at the party’s Covent Garden headquarters that morning, Dutt was ruthless in espousing the revised line from Moscow and advocating its acceptance. The party had “failed to understand” the “new period” that the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the outbreak of war had signified, and in that “new situation,” it was necessary to “adjust our perspective” and “face, frankly and openly, that our line was a wrong line.” Citing Lenin and numerous theoretical concepts and “isms” that must have impressed his listeners, he went on to explain, with less than perfect clarity, why the new Muscovite line was correct. In closing, he warned that “the Party is now on trial as it has never been since the beginning of its history. We are going to need all forces in the conditions that we have to face, and in the fight that we have before us we want no half-hearted supporters, no vacillators, no faint-hearts. Every responsible position in the Party must be occupied by a determined fighter for the line.” For those still in doubt as to their fraternal responsibility, he added that “the duty of the communist is not to disagree but to accept” and warned that “any member who deserts from active work for the Party will be branded for his political life.” It was not difficult to determine at whom that closing threat was aimed.

Pollitt was not the first to respond; that task fell to Willie Gallacher, a firebrand Scot and the party’s only member of Parliament (MP). He was scathing toward Dutt, retorting that he had never listened to a “more unscrupulous and opportunist speech” or known “anything so rotten, so mean, so despicable, so dirty.” But for all his righteous indignation, Gallacher was very much in a minority. Member after member of the Central Committee stood up to voice undimmed “faith in the Soviet Union” and agreement with “Comrade Dutt’s position.” Then Pollitt finally had the floor.

Although he must have harbored the distinct impression that the party he had led for a decade was measuring him for a coffin, Harry Pollitt was initially conciliatory, stating that it would be easy for him “to say I accept and let us kiss and be friends and everything in the garden would be lovely.” But, he said, that would be dishonest to his convictions. Reiterating his visceral antifascism—his desire, as he put it, to “smash the fascist bastards”—he expressed his dismay at the fact that the “fight against fascism” had disappeared and that, due to its pact with the Soviet Union, fascism now seemed to have taken on a “progressive role” and was no longer to be considered as the main enemy of the communist movement. “May I say without offence,” he went on, doubtless offending many in the room, “that I don’t envy the comrades who can so lightly in the space of a week, and sometimes in the space of a day, go from one political conviction to another.”

Pollitt also had a personal response for Rajani Palme Dutt, whose oblique threats must have raised his ire. “Please remember, Comrade Dutt,” he said, “you won’t intimidate me. I was in this movement practically before you were born and will be in the revolutionary movement a long time after some of you are forgotten.” If he could not trump Dutt on his loyalty to Moscow, Pollitt could at least pull rank. He ended on a note of sadness rather than anger, explaining how he felt “ashamed at the lack of feeling that the struggle of the Polish people has aroused in our leadership.” His comrades were deceiving themselves if they thought that the pact with a country they hated did not “leave a nasty taste in the mouth.” As far as Pollitt was concerned, the party’s honor was now at stake, and it was impossible for him to continue as leader in the circumstances. So he declared his resignation. His eloquent defense failed to move his comrades, however. The committee voted 21–3 to accept the new line outlined by Dutt, with the only dissenters being Pollitt, Gallacher, and Daily Worker editor Johnny Campbell.

Ten days later, the Times reported that Pollitt had been “relieved of his office” as “the policy of the British Communist Party was found to be altogether out of step with Moscow’s.” A revised manifesto, composed on October 7, was declared to correct the previous policy espoused by Pollitt on the outbreak of war. At the end of the month, a new pamphlet, penned by Rajani Palme Dutt and titled “Why This War?,” gave the communist argument for neutrality. Pollitt’s pamphlet was quietly withdrawn.

IN LINE WITH ITS UNIVERSALIST PRETENSIONS, SOVIET COMMUNISM boasted an international organization known as the Communist International, or Comintern. Founded in 1919 and based in Moscow, the Comintern spearheaded the international class struggle against the bourgeoisie and promoted communism and the Soviet system to the world, acting in effect as the Soviet Union’s unofficial foreign policy agent—the handmaiden of global revolution. Through the Comintern all affiliated communist and revolutionary socialist parties would be guided in their political mission, advised of how to interpret events, and informed of the line they were required to take. To the loyal communist, then, the Comintern’s word was law.

So it was in 1939, when the international communist movement was faced with the profound challenge of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. However, the first problem for loyal communists was that the Comintern itself had been blindsided by events and was not up to date with Stalin’s strategic thinking. Consequently the first directive it sent out in early September echoed the prewar antifascist line, parroting the old slogans that warned of the dangers posed by German fascism. Only with Stalin’s direct intervention did the line then change: Germany’s opponents were now to be targeted, the fight against fascism abandoned. Now, the bourgeoisies of the belligerent states were blamed for the war, and it became the duty of every Communist Party to oppose the war against Hitler.

This shift had reverberations across the world. Every affiliated party was required to toe the new Muscovite line, and, as Harry Pollitt found to his cost, local perspectives—however honorable, logical, or well intentioned—counted for little against the brute political force of a Comintern directive. The result could be an uncomfortable standoff, and the apparent conflict between ideology and realpolitik caused many to question their communist faith. For some, the malaise had a troubling moral aspect. Communism, for many of its followers, boasted a self-proclaimed moral superiority, espousing “progressive values”, concern for one’s fellow man, and a principled defiance of fascist aggression. The sight of Molotov and Ribbentrop smiling together in the Kremlin undermined all that, sullying world communism’s image of itself.

The British socialist George Orwell, ever the perspicacious critic, diagnosed the problem accurately. “The Russo-German Pact,” he wrote in early 1941, “brought the Stalinists and the near-Stalinists into the pro-Hitler position,” thereby at a stroke undermining not only communism’s primary “antifascist” appeal but also its primary complaint against the status quo. Where communists had once damned their bourgeois governments for appeasing Hitler with their shabby deal making, they were now obliged to defend Moscow for doing the very same. The result, Orwell wrote, was the “complete destruction of left-wing orthodoxy.”

The fascists faced similar difficulties. Hitler, who had made a career of combating communism and had once claimed that alliance with Russia “would be the end of Germany,” now had to explain an embarrassing volte-face that potentially undermined much of what Nazism, as well as the wider fascist movement, had stood for. To complicate matters, both sides, communists and Nazis, saw themselves as tainted by association with one another. Their respective regimes, therefore—which had revolutionized the use of propaganda, news manipulation, and what Hitler once cynically called the “big lie”—faced a public relations challenge of the first order: selling the agreement between the two to their skeptical followers. As well as unleashing war in the autumn of 1939, the Nazi-Soviet Pact plunged both the communist and fascist movements into an existential crisis.

On the British left, at least, at one remove from continental troubles, the reaction to that crisis spanned the spectrum. For some, their faith in communism was undimmed. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, then a young Cambridge graduate, found the ideological somersaults easier to perform than most. He was unfazed by the speed of developments as war erupted in the late summer of 1939, despite the fact that the war was “not the war we had expected”; nor was it the war “for which the Party had prepared us.” What he laconically called the “line change” also bothered him little, despite the fact that, as he later confessed, the idea “that Britain and France were as bad as Nazi Germany made little emotional or intellectual sense.” Nonetheless, as an obedient communist, he accepted the line with “no reservations.” After all, he added airily, “was it not the essence of ‘democratic centralism’ to stop arguing once a decision had been reached, whether or not you were personally in agreement?”

Others were more conflicted. The veteran socialist Beatrice Webb, for instance, was appalled by the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. As someone who had spent her life promoting socialism and famously proclaimed the USSR to be “a new civilization,” she found Stalin’s accord with Hitler to be a “holy horror” and a “great disaster” for everything that she had stood for. “Knocked senseless” by the pact, she described it in her diary in the most damning terms, as “dishonorable,” “disgraceful,” and a “terrible collapse of good faith and integrity.” Within a few days, however—her equilibrium at least partially restored—she was again looking for the positives, seeking as ever to provide an optimistic commentary for Soviet actions. “No wonder Stalin prefers to keep his 170 million out of the battlefield,” she wrote, “whilst the anti-Comintern Axis and the Western capitalist democracies destroy each other.” Although “disreputable,” she wrote, Stalin’s policy was nonetheless “a miracle of successful statesmanship.”

If she thought that she had made sense of Stalin’s actions, the Soviet invasion of Poland in mid-September would throw her once again into turmoil. “Satan has won hands down,” she wrote the day after the Red Army’s invasion. “Stalin and Molotov have become the villains of the piece,” and their entry into Poland was “a monument of international immorality.” It was, she said, “the blackest tragedy in human history,” not because of the grim fate of the Poles but because her beloved USSR had squandered its “moral prestige.” The socialist writer Naomi Mitchison, meanwhile, saw the invasion as a personal blow: “I feel like hell deep down because of the Russian news,” she wrote in mid-September, adding that Soviet actions were “knocking the bottom out of what one has been working for all these years.” Others had more mundane concerns. One communist shop steward was devastated: “Bugger Uncle Joe, bugger Molotov, bugger the whole bloody lot of them! How the hell am I to explain this to the factory tomorrow?”

Yet darker days were to follow for Britain’s communists and their fellow travelers. After swallowing the line change in early October, they were shaken once again when the Red Army invaded Finland on the last day of November. So, as Comrade Dutt chimed in to publicly accuse hapless Finland of being a “semifascist state,” Beatrice Webb appeared to have given in to disillusionment, writing that it was the manner of the invasion, “hard hatred and parrot-like repetition of false—glaringly false—accusations,” that was “so depressing.” The leaders of the USSR had not yet “learnt good manners,” she chided, and “they will have to suffer for it.”

For those more in touch with the righteous wrath of the British people, much more than good manners or diplomatic niceties was at stake. According to Douglas Hyde, sellers of the Daily Worker were obliged to run the gauntlet, being “spat upon and assaulted in the streets doors slammed in their faces, even chamber-pots emptied on their heads from upstairs windows,” by an angry public. Moscow’s Winter War against Finland was one of a series of events that autumn that tested communist credibility in Britain, with some of the newer recruits and the less ideologically convinced becoming disillusioned and leaving the party.

There were some high-profile names among the defectors, including John Strachey. A former acolyte of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley and a prominent Marxist theorist, Strachey had been taken aback by the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact but only abandoned the party following the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940, claiming that the “inter-Imperialist aspect of the struggle was subsidiary to the necessity to prevent a Nazi world-conquest.” Left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz did not wait so long. Appalled by the pact, he broke his long-standing connection with the Communist Party in protest and published an open letter to its members titled “Where Are You Going?” It was a typically woolly, verbose attack but nonetheless landed a few punches, not least in asking its readers to try to recall the days before the pact: “You regarded Hitler-fascist aggression, did you not, as a deadly menace, as the deadly menace, to everything in which we believe, and to every hope of further progress and advance. You were horrified at the tortures in the concentration camps; you loathed Hitler’s ideological repudiation of liberty, objectivity, mercy, pity and kindness, and his glorification of force and submission to force.” Yet, he went on, the Nazi-Soviet Pact had now created a new line, of “revolutionary defeatism,” which had brought communist propaganda to the uncomfortable position of aligning itself with Hitler’s once despised Nazi Germany and so was “running the terrible risk of bringing about the very catastrophe” that it had struggled to prevent. He urged party members to take a moment to reconsider the position that the Communist Party was asking them to adopt.

In the United States reactions were similarly mixed. Although as many as 2,000 American volunteers had fought against fascism in the ranks of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, a sizeable contingent of them were able to jettison their antifascism and march in Moscow-sponsored opposition to American entry into the war in the autumn of 1939. Popular ire against the US Communist Party’s (CPUSA) stance did prompt the winding up of the Comintern-funded American League for Peace and Democracy, but under the leadership of the Soviet spy Helen Silvermaster, it promptly morphed into the American Peace Mobilization and continued campaigning against American aid to Britain and against the “warmonger” President Franklin Roosevelt.

Alongside its stooges, the US Communist Party was also extremely active in campaigning for “peace” and against any American intervention in what it called the “European Imperialist War.” All its antifascist propaganda was duly halted, and the line touted in the pamphlets of the CPUSA’s leader, Earl Browder, such as “Whose War Is It?,” parroted Comintern slogans by stressing the culpability of the British, French, and Poles, while minimizing any criticism of Hitler’s Germany. According to Browder, Stalin’s actions in signing the Nazi-Soviet Pact had been proven correct “a hundred times over.” The Soviet Union, he claimed, was a force for peace that had even halted the Nazi advance by “redeeming more than half of Poland” and was “utilizing the contradictions among the imperialists to prevent them from carrying through their schemes of oppression and war.”

Such sophistry did little to endear the political Far Left to the American public, and the CPUSA suffered accordingly, with membership falling by around 15 percent in the opening six months of the war and new memberships virtually collapsing in 1940. The American political establishment was similarly unimpressed, and in October 1939 a federal grand jury indicted Earl Browder on charges of passport fraud, following the latter’s public admission that he had traveled abroad on falsified papers. Despite the overt political motivations behind his case, Browder was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and temporarily disappeared from the political stage. The party’s subsequent “Free Earl Browder” campaign foundered on public distrust and continuing resentment of Stalin’s pact with Hitler. The pact had dealt American communism a blow from which it would never recover.

While Gollancz wrestled with his conscience and American communists battled public suspicion, a few on the left contrived to see the Nazi-Soviet pact simply as a genuinely new political constellation. The idea that the two regimes had more in common than not had gained ground prior to 1939, and the signing of the pact appeared to have very publicly confirmed it. The idea was not as outlandish as modern minds might imagine. After all, Hitler’s Nazi Party had originated in an amalgam of socialist and nationalist principles. The name “National Socialism” had been sincerely meant, and though its socialist element had been corrupted and diluted in the interim, it had never been removed entirely, and Hitler and many of his acolytes clearly still saw themselves broadly as socialists.

Consequently, the idea that Hitler and Stalin were converging, or even that they shared some political DNA, enjoyed a season of currency. An editorial in London’s left-wing New Statesman, for instance, accused Stalin of “adopting the familiar technique of the Führer.” The piece pulled few punches: “Like Hitler,” editor Kingsley Martin wrote, Stalin “has a contempt for all arguments except that of superior force. Like Hitler, he would argue that in the world today only force counts. By the inexorable laws of its dialectic, Bolshevism brought into being its antithesis, National Socialism. Today the question being asked is whether the ugly thing that now reigns from Vladivostok to Cologne is turning into the inevitable synthesis, National-Bolshevism.” British socialist journalist Henry Brailsford was also plainly baffled by the pact, referring to it as the “central enigma” of the war, but he nonetheless concurred that some sort of convergence between the two regimes might be afoot. Both were revolutionary, he noted in the New Republic that autumn, and both despised the West. Was it not possible that the two were pursuing the same aims: waging a crusade against the “effete liberalism of the pluto-democracies”?

This apparent convergence of Nazi and Soviet aims was not merely theoretical. In the United States in October 1940, a British merchant seaman was arrested in Boston after offering to supply the local German spy network with information on the Atlantic convoys. Thirty-nine-year-old George Armstrong was a communist from Newcastle who had been motivated by a speech in which Molotov encouraged all Allied merchant seamen to desert as soon as they reached a neutral port. Deported to Britain, Armstrong was tried for aiding the enemy—the first Briton of the war to be prosecuted for spying—and sentenced to death. He would doubtless have been bemused to learn that, by the time of his execution in July 1941, the Nazi-Soviet “friendship” in whose name he had committed treason was already a thing of the past.

WHILE COMMUNISTS IN BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES ENJOYED the comparative luxury of indulging in the theoretical, the abstract, and the downright contrarian, for some of their comrades elsewhere the events of that autumn and winter had a more perilous immediacy. For instance, the pact threw the French Communist Party into chaos. At the outset, it gamely attempted to convince its followers that Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler changed nothing and in fact marked a “new success of the Soviet Union” and “an incomparable service to the cause of peace,” which would “not deprive any people of its freedom” or “hand over a single acre of any nation’s land.” Yet few were convinced. As the journalist Adam Rajsky recalled, news of the pact’s signing “resounded like a thunderclap,” leaving communist intellectuals like himself to attempt to “explain the inexplicable.” In due course, despite stressing its patriotisme, the party found itself under investigation by the French government, on the charge that Stalin’s pact with Hitler had rendered the communist movement a passive ally of the Nazis and thereby, potentially, a fifth column. Even before August 1939 was out, the party’s newspaper, L’Humanité, was closed down.

If that were not difficult enough, the Muscovite change of line subsequently threw many into despair. According to one former party member, French communists reacted to Stalin’s directive with “extraordinary discipline, unique in the history of humanity.” Once the new line was given, he claimed, there was a “sudden reorientation towards a policy diametrically opposed to the policy of the day before.” But such obedience was far from universal. Some members tore up their party cards in disgust, and a number of high-level defections included twenty-one of the Communist Party’s seventy-three parliamentary deputies. A group of dissidents even made a public appeal condemning the Nazi-Soviet Pact and pledging to continue resisting the Nazi aggressor and supporting the democracies. The main French trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail, or CGT, was also resolute, deciding to expel all those of its members who refused to repudiate the pact. Finally, the French government banned the Communist Party, and the dissemination of its propaganda was declared an offense, with a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment. With some of his members now facing arrest, party leader Maurice Thorez fled to Moscow. Tried in absentia for desertion from the army, he was sentenced to death.

The party that Thorez left behind was in crisis. By the spring of 1940, the government clampdown had resulted in over 3,000 arrests, with a further 2,500 party members being dismissed from their posts in municipal administrations. Forced underground, the party was obliged to propagate the new Muscovite line through clandestine means such as flyposting and pamphleteering. Communist propaganda was no less effective for being underground, with industrial slowdowns and even incidents of sabotage resulting, but its defeatist tone got dangerously close to implying collaboration with Hitler’s Germany. Even on May 15, 1940, as Hitler’s panzers were already on French soil, the underground communist press was still attacking the “imperialists of London and Paris.” By performing such contortions, the French Communist Party, the largest sister party outside the Soviet Union, had thoroughly disgraced itself.

The German Communist Party (KPD) was in an even more parlous state. Outlawed since the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, it had been forced underground; its members were subject to arrest and persecution, and given only limited succor via often tortuous lines of communication with their superiors in Moscow. The fate of its leader, Ernst Thälmann, indicated how far the party had fallen. Once a giant of the political scene who had campaigned for the Reich presidency in 1925 and 1932, Thälmann was arrested by the Gestapo barely a month after Hitler came to power. Kept in solitary confinement, he was repeatedly questioned, abused, and beaten—losing four teeth in one interrogation—but was never granted the dignity of a trial. He simply disappeared, shunted between a succession of prisons and concentration camps from which he would never reemerge.

By 1939, the German communists had already been reduced to an underground fringe movement, isolated and largely swimming against the tide of public opinion, with its lines of command fractured, compromised, and unreliable. Little wonder then that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was initially viewed with utter bewilderment in German communist circles. Officially, at least, it was greeted as a potential lifeline, with the party announcing its approval of the pact as a “blow for peace” and expressing the hope that further, similar pacts would follow. Some German communists went further, speculating that the pact would signal an end to the persecution, with the expectation that they would soon be able to hold their meetings without hindrance and that Thälmann and other prisoners would be released. There was even a rumor that the Nazi Party itself was to be wound up and that Mein Kampf would be withdrawn from publication.

Such daydreams aside, news of the pact’s signing caused a serious split in communist ranks between those Moscow loyalists who welcomed it as the precursor to the desired war between the Nazis and the British and French imperialist and those communist idealists who were dismayed by what they saw as Stalin’s betrayal of the international working class. The future East German leader Erich Honecker was firmly in the former camp, receiving the news with equanimity in his prison cell outside Berlin and declaring the pact to be a “diplomatic success” for the Soviet Union in its struggle against the West. Others reacted with outrage and incredulity, however. Exiled novelist Gustav Regler, for instance, despaired, asking, “How could Stalin do that to us?” Thorwald Siegel, a German communist émigré in Paris, was so distressed by the Soviet invasion of Poland that he committed suicide.

Undoubtedly, a good many German communists and their sympathizers were simply confused. The playwright Bertolt Brecht was evidently one. A longtime Marxist, Brecht had fled Germany in 1933 for a life in exile in Denmark, then in Sweden and finally in Finland before emigrating to the United States in 1941. While in exile, Brecht enjoyed a creative boom, penning many of the works that would make his name and by which he expressed his visceral opposition to National Socialism and fascism. Yet it is far too neat to describe Brecht simply as a mouthpiece of Soviet propaganda. Although a convinced communist, he remained equivocal about the Soviet Union; indeed, he famously cut short a trip to Moscow in 1935, claiming—rather disingenuously—that he could not find enough milk and sugar there to go with his coffee.

In fact, Brecht’s concerns went deeper and were expressed, privately at least, late in 1939 around the time of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Like many communist sympathizers across the globe, Brecht was disillusioned and clearly had little time for the official line, noting of the pact simply, “I do not think one can say more than that the [Soviet] Union is saving itself at the cost of leaving the world proletariat without watchwords, hope or assistance.” The Soviet invasion of Poland later that month would test his faith still further. In his journal he raged about “the stripping of ideological pretencesthe abandonment of the principle that ‘the Soviet Union doesn’t require a single foot of foreign soil,’ the adoption of all that fascist bullshit about ‘blood brotherhood’ the entire nationalist terminology. This is being spouted to the German fascists, but at the same time to the Soviet troops.”

It is not inconceivable that this inchoate rage found its way into Brecht’s work; after all, he wrote two of his most famous plays, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Mother Courage and Her Children, at this time. While both are quite rightly considered archetypes of the antifascist genre, neither can be construed as uncritically toeing the Muscovite line. Mother Courage, with its critique of profiteering from war, was written in response to the invasion of Poland in the autumn of 1939 and is ostensibly and obviously anticapitalist. Yet, given the circumstances in which Stalin’s Soviet Union had entered that conflict—as an aider, abettor, and economic supplier of Hitler’s Germany—the critique might just as plausibly have been targeted toward Moscow. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, meanwhile, is more unequivocally anti-Nazi: a parody of Hitler’s rise, its antihero is a talentless Chicago gangster who is hoisted into power by corrupt commercial interests and his own ruthless, criminal nature. Yet, it is perhaps instructive that the play was written in March 1941. Brecht was criticizing Hitler in the most brutal, blood-curdling terms—as “the troubler of this poor world’s peace” and “the lousiest of lice”—at a time when Stalin and the German leader were still exchanging pleasantries. Brecht, it seems, never agreed with the “change of line” dictated by Moscow as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Indeed, it is tempting to wonder whether he did not harbor “a lurking suspicion of the similarities” between the two regimes.

From the vantage point of 1939 or 1940, this would not have been an unreasonable conclusion to draw. It was certainly the view of German socialist Rudolf Hilferding, who summed up the feelings of many of the disillusioned when he wrote that the collaboration between Hitler and Stalin had demonstrated that “there was no fundamental difference between the two.” In truth, there was more to Hilferding’s comment than mere fraternal socialist spite. The line emanating from Moscow that autumn came perilously close to advocating a political truce with Nazism, with communist energies instead to be focused on attacking the Western powers as the true enemies of world revolution. This certainly was the tone of one of the foremost German communists in Moscow, Walter Ulbricht. An early member of the German Communist Party, Ulbricht had risen to prominence in the interwar years before fleeing into exile upon Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933. Once safely ensconced in Moscow, from 1937, he emerged as a convinced and uncompromising Stalinist and became the leading German representative on the committee of the Comintern. So when he spoke to his countrymen, he did so with considerable authority.

Ulbricht communicated with his communist brethren inside Germany—known as the “comrades in the country”—primarily via the pages of Die Welt, the Comintern’s German-language journal. Typical was an article that appeared in February 1940 in which he blamed the war squarely on capitalism and “big business” and branded British imperialism as more reactionary and more dangerous than Nazi imperialism, indeed as “the most reactionary force in the world.” Given that the British and the French were the most determined to engage in a political crusade against the Soviet Union, he argued, they now superseded the Nazis—who had, after all, made a pact with Moscow—as world communism’s primary opponent. “The fight for democratic liberties,” he wrote, “cannot be waged in alliance with British imperialism,” adding that those who disagreed would “share responsibility for realising the predatory plans of [the] British and French.” The “strongest guarantee” for the hindrance of such plans, he concluded, was the German-Soviet Pact.

Ulbricht’s was not a lone voice. Izvestia also put in its penny’s worth, ridiculing the West’s “war on Hitlerism” in an editorial, while Ulbricht’s comrade Wilhelm Pieck (like him, a future leader of the communist East German state, the German Democratic Republic) went further, criticizing the West’s war in the most emotive terms as nothing more than an attempt to “starve Germany and extend the conflict to women and children, the sick and the old.” Even in June 1940, with France and the Low Countries invaded, German communists were still toeing the line of damning the “imperialist war” and blaming everything on the Western powers. As the Rote Fahne (Red Flag)—the underground newspaper of the German Communist Party—cynically explained, it was “the baleful politics of the ruling classes in England and France, and their social democratic lackeys, that has led to this slaughter.”

Given that the German Communist Party’s lines of communication with Moscow were often interrupted and its hierarchy was in utter disarray, the degree to which its domestic membership heeded such convoluted ideological leads is unclear. Moreover, the Gestapo’s attentions had scarcely lessened, so many party members preferred to adopt something like a holding pattern: waiting for clarity and biding their time until a more favorable and more easily explicable political climate developed. A few German communists argued for continued agitation against the Nazi regime, and there were some instances of leafleting in Berlin and elsewhere following the outbreak of the war, but the general trend thereafter was toward inaction. By way of illustration, the monthly average of communist leaflets registered by the Gestapo in 1938 was 1,000. In December 1939, it was 277; in April 1940, 82, the level at which it would remain for the rest of the year. Arrests followed a similar pattern, sinking from over 950 in January 1937 to 70 in April 1940. Clearly, German communists were staying their hand. Such was their inactivity that an internal SS report from June 1940 noted that within Germany one could “no longer speak of organised resistance from communist and Marxist circles.” Little wonder that one prominent historian of the period described the German communists of that era as “the most shameful of Hitler’s accomplices.”

For all the clarion calls to compliance with the new line, there were many dissenting voices within the communist movement, not least in Moscow itself. The primary hotbed of such opinions, paradoxically, was the Hotel Lux in the heart of the Soviet capital, which served as home to hundreds of foreign communists who had come to seek refuge, serve the Comintern, or learn at the feet of their masters. Yet, the Lux was not quite the safe haven that it appeared. Many of its residents had already fallen afoul of Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s, suffering torture, execution, or exile to Siberia for their supposed transgressions. At its peak, the purge had cut a swathe through the hotel’s guest list, with residents rising each morning in trepidation to enquire who had been taken by the NKVD the previous night. In all, some 170 Lux residents would disappear in this way. By the autumn of 1939, the six hundred who remained were the most loyal and most desperate of Stalin’s foreign acolytes.

Understandably, then, many within the Lux at that time were willing to go along with Stalin’s policy of friendship with Germany without question. Some were persuaded by the ideological case: that Hitler could be turned west to defeat Britain and France as an unwitting tool of the Soviets. As one of their number commented on hearing news of the pact, “Marvellous, marvellous!They should destroy one another. [T]hat way our job will be easier. Fantastic, marvellous!” Others, motivated more by personal fealty or fear, told themselves that Stalin could do no wrong, that his about-face, however shocking, had to be justified.

Yet a few were unable to square events with their political consciences, and as a result the mood within the hotel soon became fractious. Spanish communist Castro Delgado rose late on the morning of August 24, 1939, and when he reached the bus stop for the trip to Comintern headquarters, he was unaware of the signing of the pact the previous night. “The scene I saw at the bus stop was different from that on most days,” he later recalled. “Today people didn’t pile on board to get a seat. They stood in groups on the sidewalk and talked animatedly. Some were almost shouting. I looked at one and then another. No one noticed me. I said ‘good morning’ and no one answered. Everyone continued to talk, gesticulating and waving their arms. I was the only one who wasn’t talking and gesticulating.” Like many of his fellows, Delgado was torn. He told himself that “Stalin never errs”; yet, as a Spaniard, he could not forget the civil war and his antifascist principles. “From Almeria to Guernica,” he wrote, “from Badajoz to Barcelona I hear the word ‘but.’” Disbelief was a common reaction. Another Spaniard recalled being “stupefied” by the news that morning: “We had to rub our eyes to assure ourselves that we were in fact reading Pravda.”

Ruth von Mayenburg experienced a similar emotion. As an Austrian communist, she had undertaken a number of espionage visits to Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s before transferring her activities to the Comintern. She was predictably astonished by the pact, writing that it was “as though the clock on the Kremlin tower stopped,” but she justified the measure to herself on the grounds of tactical necessity, realpolitik. Only later did her emotional response resurface. “It was actually shameful,” she said of the pact, “and we weren’t able to overcome this feeling of shame for a long time.”

For those in the upper echelons of the Soviet hierarchy, grim experience dictated that it was unwise to question a policy already made—Stalin’s decision, they knew, was final. This strict conformity was demonstrated by the account of the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who himself had such grave concerns about the pact that he sank into a deep depression after it was announced and struggled to feed himself for several months. Returning to Moscow from Paris in the summer of 1940, Ehrenburg was keen to share his belief that the Germans were committed to attacking the Soviet Union, but he found few willing to engage in that conversation, while the press continued to laud friendly Soviet-German relations. He was shocked when he tried to air his concerns with a deputy commissar, Solomon Dridzo-Lozovsky, who merely “listened to me absent-mindedly, without looking at me and with a melancholy expression.” When Ehrenburg challenged his apparent nonchalance, the commissar replied, “Personally, I find it very interesting. But you know we have a different policy.”

Ordinary Soviet citizens—denied the benefits of foreign travel or a thoroughgoing “political education”—were often simply bewildered. After all, they had been told for years that fascism was the Soviet Union’s primary enemy and that Hitler’s Germany was the nefarious outside power that eyed Soviet territory and in whose service “traitors” had conspired against Stalin. As factory director Victor Kravchenko recalled, “The big treason trials, in which Lenin’s most intimate associates perished, had rested on the premise that Nazi Germany and its Axis friends were preparing to attack us.” Moreover, he explained, Hitler’s villainy had become an article of faith for everyone in the USSR: “Soviet children played games of Fascists and Communists; the Fascists, always given German names, got the worst of it every time. In the shooting galleries the targets were often cut-outs of brown-shirted Nazis flaunting swastikas.”

Far from being just another foreign arrangement, therefore, the Nazi-Soviet Pact signified a complete reversal of the entire foreign and ideological policy of the Soviet Union and, as such, was utterly baffling. Kravchenko was most eloquent in recording his feelings at the time. The pact, he wrote in his memoir, streaked “meteorlike across our horizon and crashed headlong into the minds and consciences of the party membership,” leaving all of them “groggy with disbelief.” “Not until we saw newsreels and newspaper pictures showing a smiling Stalin shaking hands with von Ribbentrop,” he recalled, “did we begin to credit the incredible.” Explaining the news to party cells in factories and offices was an unenviable task. As one young communist discovered, the audience sat “bewildered and silent,” while “nobody—not even our political director—could offer any explanation.”

The vast majority of Soviet citizens were no less confused, some even mistaking the announcement for some sort of practical joke. Their sense of bewilderment was perhaps heightened by the way in which the tone of public and cultural life in the Soviet Union shifted after the signing of the pact. From one day to the next, the newspapers stopped criticizing Nazi Germany and instead began lauding German achievements. As Kravchenko noted, “The libraries, similarly, were purged of anti-Fascist literature. The Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries instantly discovered the wonders of German Kultur. Visiting Moscow on business, I learned that several exhibits of Nazi art, Nazi economic achievements and Nazi military glory were on view or in the process of organization. In fact, everything Germanic was in vogue.”

The Soviet film industry was similarly cleansed. The films Professor Mamlock and The Oppenheim Family, dramas highlighting the Nazi persecution of the Jews, were unceremoniously withdrawn from circulation. The most famous example of this cultural purge is the case of the Sergei Eisenstein masterpiece Alexander Nevsky, which had been released in December 1938 and was still circulating in Soviet cinemas as the ink dried on the pact less than a year later. Retelling the story of the eponymous Russian hero who famously defeated the invading Teutonic Knights in the mid-thirteenth century, the film served an obvious propaganda purpose, appealing to Russian nationalism and containing graphic scenes of atrocities committed by the German invaders. For those cinemagoers beguiled by the film’s subtlety, the message was spelled out in a scene in which a crowd of Russian peasants is presented with evidence of the invaders having tortured their womenfolk: “The German is a beast!” they cry in response. “We know the German!” Once those same Germans became Moscow’s allies in 1939, such a prejudicial screen depiction was deemed unacceptable, and the film was swiftly withdrawn. But it may have been too late: it was estimated that, in the first six months of its circulation, some 23 million Soviet citizens had already seen Alexander Nevsky.

Of course, any political or cultural lead had to come from the very top, and Stalin had been quite correct when he stated, “Public opinion in our country will have to be prepared slowly for the change in our relations that this treaty is to bring about.” In the cultural sphere, at least, measures were rather halfhearted, however. Aside from a few exhibitions and the withdrawal of anti-German films such as Alexander Nevsky and a couple of exhibitions of German art, little else of note was attempted. In the short term, radio programs were altered, with the anti-German items being replaced by those that projected a more positive image. Eisenstein, meanwhile, was given the chance to redeem himself by staging a production of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Bolshoi, which premiered in November 1940. The performance received rave reviews, with Pravda praising the “genius” of Wagner and hailing the work as the “richest legacy of the great German composer.”

In the political sphere, the Soviet regime was a little more proactive, setting up “agitation points” in public parks and squares, where party representatives would attempt to explain the new policy and answer questions. At one such point in a Moscow park in mid-September 1939, an elderly man expressed the widespread concern that the Germans would not stop at Poland and would keep going east. In response, the party spokesman declared that there were assurances in place so that this would not happen, but according to an eyewitness, he was otherwise vague and unconvincing.

Such initiatives evidently did not last long. As Nikita Khrushchev recalled, “For us to have explained our reasons for signing the treaty in straightforward newspaper language would have been offensive, and besides, nobody would have believed us. It was very hard for us—as Communists—to accept the idea of joining forces with Germany. It was difficult enough for us to accept this paradox ourselves. It would have been impossible to explain it to the man in the street.” For many Soviet citizens, then, the old concerns were barely assuaged, only silenced. As the poet Konstantin Simonov complained, “They were still the same fascists, but we could no longer write or say aloud what we thought of them.”

A few, it seems, took the new climate of positivity toward Germany literally and began to express admiration for the Nazis or for Hitler personally. The younger generation, for example, had a far from universally negative view of the Third Reich, with some praising Germany’s higher standard of living or applauding its persecution of the Jews. Hitler, too, was praised as charismatic, as the archetypal “strong man,” who “fears no one, recognises no one, and does as he pleases.” Indeed, NKVD and Communist Party sources even reported finding swastikas daubed on Muscovite walls.

For others, meanwhile, the disillusionment engendered by the Nazi-Soviet Pact proved contagious, spilling over into a growing distrust of their own side. Like in the West, one explanation that emerged stressed the supposed convergence and similarity between communism and Nazism that the pact appeared to symbolize. As one wit put it, Hitler and Stalin “have agreed simply that there should be no leaders of the opposition and no parliaments. Now all that is needed is for Hitler to transfer from fascism to socialism, and Stalin from socialism to fascism.” Another quip doing the rounds in Moscow that autumn had Hitler and Ribbentrop submitting applications to join the Communist Party, while Stalin considered whether to accept them.

As the Soviet Union expanded westward in concert with the Germans, that critical minority grew increasingly shrill, questioning the invasion of Finland and even extending sympathy to those in eastern Poland who had now become Soviet citizens. “There they had their own little houses, cows, horses, and land, felt themselves to be the boss,” one opinion ran. “Now they’ll go hungry.” Unsurprisingly, an internal party memorandum that winter noted the existence among the population of “unhealthy and sometimes directly anti-Soviet feelings bordering on counter-revolutionary conversations.” Clearly Stalin would not be having things all his own way.

JUST AS STALIN STRUGGLED TO TAKE HIS PEOPLE WITH HIM, SO DID Hitler. The first source of criticism was from his international allies and sympathizers. There was a widespread feeling that the Nazi regime had been morally damaged by its association with Stalin—a sentiment even expressed by the Times of London. The Portuguese, for instance, were reportedly angered by the pact and by Germany’s affection for its new partner. Hungary, too, was unimpressed, and its people evidently found it “difficult to reconcile at such short notice their professed friendship for Germany with their long-standing hatred of Bolshevism.” Only the Budapest pro-Nazi newspaper Magyarság applauded the pact as “a new world record in clever diplomacy.”

In Italy, Mussolini faced a dilemma. Although he feared the prospect of war, he was nonetheless concerned that he would be left out of any potential windfall of benefits and so was minded to give his sanction to German plans. His foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, meanwhile, was more principled in his opposition, seeing in the pact with Moscow a betrayal of the very foundations of Rome’s alliance with Berlin. Ciano was right: the Nazi-Soviet Pact clearly violated the terms of the secret protocol to the Anti-Comintern Pact, which stipulated that “without mutual consent” neither signatory would conclude political treaties with the USSR. He therefore confronted Mussolini, demanding that he not go along with the Germans. In his diary, he gave a flavor of the conversation. “You, Duce,” he wrote, “cannot and must not do it. The Germans, not ourselves, have betrayed the alliance in which we have been partners, and not servants. Tear up the [Axis] pact. Throw it in Hitler’s face and Europe will recognise in you the natural leader of the anti-German crusade. Speak to the Germans as they should be spoken to.” But Ciano’s pleas fell on deaf ears. Embittered and disillusioned, he could only vent his feelings in his diary. “The Germans are treacherous and deceitful,” he wrote. “Could there ever be a more revolting scoundrel than von Ribbentrop?”

The Japanese were similarly dumbfounded, seeing in Hitler’s pact with Stalin not only a public betrayal of their agreement with Berlin and Rome but also a dramatic deterioration in Japan’s geostrategic security. If Stalin now had a friendly frontier to the west, they would argue, what was stopping him from turning toward the east and threatening Japanese possessions in Manchuria? Indeed, such was the disquiet in Tokyo that the government of Hiranuma Kiichirō, which had wrestled with the idea of an anti-Soviet alliance with Germany, collapsed in acrimony. Even the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Hiroshi Ōshima, a longtime friend of both Germany and Ribbentrop personally, saw the pact as a betrayal and tendered his resignation.

Neither did Hitler find much succor among his ideological sympathizers. In Britain, following the invasion of Poland, nobody supported Hitler beyond the lunatic fringe of those like Unity Mitford, who shot herself in the head in Munich on the outbreak of war, and William Joyce, who washed up in Berlin as the propagandist “Lord Haw-Haw.” Even the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley stated publicly that “any Englishman who does not fight for Britain is a coward.” Fearing that the war would ruin the British Empire, Mosley had hoped that Britain could avoid involvement and so had previously adopted a pacifist, antiwar line, with the slogan, “Why cut your throat today to avoid catching a cold tomorrow?” But when war came in September 1939, he nonetheless urged his followers to “do nothing to injure our country, or to help any other power.”

Most of the pro-German British Right followed Mosley’s lead. The Link, for instance, a cultural organization established in 1937 to “promote Anglo-German friendship,” closed its doors. Although unrepentant, its pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic founder, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, explained, “Naturally, we closed down on the outbreak of war; that was essential, the King’s enemies became our enemies.” The Right Club ostensibly followed suit: another pro-Nazi society, founded by MP Sir Archibald Ramsay, it also closed down official operations with the outbreak of war, although a number of Ramsay’s followers continued leafleting and bill-posting well into 1940.

Only in the United States did Hitler briefly find a modicum of international sympathy. There, the pro-Nazi German American Bund, which had been founded in 1936 and consisted almost exclusively of German émigrés, was unabashed in seeking to project a positive view of its homeland and cheerleading for Hitler. Although its activities peaked early in 1939 with a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York attended by some 20,000 members, the events of that autumn propelled the organization into a rapid decline. In a curious parallel with the fate of the American Communist Party, the Bund’s leader, Fritz Kuhn, was convicted on fraud charges soon after the outbreak of the war in Europe, and its national secretary was convicted of perjury the following year. With that, the organization swiftly disintegrated.

Domestically, too, Hitler faced considerable opposition. Like Stalin, he confronted the challenge of contradicting years of propaganda against, deeply ingrained prejudices toward, and fears about his new treaty partner. Nazism had emerged, in part at least, as a response to the rise of the Bolsheviks and had largely defined itself as a national counterpoint to the perceived evils of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” With anticommunism an item of faith for many Nazis, the pact was bound, at the very least, to raise a few eyebrows.

Among his inner circle, of course, Hitler could effectively defend the move through the force of his personality or by appealing to realpolitik. If Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had any reservations about the new arrangement, he did not share them with his diary. On the day of the pact’s signing, he was as effusive in private as his minions were in public, writing that “the announcement of the Non-Aggression Pact with Moscow is a world sensation!” Others were less convinced, however. Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was among those strongly opposed to the new alignment. When he first heard of the pact, he recorded his fury in his diary: “The trip of our minister to Moscow; an act of moral disrespect towards our 20-year struggle, towards our Party Rallies, towards Spain. About 4 years ago, the Führer said in my presencethat he would not make a deal with Moscow, because it was impossible to forbid the German people to steal and at the same time make friends with thieves.” He finished the entry snorting with derision: “Apparently the Soviets have already booked a delegation for the Nuremberg Rally.” Rosenberg would return to this theme a few days later. Although Hitler had clearly gone to considerable lengths to persuade him of the pact’s merits, he was still uneasy. “I have the feeling,” he wrote in his diary on August 26, “that this Moscow-Pact will one day wreak vengeance on National Socialism. It is not a move made with freewill, but an act of desperation. How can we still speak of the salvation and shaping of Europe, when we have to ask the destroyer of Europe for help?”

Hitler was not above responding to such waverers with threats. At his mountain retreat above Berchtesgaden in August 1939, he defended the pact to his military chiefs of staff, claiming, “Stalin and I are the only ones who visualise the future. So in a few weeks I shall stretch out my hand to Stalin at the common German-Russian frontier, and with him undertake to redistribute the world.” By way of a warning, he added, “I have given the command and I shall shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism.”

Industrialist Fritz Thyssen might have been one to taken such threats seriously. A longtime financial and political supporter of the Nazis, Thyssen had begun to have second thoughts before 1939. Although he had welcomed the crushing of the Left, he had been increasingly perturbed by the criminality and violence of the SS and of Hitler’s “Brown-shirts,” the Sturmabteilung (SA). The events of autumn 1939—not least the death of his nephew in the Dachau concentration camp and Hitler’s chilling declaration in the Reichstag that “he who is not with me is a traitor, and shall be treated as such”—would prove the last straw. Consequently, Thyssen took his family and began a life of exile in Switzerland. The news of the pact had troubled him deeply. As he wrote to Hermann Göring that September from his Swiss refuge, he found it “grotesque” that “National Socialism has suddenly discarded its doctrines in order to hob-nob with communism.” The policy, he argued, amounted to suicide, and the only beneficiary would be the Nazis’ “mortal enemy of yesterday Russia.” Writing to Hitler the following month, he was no less conciliatory: the pact and the war, he wrote, meant nothing less than the “Finis Germaniae.”

Such heretical opinions could not be expressed openly within Germany. Public discourse was uniformly positive about the pact, with German newspapers immediately altering the tone with which they reported Soviet current affairs or Russian culture. Where reporters and editors had once been unable to resist inserting—at the very least—a derogatory adjective or a critical aside, they now reported events with scrupulous evenhandedness. On the morning of the pact’s announcement, the newspapers seemed desperate to make the case for the new arrangement. Every title carried almost verbatim reports and commentaries, scripted under Goebbels’s supervision, rejoicing at the restoration of the “traditional friendship between the Russian and the German peoples.” In the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, Ribbentrop congratulated himself by lauding his achievement as “one of the most important turning points in the history of our two peoples.” Even the in-house newspaper of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps, toed the optimistic line, reminding its readers, in a gallop through Russian and Soviet history, that the empire of the tsars had originally been a Germanic state, that it had twice “saved” Prussia, and that it had “paid dearly” for its enmity with Germany in World War I. Echoing Ribbentrop, the newspaper concluded that the two countries had always flourished when they were friends and so looked forward to a new era of collaboration.

With the outbreak of war, the positive attitude continued. The Völkischer Beobachter carried extended extracts from Molotov’s speech to the Supreme Soviet, justifying and praising the Nazi-Soviet Pact, on page two. And, following the Red Army’s invasion of Poland on September 17, Soviet military communiqués were given similarly exalted status, with editorial comments dutifully echoing the Soviet line. Rosenberg was predictably disgusted. “Our press is lacking all dignity,” he wrote, “Today they rejoice over the traditional friendship between the German and Russian peoples. As if our struggle against Moscow had been a misunderstanding and the Bolsheviks had been the real Russians all along, with the Soviet Jews at their head! Cuddling up like this is worse than embarrassing.”

Cultural content in the newspapers was also swiftly coordinated, albeit with a clear preference for Russian subjects over those with a narrower Soviet context. Already on August 26, for instance, a sympathetic article explored the Russian view of the Battle of Tannenberg, the twenty-fifth anniversary of which Germans were about to mark. A week later, on September 3, a whole page of the Völkischer Beobachter was devoted to the history of the Kremlin. Similar articles followed, covering such diverse subjects as Russian publishing, history, literature, and music. Those raised on a diet of sneering contempt for all things emanating from Moscow must have found such revelations more than a little disconcerting. In time, Pravda and Izvestia would be available on Berlin’s streets, containing, as one reader recalled, “a lot of negative stuff about the English and nothing against fascism.”

If one were to believe the American William Shirer, however, Hitler needn’t have worried about the popular reaction to the Nazi-Soviet volte-face. According to the renowned radio journalist and commentator, the people of Berlin—though “still rubbing their eyes” at the news—were at least enthusiastic. “You may be surprised,” he announced to his American listeners, “but the fact is that they do like [the pact]. Judging from the reaction of the people in the street it is a very popular move. I rode around Berlin today on buses, street-cars, the elevated and the subway. Everyone had their head buried in a newspaper. And in their faces you could see they considered that what they read was Good News.”

Many certainly would have agreed instinctively with Shirer’s assessment. After hearing the announcement on the radio, one eyewitness wrote in his diary about the pact’s positive reception. “Everyone beaming with joy,” he recorded. “Wherever one goes, everywhere people speak excitedly of the Agreement with Russia!” Part of that excitement lay in the erroneous belief that the pact, rather than heralding war, might actually prevent it. But others were less optimistic. In Berlin, diarist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich reacted with resignation that the tension had finally been broken and war now seemed inevitable. News of the pact, she wrote, had been a “bombshell,” and she was not sure “whether to heave a sigh of relief or to gasp with horror.” Having long deduced that Hitler wanted his war, she believed that he would finally have his wish. She concluded that an “end with horror seems almost more bearable to us than horror without end.”

The only uniform reaction to the news, perhaps, was surprise. A Bavarian doctor summed up the thoughts of many when he wrote, “I just could not believe it, that Hitler had made a pact with the Bolsheviks; with the very same power that—for as long as I could remember—had been evil personified for the National Socialists. I began to marvel that the Führer had changed his spots to carry off this amazing diplomatic chess move.” The thoughts of Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer were understandably darker. The pictures of Ribbentrop shaking hands with Stalin, he wrote, were “the maddest thing”; he added, “Machiavelli is a babe in arms in comparison.”

Many in the military establishment were similarly dismayed. As intelligence officer Hans Gisevius noted, the army commanders were “thunderstruck indignant beyond words”; “the vision of Hitler and Stalin walking arm in arm was too much, even for our unpolitical generals.” Colonel General Ludwig Beck, the former army chief of staff, spoke for many when he expressed his profound disquiet at the new arrangement. In November 1939, he voiced the opinion that Germany’s victory over Poland had been diminished by the fact that the “Russian colossus” had been “set in motion” westward in the process.

As General Heinz Guderian recalled, Hitler appears to have expected objections from this quarter. Seated next to the Führer at a Reich Chancellery luncheon in late October 1939, after he had been awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, Guderian was asked directly “how the army reacted to the Russian pact.” When the general replied that the soldiers had “breathed a sigh of relief” as they would not have to fight a two-front war, Hitler stared at him “in amazement,” and he got the distinct impression that the Führer was rather displeased by his answer. Hitler was disappointed, he believed, because “he had doubtless expected me to express astonishment at his having ever agreed to sign a pact with Stalin.”

Among the German political class there was also disquiet. Former diplomat Ulrich von Hassell wrote in his diary that he well understood the idea behind the pact—what he called “using Beelzebub to drive away the Devil”—but he believed that it would be “regarded by the whole world as proof of the absolute unscrupulousness and lack of principle of Hitler and Stalin.” The final straw for Alfred Rosenberg, meanwhile, was when Ribbentrop returned from his second visit to Moscow and proclaimed that the atmosphere in the Kremlin was “like being amongst old comrades.” “That,” Rosenberg raged in his diary, “is just about the most impudent affront that can be inflicted upon National Socialism.”

Such was the discontent in German diplomatic circles that word of it even reached British ears. In the autumn of 1939, the foreign secretary, Viscount Halifax, prepared a secret memorandum on German-Soviet relations citing sources in Berlin that suggested there was “growing dissatisfaction and disillusionment in Germany—in naval and military circles, among diplomats, on the part of Göring and his entourage, and in the Party—over the Russo-German Pact.” Those sources were not far wrong. On the morning after the announcement of the pact, it was said that the garden of the “Brown House” in Munich—the Nazi Party headquarters—had been littered with the discarded party badges of disgruntled members. Hitler would later acknowledge that the “maneuver” of the pact with Moscow “must have appeared to be a rare old muddle” to the convinced National Socialist, but he was confident that the about-face had been accepted “without misgiving.” He was mistaken. He and his propagandists clearly still had some considerable explaining to do.

To this end, the Nazi state had a number of tools at its disposal. Cinema, ever the bellwether in totalitarian culture, was quickly coordinated. Although Nazi filmmaking had been obsessed with highlighting the “Bolshevik menace” only months before, the signing of the pact caused it to move seamlessly to showing Germany’s eastern neighbor in a more positive light. Typical was the fate of the film Friesennot, released in 1935 and still circulating in Germany in the autumn of 1939. Set in an ethnic German village in the Soviet Union, the film portrays the villagers’ brutal persecution at the hands of the Red Army and its political commissars, culminating in a bloodbath and the murder of a local girl who had fallen in love with a Soviet officer. Despite its critical and commercial success—Friesennot had even found its way into Hitler’s personal film collection—its anti-Bolshevik motifs were profoundly at odds with the change in political climate in 1939, and the film was duly banned in September.

In place of such works, a new program of films with themes more in tune with the new constellation of power was swiftly commissioned. An obvious subject for cinematic treatment was the nineteenth-century statesman Otto von Bismarck, a hero to German nationalists, who had nonetheless been careful to cultivate a healthy alliance with Russia. The film Bismarck, commissioned by Goebbels personally, appeared in Germany’s cinemas in December 1940. Rather more popular, however, was Der Postmeister, a tale of doomed love in St. Petersburg, adapted from a short story by Pushkin and featuring the former communist Heinrich George in the title role. But, despite receiving rave reviews and winning the Mussolini Prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 1940, Der Postmeister enjoyed only a brief heyday. By the following summer it had disappeared from German cinema screens, damned by its sympathetic view of the Russian people.

Pro-Russian activity in other cultural spheres was much less evident. Music was an area in which one might expect to have heard an echo of the new era of Nazi-Soviet friendship; yet little change was apparent. Russian music was not banned in Germany until 1942, but there had been an active campaign to Germanize the Third Reich’s cultural output since the mid-1930s, and radio playlists, concert programs, and repertoires all naturally tended to reflect and perpetuate that bias. There were exceptions, of course. Soon after the pact was signed, Munich Radio marked the occasion by replacing a scheduled discussion titled “I Accuse Moscow—the Comintern Plan for World Dictatorship” with thirty minutes of Russian music. But beyond such instances, the tone was one of continuity. It is telling, perhaps, that the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra devoted concerts during the Third Reich to the music of many foreign lands—including Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Finland, and even Britain—but never to that of Russia. Opera was a little more ecumenical, with works by Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and Mussorgsky all being performed in Germany during the twenty-two months of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but these were the exceptions to a solidly Germanic norm.

Germany’s vibrant cabaret scene showed similar prejudices, with a few Russian, or “Cossack,” choirs circulating, leavening the traditional music hall fare by offering what one newspaper advertisement described as the “unique experience” of “Russian melodies.” One such group, which called itself the Ukrainian National Choir, had the misfortune to be in residence at the Wintergarten music hall in Berlin in June 1941, at the very time that their homeland was being invaded. Their show was cancelled two days after the German invasion. The fate of the performers is unknown.

IN RETROSPECT, IT IS SURPRISING NOT THAT SO LITTLE EFFORT WAS made to propagate a genuine friendship between the Nazis and the Soviets but that any effort was expended at all. Given the ideological enmity between the two, it is remarkable that cultural exchanges, political education, and the might of the respective propaganda machines were all harnessed, at least temporarily, in the interests of improving German-Soviet relations. Of course, as Stalin clearly recognized, any such improvement required sustained effort and engagement, and it got neither. The political will was lacking, on both sides, to make any more than token gestures.

But the domestic reactions to the Nazi-Soviet Pact in Germany and the USSR demonstrated rather well the limitations of propaganda. Although both sides were acknowledged masters of the dark arts of political persuasion, neither could claim any particular success in convincing its respective public about the sincerity of its partner’s newfound benevolence. It may be, of course, that this lack of success was in some sense deliberate, reflecting the temporary, tactical nature of the relationship and the desire on the part of both regimes not to dilute public distrust of a potentially dangerous enemy. And ideology was not abandoned entirely, of course. Both sides attempted to put an ideological gloss on the pact in an effort to make events comprehensible to the faithful. The Germans tried to convince themselves that the two sides were converging, that the Bolshevik excesses of the past had given way to a more nationally minded agenda. The Soviets, for their part, could paint their collaboration with Hitler as a tactical masterstroke in the wider struggle against Western imperialism and capitalism.

Yet, regardless of such contortions and convoluted justifications, we must also consider that, for many of their adherents, Nazism and communism were fervently held creeds whose principles they could not simply jettison at will, regardless of which way the political wind was blowing. As Harry Pollitt put it, “I do not envy those comrades who can so lightly go from one conviction to another.” Pollitt refused to recant. Although he continued, after his removal, to campaign publicly for the new line of Dutt and the Comintern, he did not change his personal view. Indeed, as one account has it, he once attended a communist meeting brandishing a copy of his controversial pamphlet “How to Win the War” and, when challenged, exclaimed that he stood by every word of it. Although they might have disagreed about almost everything else, many—fascists and communists alike—would doubtless have applauded such steadfastness.