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

^{CHAPTER 9} NO HONOR AMONG THIEVES

JUST BEFORE DAWN ON SUNDAY JUNE 22, 1941, THE CODE WORD “Dortmund” was transmitted to German units stationed on the border with the Soviet Union. With that, on the stroke of 3:15 a.m., the assault began. All along the 1,300-kilometer frontier, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, an intense artillery bombardment prefaced the massed advance of 3 million men, accompanied by thousands of tanks and aircraft, across the line once dubbed the “Boundary of Peace.” In some places, at strategically vital river crossings or fortified guard posts, guile preceded the attack. At Koden, near Brest, for instance, Soviet sentries on a bridge over the river Bug were called out by their German counterparts to discuss “important business” and then machine-gunned. Elsewhere, elite teams of “Brandenburger” commandos, deep behind the Soviet border, cut telephone lines or disabled radio masts to hamper the Red Army’s response. Along most of the front, no ruse or deception was necessary, however, and the guns simply opened fire, heralding the largest invasion in the history of warfare. The Nazi-Soviet Pact had run its course.

Perfectly timed to coincide with Ambassador Schulenburg’s resigned shrug in Moscow, Soviet ambassador Vladimir Dekanozov was summoned to the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin. There, he and his interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, were met by Ribbentrop, looking “puffed and purplish, his eyes clouded, the eyelids enflamed.” “Could he be drunk?” Berezhkov wondered. When Ribbentrop began, he seemed to confirm Berezhkov’s speculation. Raising his voice, he gave a rambling account of alleged Soviet violations of German territory and airspace and accused Moscow of harboring the intention to “stab the German people in the back.” Accordingly, he concluded, “German troops had crossed the border into the Soviet Union.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soon after, Stalin left the Kremlin for his dacha at Kuntsevo, outside Moscow. Only at 9:15 that evening did he finally dictate “Directive No. 3,” which ordered the Red Army not only to “hold firm” and “destroy” the enemy but also to cross the Soviet frontier in pursuing the foe. The problem was that, by that time, the Red Army was already in headlong retreat.

IT HAD NOT TAKEN LONG THAT MORNING FOR SOVIET FORCES TO realize that the German attack was not a mere provocation. Swiftly overrun in its forward positions, the Red Army was being slaughtered where it stood, outgunned and outfought by an enemy who was better equipped, better trained, and better led. On average, it has been calculated, a Red Army soldier died every two seconds that day. In the chaos of the attack, entire units simply disappeared, consumed in the maelstrom of explosions, buried in destroyed buildings, and crushed into the sunbaked earth.

At the end of the first day, the remains of the 10th Army regrouped at its new headquarters. A few hours earlier, it had consisted of six infantry divisions, six armored divisions, two cavalry divisions, and three artillery regiments; now its stragglers possessed little more than two tents, a few tables, and a telephone. Others had even less. As one Soviet commander would later confess, “The only thing that was left of the 56th Rifle Division was its number.”

The Red Air Force, meanwhile, had been destroyed on the ground, with few pilots even getting airborne to engage the Germans. On the first day alone, the Luftwaffe claimed to have destroyed nearly 1,500 Soviet aircraft. It was almost certainly an underestimate. As Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant would write a couple of days later, “The ease of our victories along the whole front came as a surprise to both Army and Luftwaffe. Enemy aircraft were parked in neat rows on their airfields and could be destroyed without difficulty.” When he received the news, Stalin was incredulous: “Surely the German air force didn’t manage to reach every single airfield?” he asked his minions. The affirmative response sent him into an impotent rage.

For Soviet ground forces it was a similar story. Despite the tenacity and bravery of its soldiers, the Red Army was, for the most part, simply overwhelmed. Already at the end of that first day—as Stalin was finally calling on his troops to throw out the invaders—some German spearheads were over fifty miles beyond the former frontier. Isolated pockets of Soviet resistance were surrounded and neutralized, as German armored columns swept eastward, penetrating deep into the rear areas, disrupting communications and support efforts, in a classic demonstration of blitzkrieg. After two days, the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic, Vilnius, fell to the Germans; a week after that the Latvian capital, Riga, the Byelorussian capital, Minsk, and the western Ukrainian city of L’vov (the former Polish Lwów) had also fallen. By that time, some German units had already advanced over 250 miles from their starting positions. Already, almost all the lands gained under the pact had been lost. The Soviet Union, it seemed, was being engulfed.

One of the only sources of optimism for Stalin in those opening days was the performance of his new breeds of tanks, the T-34 and the heavier KV. Although fewer than 1,500 of these models were available to the Red Army in June 1941, they came as an unwelcome surprise to German forces, which had grown accustomed to enjoying battlefield superiority. Wehrmacht antitank crews quickly discovered that their weapons, especially the standard 37-mm gun, were ineffectual against them; one crew claimed to have hit a T-34 twenty-three times without destroying it. Panzer crews, meanwhile, were similarly alarmed to note that the main gun of the new Soviet tanks was highly effective and could inflict serious damage to their vehicles before they were even within range. As one German account recalled, “The KV-1 and KV-2 were really something! Our companies opened fire at about 800 yards, but it remained ineffective. We moved closer and closer to the enemy, who for his part continued to approach us unconcerned. Very soon we were facing each other at 50 to 100 yards. A fantastic exchange of fire took place without any visible German success. The Russian tanks continued to advance, and all armour-piercing shells simply bounced off them.” Unsurprisingly, German field commanders soon began to speak of “tank terror” among Wehrmacht troops. Yet, despite such fears, the Axis advance was scarcely halted: there were too few T-34s and KVs to make a serious difference on the battlefield, and too few of those available had crews experienced or trained enough to exploit their temporary advantage.

Some of the strongpoints that briefly offered resistance were the fortifications of the Molotov Line, such as at Kunigiškiai in Lithuania and Rava-Russkaya near L’vov. A German field report that summer would record troops encountering 68 artillery casemates, 460 antitank emplacements, and 542 machine-gun installations, the majority with accompanying bunkers and antitank earthworks. Although overwhelmed, the defenses of the Molotov Line were clearly not just a paper tiger. A similar, if more antiquated, example was the fortress at Brest, the town where the Nazis and the Soviets had jointly paraded to mark their conquest of Poland in 1939. Built in the mid-nineteenth century by the town’s then Russian occupiers, the fortress was a formidable construction, once considered impregnable. Spread across the confluence of the river Bug and a tributary to the west of the town, it formed a huge complex of barracks, ravelins, moats, and casemates, with walls five feet thick and space for a garrison of up to 12,000 soldiers.

Ironically, the sector of the German front facing Brest was under the command of General Heinz Guderian, who had taken the salute with the Soviets there in September 1939. “I had already captured the fortress once, during the Polish campaign,” Guderian wrote in his postwar memoir. “I now had the same task to perform a second time, though in more difficult circumstances.” As he recalled, “The fortifications at Brest were out-of-date, but the [rivers] and water-filled ditches made them immune to tank attack.” Such was Guderian’s concern about the fortress that he asked for an infantry corps to be placed under his direct command for the crucial assault.

The Germans attacked the fortress on the morning of June 22. Subjected to a massive artillery bombardment from the outset, followed by an infantry advance and finally an aerial assault, its 7,000-strong Red Army garrison fought bravely, with around 2,000 Soviet soldiers paying with their lives, while others held out for a week, finally succumbing on June 29. One Red Army officer, Major Pyotr Gavrilov, even managed to avoid capture, hiding out in the fortress’s cellars, until he was finally apprehended on July 23, a full month after the beginning of Barbarossa. Remarkably, he would survive the war.

By that time, Guderian was already 250 miles to the east, narrowly avoiding another uncomfortable reminder of recent history. In mid-July, his 2nd Army was near the towns of Zhlobin and Rogachev in eastern Byelorussia when it faced an unsuccessful counterattack by the Soviet 25th Mechanized Corps, under the command of Major General Semyon Krivoshein, with whom Guderian had shared a platform in Brest in 1939. Although neither appears to have realized it, the two were probably no more than a few kilometers apart across the battlefield. One must assume that Krivoshein’s earlier invitation to Wehrmacht officers to “visit him in Moscow” after the defeat of the British no longer stood.

In fact, reminders of the Nazi-Soviet Pact were all around. Considering the extent of the German-Soviet economic relationship in the opening phase of World War II, that connection inevitably played a significant role in the Barbarossa campaign. As we have seen, it is sometimes wrongly suggested that Soviet supplies made the decisive contribution to the German campaign in the west in the summer of 1940—that the Panzers racing for the French coast near Abbeville were “running on Soviet fuel.” As much as this contention does not fit the Nazi offensive of 1940, it fits that of 1941 much better: German tanks racing to take Minsk or encircle Kiev were to some extent dependent on Soviet oil supplies—one in every eight of them was indeed running on Soviet fuel.

The same partial dependency ran the other way. The T-34s and KV heavy tanks that had given the Germans such a momentary fright in the summer of 1941 had rolled off production lines set up largely using imported German machinery—lathes, cranes, forges, and mills. That recent cooperation was perceptible in other aspects as well. As one historian has memorably expressed it, “German soldiers fed by Ukrainian grain, transported by Caucasus oil, and outfitted with boots made from rubber shipped via the Trans-Siberian railroad, fired their Donets-manganese-hardened steel weapons at their former allies. The Red Army hit back with artillery pieces and planes designed according to German specifications and produced by Ruhr Valley machines in factories that burned coal from the Saar.”

Some would even complain that the German-Soviet cooperation had not gone far enough. Colonel General of the Red Air Force Alexander Yakovlev would later note ruefully that his buying delegation had been offered but rejected the Ju-87 Stuka dive-bomber during one of its visits to Germany. “Why throw money down the drain?” its members had concluded. “It’s slow, obsolete.” That assessment had certainly not been wrong—after all, the Stuka had been badly mauled by the Royal Air Force the previous summer during the Battle of Britain—but it had nonetheless proved itself highly effective when enjoying air superiority, as it did over the eastern front in 1941. The irony was not lost on Yakovlev: “In the first days of the war,” he recalled, “these ‘obsolete, slow’ machines caused us incalculable calamities.”

A salient example of the interconnection between the Soviet and German military machines in that brutal summer is the ex-Lützow, now renamed the Petropavlovsk. Having languished for over a year in the shipyards of Leningrad, the unfinished German battleship was inevitably pressed into service in the battle for the Soviet Union’s second city. Although not yet seaworthy, the vessel nonetheless had four of her eight main 203-mm guns installed and so could be used as a floating battery when the Wehrmacht approached the city in late August. So it was that on September 7 the Petropavlovsk—built by German labor in Bremen—bombarded approaching German troops, firing around seven hundred German-made shells, each one weighing 122 kilograms (269 pounds). Ten days later, German artillery in turn found their range and hit the cruiser with fifty-three rounds, causing her to beach, bow first, in the coal harbor. It was a fitting end to a vessel that had become symbolic of the tortuous relations of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Such were the German successes against the Soviets that summer that they seemed to confirm Hitler’s prediction that “you only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” And in fact, in the early days of the German invasion, Soviet rule began to look distinctly fragile, both at the front and behind the lines. In those regions recently annexed by the Soviets, local populations were predictably hostile. Across all three Baltic states, popular risings against Soviet rule preceded the arrival of the Germans, who were greeted as liberators despite the fact that they were just as inimical toward the idea of national independence as the Soviets had been. As one Estonian eyewitness recalled, “The German troops were at first met with great enthusiasm. The horrors of the red regime were over now. Many men, especially those whose family members had been killed or deported, went into the German army of their free will. They wanted to take revenge on the communists.”

In Latvia, meanwhile, morale among local units incorporated into the Red Army was predictably bad; desertions were common, and some units even turned their guns on their former masters. Hostility to the Red Army was not confined to the Baltic states. As one Soviet soldier fighting in the city of L’vov recalled, the locals there “were as likely to spit in a Soviet soldier’s face as they were to offer him directions.” A Red Army general had a similar experience when his staff car broke down near Kovel in western Ukraine. A crowd of about twenty locals gathered, he wrote, but “no one was saying anything. No one offered to help,” they just “smirked maliciously at us.”

Even far behind the lines, there was disquiet. In Moscow there was a spate of panic buying and a run on the banks; a standoff at a food plant degenerated into a violent confrontation. Although many keen young men volunteered to fight and a general mood of Russian patriotism prevailed, there was nonetheless genuine discontent in evidence, with sometimes long-standing resentments against the collectivization, or the terror, finally being aired. One Muscovite claimed that it was just as well that the war had started, as life in the Soviet Union had become so unbearable that “the sooner it was all over the better.” Another said, “At last we can breathe freely. Hitler will be in Moscow in three days and the intelligentsia will be able to live properly.”

What was worse for Stalin was that some, even beyond the border areas, were actively welcoming the invaders. As one German officer noted near Vitebsk in Byelorussia, “I was astonished to detect no hatred among [the local people]. Women often came out of their houses with an icon held before their breast, crying: ‘We are still Christians. Free us from Stalin who destroyed our churches.’ Many of them offered an egg and a piece of dried bread as a ‘welcome.’ We gradually had the feeling that we really were being regarded as liberators.”

More worrying still was the apparent disintegration of Soviet forces in those opening days of the campaign. Facing the full force of the blitzkrieg, the Red Army was in disarray, with surviving troops often fleeing eastward alongside columns of similarly leaderless refugees. In some cases, officers attempting to stem the panic and restore order were shot by their own troops. One soldier recalled his experience of the constant shelling, the din of battle, and the orders that never arrived. Finally, he decided to leave his post and, taking a small group of men with him, set off eastward on foot. “There was no-one to help with advice or supplies,” he remembered. “None of the men had ever seen a map.” They would walk without a break for forty-eight hours.

Not just the ordinary soldiers were seeking a way out; Marshal Grigory Kulik was also looking to flee. After his buffoonish intervention in the High Command Conference earlier in the year, the fleshy fifty-year-old had arrived at the front on June 23 in a leather flying suit and goggles, hoping to rally what was left of the 10th Army. However, when disaster loomed, he ordered his men to follow his lead in shedding their uniforms, disposing of their documents, and adopting peasant dress. After burning both his marshal’s uniform and his flying suit, he fled east in a horse-drawn cart.

Once again, Kulik would escape with his life. But given the scale of the disaster unfolding on the western frontier, discipline clearly had to be restored swiftly. This was achieved in part via the reintroduction, in late June, of so-called blocking units: NKVD troops tasked with preventing unauthorized withdrawals from the front, with extreme force if necessary. From its role in the purges, the NKVD was already widely feared. As one Red Army colonel recalled, the mere sight of the cornflower blue cap of an NKVD man could transform the most hardened soldier into a nervous, babbling wreck, desperately protesting his innocence. Now the NKVD was given the task, as the order put it, of “leading the fight against deserters, cowards and alarmists.” Its officers had the authority to shoot suspects on the spot, and anyone behind the front lines who could not adequately explain his presence fell under immediate suspicion.

According to some accounts, Stalin, too, required a certain stiffening of his resolve. Although he handled most of the opening week with exemplary vigor—working all hours to coordinate the desperate Soviet response—by the time of the fall of Minsk on June 28, he seemed to have reached the end of his tether. Minsk was grimly symbolic. Not only was it the capital city of the Soviet Republic of Byelorussia and a major population center, but it was also fully three hundred kilometers from the frontier—demonstrating the scale of the Red Army’s collapse—and lay on the traditional road to Moscow, less than seven hundred kilometers from the capital. If Hitler’s troops could continue that rate of advance, they would be arriving in Moscow within two weeks.

Unsurprisingly, this realization appears to have momentarily shaken Stalin’s confidence. On the evening of June 28, when news of Minsk’s fall reached him, Stalin was reportedly furious, storming out of his office when his demand for an update from the front met with impotent shrugs. That same night, according to Zhukov, Stalin twice visited the Defense Commissariat, where he reacted violently to bad news and caused an unseemly spat between himself, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, Chief of the General Staff Zhukov, and Beria, with the latter threatening that the NKVD might have to intervene to restore the army’s martial spirit. No longer able to contain his fury, Stalin shouted at Zhukov, “What is the General Staff for? What is the Chief of Staff for, if during the first days of war he loses his head, is not in communication with his forces, doesn’t represent anyone and doesn’t command anyone?” In the aftermath, a mood of resignation took hold of the Politburo, with many, including Stalin, profoundly depressed by the night’s events. Later, as he left the Defense Commissariat, Stalin gave voice to his darkest fears. “Everything’s lost,” he said, “I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.” It was said that he cursed all the way to his dacha at Kuntsevo.

The suspicion that Stalin had some sort of breakdown in the opening weeks of the war has been remarkably persistent. It first emerged with Nikita Khrushchev and his “Secret Speech” of 1956—as part of a successful attempt to discredit the once revered dictator—and has been retold, regurgitated, and embellished by biographers and commentators ever since. Some publications still confidently assert that Stalin was absent for fully ten days, during which the Soviet Union was effectively “leaderless.” This idea is no longer taken seriously. An analysis of the visitors’ book in Stalin’s Kremlin office, for instance, has demonstrated that there was scarcely a hiatus in appointments in that first week, with Stalin absent from the Kremlin for only two days, on June 29 and 30, during which time he chaired meetings elsewhere. Whether at his dacha, at the Defense Commissariat, or in the Kremlin, Stalin barely stopped.

Yet the image of Stalin, unshaven and incommunicado, sulking at his dacha, visited by a cowering coterie of Politburo officials begging him to resume his duties, is nonetheless highly seductive. In its most elaborate form, the story has Molotov, Beria, Soviet foreign trade commissar Anastas Mikoyan, and Defense Commissar Kliment Voroshilov entering the house, where they confront a “thinnerhaggardgloomy” Stalin, who “turned to stone” when he saw them. According to one account, the Soviet leader rambled on about Lenin, lamenting, “If he could see us now,” and bewailing what destiny had visited upon “those to whom he entrusted the fate of his country.” It was also claimed that he had been “inundated with letters” from ordinary Soviet citizens “righty rebuking us.” Finally, it is said, he addressed his acolytes with the wary, suspicious question, “Why have you come?”—as though Stalin feared that he himself was about to be purged.

Although the episode is most likely a postwar invention, intended to demonstrate Stalin’s fallibility, even his weakness, the tale has a certain logic. For one thing, Stalin had signed far too many death warrants to be ignorant of the fate meted out to those perceived to have failed, transgressed, or stepped out of line. Beyond that, he had every reason to indulge in a spot of genuine mea culpa introspection. After all, he himself had been a prime mover in formulating the policy that had led to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and he had taken a personal hand in the negotiations with Ribbentrop. According to Sergo Beria, Stalin decided on the pact alone: “He wound up the whole business in 48 hours without consulting the Politburo, who were faced with a fait accompli.” More than any other Soviet policy, then, the rapprochement with Germany carried Stalin’s imprimatur. Moreover, once that relationship began to sour, he had stopped his ears to the Cassandra-like prophecies of an imminent German attack.

Although we can now dismiss the wilder idea of a sulking Stalin spending days hors de combat at his dacha, the suggestion that he might yet have endured a bout of uncertainty and reflection is still very persuasive. The fall of Minsk symbolized the wider disaster not only for the USSR but for Stalin personally. It was arguably the gravest crisis he would ever face, the moment that threw his misjudgment into sharp relief. Perhaps only a dictator of Stalin’s brutal determination—and one with the absolute power that he had arrogated for himself—could have survived it.

Whatever the truth of the dacha episode, Stalin reappeared in the Kremlin on July 1. That same day, he was appointed chairman of the State Defense Committee, which would be directly responsible for the prosecution of the war with Germany. Two days later, he spoke to the Soviet people, by radio, for the first time since the German attack. “Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters!” he began haltingly, but with uncharacteristic warmth. “Men of our army and navy! I am addressing you, my friends!” What followed was essentially a call to arms, a plea to all Soviet peoples to “rise in defence of our native land” and to show “unexampled valour” in combating their “most malicious and most perfidious enemy—German fascism.” He reminded them that there were “no invincible armies and never have been,” and predicted—stretching history a little—that Hitler’s Wehrmacht would be “smashed, as were the armies of Napoleon and Wilhelm.”

Naturally, perhaps, alongside this rousing rallying cry, Stalin felt obliged to offer a defense of his earlier policy of collusion with Germany. “It may be asked,” he said, “how could the Soviet government have consented to conclude a Non-Aggression Pact with such treacherous fiends as Hitler and Ribbentrop?” It had not been an error, he answered piously; no “peace-loving state” could turn down a peace treaty with a neighbor. Indeed, the Soviet Union had gained a “definite advantage” from the pact, Stalin claimed, by securing “peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing its forces to repulse fascist Germany should she risk an attack.”

In addition to the rationalization provided by such rhetorical flourishes, Stalin needed a scapegoat for the debacle of the opening week of the war, and he found one in General Dmitry Pavlov, commander of the western front. Pavlov had evidently been overwhelmed by the course of events, hamstrung by the speed of the German advance and the disintegration of his own forces. Increasingly, it had seemed to his subordinates, Pavlov was issuing unrealistic orders, trying to justify his own existence, to “show Moscow that something was being done.” Yet, by the end of June, with Minsk having fallen, Pavlov had lost most of his force, including twenty divisions, totaling around 400,000 men, taken prisoner by the Germans in just one vast encirclement battle. Arrested and taken to Moscow, along with most of his staff and subordinates, he was accused of “panic mongering,” “dereliction of duty,” and “cowardice” and slated for execution. Pavlov refused to go quietly, however, repudiating his confession, which had doubtless been extracted under duress, and, in a final rebuke of Stalin, making it quite clear where he thought the blame for the disaster lay. “We are here in the dock,” he said, “not because we committed crimes in time of war, but because we prepared for this war inadequately in time of peace.” One of the Red Army’s most gifted generals was shot in the head, his body dumped in a municipal landfill.

Such actions were not particularly unusual. Indeed, rather tellingly, the person whom Stalin saw most often during the opening weeks of the war was NKVD head Lavrenti Beria. Alongside Pavlov, a number of other commanders were charged with treason and made to pay personally for the Red Army’s failings, including Lieutenant General Aleksandr Korobkov, commander of the 4th Army, and Major General Stepan Oborin, commander of the 14th Mechanized Corps. The arrests were quite arbitrary, arranged more or less by quota, as had been done during the Great Purge. Stalin’s order required simply that one front commander, one chief of staff, one chief of communications, one chief of artillery, and one army commander be arrested and charged; the specific transgression or offense was immaterial. The unfortunate Korobkov, for instance, had performed no worse than his colleagues but was the only army commander who could be found on the day of the order. A further three hundred or so Red Army commanders would be executed later in the year, as German forces neared Moscow, pour encourager les autres.

Given such levels of brutality against his own loyal generals, Stalin could scarcely be expected to show any compassion to his perceived political opponents. On the day after the German invasion, Beria’s deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov, instructed his subordinates in the areas threatened by the invasion to check their prisoner holdings and “compile lists of those whom you deem necessary to shoot.” Beria clarified the instruction the following day, ordering that all prisoners convicted or even accused of counterrevolutionary activity, sabotage, diversionism, or anti-Soviet activity be executed. The NKVD jailers did not need telling twice. Whereas ordinary criminals were sometimes released, and others were successfully evacuated to the Soviet interior, the looming chaos of the German attack made evacuation seem a rather perilous and unreliable way of dealing with Moscow’s political enemies—a point grimly demonstrated by the unhappy fate of two transports of the last mass deportation from the Baltic states, which had simply disappeared in the chaos of the blitzkrieg. From the NKVD’s perspective at least, the most responsible option for the remaining prisoners was execution.

Consequently, in countless locations, the incoming Germans found evidence of killings and massacres of those people whom the departing NKVD had not wanted to take with them and could not afford to leave behind. At Tartu in Estonia, for instance, some two hundred political prisoners were shot and dumped in the prison yard and in a nearby well. At Rainiai in western Lithuania, about eighty prisoners were driven on June 24 to a local forest, where they were tortured and abused before being executed. The victims were so badly mutilated that more than half of them could not be identified. At Chișinău, in what had once been Bessarabia, the garden of the former NKVD headquarters was found to contain the corpses of some eighty-five prisoners, all with their hands and feet tied and shot in the back of the head.

In the former Polish eastern regions, annexed by Stalin in 1939, at least 40,000 prisoners—Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and Jews—were confined in overcrowded NKVD prisons by June 1941. As elsewhere, some were released or evacuated, but around half would not survive. The worst massacres were in L’vov, where around 3,500 prisoners were killed across three prison sites, and at Lutsk (the former Polish Łuck), where 2,000 were murdered. But almost every NKVD prison or outpost saw a similar action—from Sambor (600 killed) to Czortkov (Czortków) (890), from Tarnopol (574) to Dubno (550). In most cases, similar methods were employed: prisoners were brought to the prison yard in batches of forty or so and machine-gunned. When time was short, NKVD troops did the killing in the cells, firing through the observation holes or tossing in hand grenades and locking the door. Any survivors were then bayonetted or battered to death. One eyewitness to the killings at Lutsk recalled, “Blood flowed in rivers, and body parts flew through the air.”

Total figures for those executed by the NKVD in the wake of the German invasion are unclear and will probably never be known for sure, but a few tentative figures may be presented. In Latvia, for instance, over 1,300 corpses would later be unearthed from the grounds of the NKVD prison and other locations, while a further 12,000 individuals were unaccounted for. For Lithuania, the figure of 1,000 murdered by the NKVD in June 1941 has been suggested. In Estonia, meanwhile, a figure of 2,000 has been estimated for those civilians killed either by the NKVD or in fighting with the withdrawing Red Army. An analysis of recent Soviet data gives a total of 8,700 Poles executed by the NKVD in June 1941, though other investigations suggest a figure around three times that. Charting a course between the hyperbole and the denial is not easy, but we must bear in mind that in many cases the dead from that period find no reference in the official Soviet record. Given that one respected historian has given a total figure of 100,000 for prisoners executed by the NKVD in former eastern Poland alone, one might assume a significantly larger figure for the total across all of the Soviet borderlands.

Just as the NKVD had eliminated its perceived class enemy, so the SS and its allies were exterminating their perceived racial enemy. Indeed, in the opening phase of the invasion, the two processes could be linked. Although Hitler’s SS and Einsatzgruppen execution squads had genocidal designs of their own upon crossing the German-Soviet frontier, in a few places anti-Soviet feeling was running so high that they had little difficulty inspiring local paramilitaries to take the lead in targeting those deemed responsible: the Jewish populations.

One of the most infamous examples was the Lietukis Garage Massacre in Kaunas, Lithuania, on June 27, 1941. One German eyewitness recalled coming across a crowd of people “cheering and clapping mothers lifting their children to get a better view,” so he decided to push his way through to take a look. There, he said he witnessed “probably the most frightful event that I had seen during the course of two world wars.” A local man, nicknamed “the Death Dealer,” was dispensing mob justice to those considered “traitors and collaborators”:

Another German watching events that day was astonished by the behavior of the crowd, women and children included, who applauded every time the man beat one of his helpless victims. When it was all over, he recalled, the “Death Dealer” put down his club, picked up an accordion, and played the Lithuanian national anthem.

In Lithuania alone, it is thought that some 2,500 Jews were slaughtered by their neighbors in similar bloody pogroms in the opening weeks of the German-Soviet war. In eastern Poland, at least thirty towns saw pogroms against the local Jews as soon as the Soviets departed. In many cases, anti-Semitism merged with anti-Soviet sentiment, and unfortunate Jewish victims were forced to sing Red Army songs or hymns to Stalin as part of their public humiliation. In Kolomyia (the former Polish Kołomyja), Jews were rounded up and forced to pull down the statue of Stalin, which had been erected in the center of the town in 1939. A particularly gruesome example of the treatment meted out to local Jewish populations occurred in Boryslav (Borysław) in western Ukraine, where the incoming German commander gave locals twenty-four hours to “avenge themselves.” In the horrors that followed, Jews were rounded up by a militia and herded to the former Soviet prison in the town, where they were forced to exhume and clean the corpses of those Poles and Ukrainians murdered by the NKVD and buried in the prison grounds. One eyewitness recalled, “I found myself in the middle of a huge courtyard. Everywhere there were bodies. They were terribly distorted and their faces were unrecognisable. It stank of old blood and rotting flesh. Next to the corpses stood Jewish men with wet cloths in their hands, to wipe away the blood. They keenly washed the decaying bodies. Only their eyes were feverish—crazed with fear.” Their hideous work done, the unfortunate Jews were then shot or beaten to death by the mob, their bodies in turn flung into the mass graves they had just exhumed. An estimated 250 people were murdered in Boryslav that day, before the German authorities put a stop to the slaughter. The numbers killed elsewhere in similar atrocities will probably never be known.

These hideous actions were in part a way for a minority among local populations to curry favor with the incoming occupier—an attitude aptly described as “anticipatory obedience.” It has also been plausibly argued that such horrors were not as spontaneous as they might have appeared and that the incoming SS commanders actively sought to instigate pogroms and massacres but—initially at least—preferred to allow local auxiliary units to do the dirty work. As the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, Walter Stahlecker, would note, “The attempts at self-cleansing on the part of anti-Communist or anti-Semitic elements in the areas to be occupied are not to be hindered. On the contrary, they are to be encouraged, but without leaving traces, so that these local ‘vigilantes’ cannot later say that they were given orders or political concessions.” But these factors alone do not adequately explain such atrocities, as they ignore the role played by the ingrained hatred that many in the Baltic states and elsewhere had for the NKVD and the Soviet Union. Of course, most NKVD officers, Soviet administrative staff, and even Communist Party members would have already fled, but the commonly perceived association of Soviet communism with Jewry meant that local Jewish populations bore the brunt of popular anger.

As they invaded the Soviet Union, the Nazis actively sought to propagate that conflation of Jewishness and communism. Of course, it made no difference that the connection was mythical. Although some of the region’s Jews had indeed welcomed the arrival of the Red Army, they had collectively benefited little from their absorption into the Soviet Union and had suffered disproportionately from the resulting waves of arrests and deportations. In Latvia, for instance, Jews had made up around 5 percent of the total population but represented at least 12 percent of those deported by the Soviets in 1941. Nonetheless, a twisted ideology and a perception of guilt by association demanded that they be made to pay for Soviet crimes.

In many places, the new occupiers consciously sought to make the link, publicly blaming NKVD killings on the Jews, forcing Jews to carry out the exhumations of NKVD victims, and targeting recruitment efforts for local auxiliary units toward those with relatives killed or deported by the Soviets. Yet the Nazis might well have felt that they were, to some extent, pushing against an open door. Eyewitnesses said that the Kaunas “Death Dealer,” for instance, though unnamed, had lost his parents to an NKVD murder squad only two days earlier. In nearby Latvia, a policeman recalled a public exhumation, organized by the Germans: “The day was hot, the corpses had been under for at least a week and they exuded an intolerable stench. I had never seen such horror before or since; I vomited from the stench and the sight. The purpose of the display was to create hatred against the Communists, an incentive that we Latvians actually did not need.”

Latvia had scarcely any history of anti-Semitism prior to the trauma of 1939 to 1941; it had even been a destination for some Jews fleeing the Third Reich, including Russian-born scholar Simon Dubnow. Yet, in 1941 and beyond, it became the scene—like its Baltic neighbors—of some of the most hideous atrocities, in which local units, such as the infamous Arajs Kommando, played a significant role. It seems clear that the Soviet occupation—with its informers, collaborators, denunciations, and persecutions—had so poisoned already fragile community relations that, even without Nazi encouragement, some sort of bloody reckoning became inevitable. In this regard, the example of Estonia is instructive. There, the small Jewish population that remained in the country in 1941, numbering just under 1,000, was swiftly exterminated once the Germans arrived. Yet as many as 5,000 non-Jewish Estonians were also murdered by the local Self-Defense Committee for their supposed collaboration with the Soviet regime. In some places at least, anti-Soviet sentiment was as much a motivator in the horrors of that summer as anti-Semitism.

ALTHOUGH BARBAROSSA TRANSFORMED LARGE SWATHES OF EASTERN Europe into a vision of the lowest circles of hell, in Germany it ushered in the return of something like normality. It was understandable, perhaps, that Hitler and Goebbels felt relieved by the outbreak of war with Stalin’s Soviet Union, but strangely many ordinary Germans, evidently tired of the political machinations and the oppressive rumor-laden atmosphere, seem to share the sentiment. As the CBS radio correspondent in Berlin, Henry Flannery, explained, “The war against Russia was the first popular campaign that had been launched. None of the Germans had been able to understand why a treaty should have been made with the Soviets, after they had been the main object of denunciation since 1933. Now they had a sense of relief, a feeling of final understanding. I listened to their conversations around the news-stands and on the subways. I talked with a number of them. For the first time, they were excited about the war. ‘Now,’ they said, ‘we are fighting our real enemy.’” The diarist Victor Klemperer would have concurred. Walking in Dresden on the evening of June 22, he noted the “general cheerfulness” and “triumphant mood” of the populace. “They were dancing in the Toll House,” he wrote, “cheerful faces everywhere. A new entertainment, a prospect of new sensations, the Russian war is a source of new pride for the people, their grumbling of yesterday is forgotten.”

Behind the facade, of course, there were concerns. Many were simply shocked by the news, particularly those who had believed the rumors of the previous week that Stalin was on his way to Berlin for talks. “We knew it was coming,” Berlin diarist Missie Vassiltchikov wrote. “And yet we are thunderstruck.” Others entertained dark fears about the sheer scale of the new adventure. One Berliner noted glumly that “Russia has never been suited to lightning wars,” adding, “What’s the use of our being in the Urals? They’ll just go on fighting beyond the Urals. No, that mouthful is one we can’t chew.” Even Heinrich Himmler’s own twelve-year-old daughter, Gudrun, struck a pessimistic tone. Writing to her father on June 22, she chided, “It is terrible that we’re at war with Russia—they were our allies. Still Russia is sooo big, if we take the whole of Russia, the battle will become very difficult.”

Beyond such concerns, however, there was a sense of business as usual. The German Cup Final, for instance, scheduled for the afternoon of June 22 in Berlin, went ahead as planned, with the stadium announcer making only the briefest mention of the titanic struggle then being waged seven hundred kilometers to the east. As Rapid Vienna midfielder Leopold Gernhardt would later recall, none of the players gave much thought to Barbarossa that day; they were too focused on the match. Those spectators distracted by events elsewhere were at least treated to a classic, with Rapid coming from behind to defeat Schalke 4–3.

For many Germans, there was little sense at the time that the invasion of the Soviet Union had any transcendent significance, marking the crossing of a Rubicon. Although almost all of them would have known someone involved in the invasion—a brother, son, father, or neighbor—they had already accepted war as the bloody backdrop against which their everyday lives were being played out. Thus, the invasion of Stalin’s USSR was just another act in the ongoing drama. Indeed, as Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in her diary, there was a distinct sense of continuity: “Our propaganda can pick up where it had to leave off so suddenly in September of 1939,” she wrote mockingly. “United against Bolshevism! Guard Europe from the Soviet menace!”

Germany’s communists, meanwhile, felt a profound sense of relief. Barbarossa brought an end to the ideological gymnastics they had been obliged to perform for so long, as well as to the enforced suspension of their activities. With the Nazi invasion of the bastion of proletarian revolution, they could once again take sides to defend Stalin and world communism, as was their duty. To this end, dormant cells across the country would be revitalized and long-silent agitators would rejoin the fight. The hated “imperialist war” that Britain and France had waged was transformed, overnight, into a principled crusade against “fascist aggression.” From that summer, the German Communist Party (KPD) began publishing its “Informationsdienst” (Information Service), providing tips on how best to disrupt the Nazi war effort, and walls in the big cities were soon defaced with scrawled slogans and crude, handprinted posters. In July 1941 alone, the number of illegal KPD leaflets confiscated by the Gestapo across Germany rose to almost 4,000, a tenfold increase from the previous month. The unofficial truce observed by Germany’s domestic communists had come to an end. Battle had finally been joined.

For their comrades in the Soviet capital, meanwhile, the changes experienced with the outbreak of war were a little subtler. The vast majority of the Soviet people received the news of the war with a profound sense of shock—some with tears and incredulity, others with a surge of ideological or patriotic fervor. A good deal of anger was also, inevitably, directed toward the Germans, whom ordinary Muscovites accused of having cruelly betrayed Stalin and broken faith with the pact. Others blamed the pact itself: “Whoever had faith in Hitler, that Herod?” one asked. Some stopped short of blaming the German people as a whole, however. Molotov had given a lead in his speech, in which he stated that the war “had not been inflicted upon us by the German people but by Germany’s bloodthirsty rulers.” The sentiment found a ready echo, perhaps due to the influence of two years of positive propaganda about Moscow’s pact partners. Some evidently found the idea of ordinary German soldiers as deadly enemies hard to comprehend. “What have we got to be afraid of?” one man asked his neighbor. “The Germans are civilized people.” That belief would not last.

Paranoia, ever present in Stalin’s Soviet Union, naturally increased. While those arrested in Beria’s initial clampdown in the capital were carted off to the NKVD’s prisons for interrogation, space was made for them by sending the same number of existing inmates off to an uncertain fate in the work camps of the Gulag. New arrivals in Moscow were quick to notice the nervousness. Members of the British military mission arriving in the Soviet capital on Churchill’s orders soon after the German attack were even confronted by an angry crowd after someone suggested that—with their unfamiliar uniforms—they might be “parachutists.” Speaking any language but Russian aroused immediate suspicion, one foreign journalist recalled. Another foreigner was dismayed when instructed by a militia woman to put out his cigarette: she evidently suspected that he was using it to signal to German aircraft.

Other changes were more profound. As well as a reflexive swelling of Russian patriotism and a dogged conviction that Mother Russia would prevail, a genuine attachment to Stalin moved many. Whereas the “Stalin cult” had previously been rather perfunctory and often tainted by fear as a result of the purges, with the German invasion the Soviet people found in him a leader to look up to. Though Molotov’s speech on the outbreak of war had been uninspiring, Stalin’s had been much more assured, infusing a frightened, bewildered people with new hope, direction, and the prospect, however distant, of eventual victory. It was, wrote journalist Alexander Werth, “a great pull-yourselves-together speech, a blood-sweat-and-tears speech,” with Churchill’s own wartime orations as “its only parallel.” The “Father of Nations” long promised by Soviet propaganda seemed to have finally emerged.

For Churchill, enjoying a celebratory cigar at Chequers on the morning of the invasion, Barbarossa posed a rather different challenge. Of course, with Hitler’s attentions distracted elsewhere, the attack certainly gave Britain a vital breathing space, as Commander of Home Forces General Alan Brooke, noted: “As long as the Germans were engaged in the invasion of Russia there was no possibility of an invasion of these islands. It would now depend on how long Russia could last and what resistance she would be able to put up [but] it certainly looked as if Germany would be unable to launch an invasion of England until October and by then the weather and winter would be against any such enterprise. It therefore looked as if we should now be safe from invasion during 1941.” Beyond that, Barbarossa presented something of a dilemma, particularly with regard to framing Britain’s response. According to Member of Parliament (MP) Harold Nicolson, the reception to news of the invasion was mixed. “Most people in England will be delighted,” he wrote in his diary, suggesting that the addition of a new ally was always welcome. But there were also reservations. “It will have a bad effect on America,” he noted, “where many influential people do not like to see themselves as the allies of Bolshevism [and] it will have a bad effect on Conservative and Catholic opinion here.” There were further caveats. For some, it was considered rather poetic that, after a long period of what Churchill called “seeming to care for no one but themselves,” the Soviets were now eagerly calling for assistance from the capitalist world. As Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden tartly noted, Moscow’s great fear was now “that we would stand inactively watching their life-and-death struggle, as they had watched ours.”

What was more, many did not consider that the Soviet Union would be able to resist Hitler for long. Nicolson reckoned that the Soviets were “so incompetent and selfish that they will be bowled over at a touch”; General Brooke assumed more measuredly that they would last “3 to 4 months, possibly slightly longer.” Remarkably, the latter opinion was rather optimistic by the standards of the British military establishment. An assessment by the Chiefs of Staff from mid-June, for instance, concluded that the Red Army suffered from “inherent failings” and obsolete equipment, and its offensive value was low. Considering such shortcomings—and the Red Army’s unimpressive showing in the Winter War with Finland—a rapid Soviet collapse was anticipated, with Moscow and Ukraine foreseen as falling to the Germans within as little as six weeks.

Many in Britain still harbored a fundamental distrust of the USSR. The efforts of Sir Stafford Cripps to find some arrangement with Moscow had foundered—as much on British impotence as Soviet intransigence—but, beyond that, British government and military circles remained profoundly suspicious of Stalin’s motives, and many persisted in the view that the USSR was more a potential enemy than a potential ally. The fact that the Soviets had invaded and annexed eastern Poland and the Baltic states had not been forgotten; neither had the Winter War with the plucky Finns or the more recent fiasco of the attempt to warn Moscow about Hitler’s aggressive intentions. On the very eve of the invasion, Churchill, already known for his colorful epithets about the USSR, coined another one, summing up the ambivalent British attitude rather neatly. Russia, he said, was like a “formidable crocodile”: “If a crocodile came up on one side of our boat and helped to balance it, so much the better. But you never know with Russia. You give the crocodile a hearty kick and he may be agreeable to you. You give him a pat and he may snap off your leg. We had tried both methods and gained nothing.”

Hence Churchill had to execute a precise balancing act. He had to avoid alienating those on the British right who hated the idea of any association with communism, as well as those on the left who craved a full-blown alliance with Stalin. In addition, he wanted to give the Soviets enough encouragement that they would keep fighting, as every month of fighting on the eastern front would give Britain a vital stay of execution. Above all, perhaps, he had to consider the Americans, whose alliance he valued much more highly than Stalin’s, yet whose public and politicians, he feared, would balk at any binding commitments to the USSR.

In his own account of events of the morning of June 22, Churchill implied that his reaction to news of the invasion was more or less spontaneous. “I spent the day composing my statement,” he wrote. “There was not time to consult the War Cabinet, nor was it necessary.” Yet that impression of spontaneity should be resisted. Churchill had thrashed out the British position over the previous days, with the vital help of Cripps, so as to be able to sail the treacherous course between all of the conflicting interests. The result was a glorious piece of Churchillian rhetoric.

In a radio broadcast that same evening, the veteran anti-Bolshevik made his new support for Stalin and the Soviet Union plain. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, Churchill declared, was nothing less than the fourth “climacteric,” the fourth “intense turning point” in the progress of the war. Hitler—a “monster of wickedness” and a “bloodthirsty guttersnipe”—was now carrying his “work of butchery and desolation” to the vast multitudes of Russia and Asia, “grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men.” That human catastrophe, Churchill suggested, transcended everything: “The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. It excels in all forms of human wickedness, in the efficiency of its cruelty and ferocious aggression. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I’ve spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies, flashes away.” In a strikingly lyrical passage, he implied that it was not communism that was being attacked but Mother Russia herself:

British policy, Churchill went on with characteristic flourish, was simple: “We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing. We will never parley; we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until, with God’s help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or state who fights against Nazidom will have our aid.”

It was stirring stuff, and deliberately so—“a masterpiece,” according to Harold Nicolson. Churchill had given a decisive line—making a moral case for support of the USSR, yet stopping short of advocating alliance—which would satisfy not only his domestic audience but also his potentially fractious cabinet and, most importantly, his would-be American ally. In private, he was less gracious, but the message was broadly the same: “If Hitler invaded Hell,” he told Jock Colville, “I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil!”

If Churchill’s aim had been to rally the nation around his vague offer of assistance to Stalin’s Soviet Union, he succeeded. His speech attracted widespread praise for its deft handling of a ticklish situation. Only a few, it seems, expressed doubts about his sincerity or railed against his supposed hypocrisy. Even British communists—though no friends of Churchill—were assuaged. As the Communist Party’s only MP, Willie Gallacher, noted, Churchill’s speech had been “agreeably surprising,” and though it did not go quite far enough, he said, “it went further than [he] expected.”

Indeed, the British Communist Party was a natural beneficiary of the speech. Previously confined to a rather uncomfortable, unpopular position of opposing the war on the political fringes, British Communists were now, at a stroke, swimming with the mainstream, almost in tune with the Churchillian zeitgeist. In London, the party’s Central Committee decreed that the “imperialist conspiracy against the working class” had become a “global crusade against fascism.” Loyal shop stewards were ordered to ban rather than foment strikes. In due course, Harry Pollitt would leave the East London shipyard where he had been working and resume his position as general secretary of the party, his principled position of 1939 vindicated, the squabbles with Rajani Palme Dutt forgotten, if not wholly forgiven. The Communist Party, once again, had the benefit of a clear, concise, defensible line: waging war “side by side with the Soviet Union” against fascism. The embarrassing ideological gymnastics of the previous two years now over, the party’s membership would soon rise to record levels.

The Americans were a little harder to bring on board. President Roosevelt had long wrestled with America’s isolationist instincts, seeking to balance his own domestic approval ratings with his personal conviction of the necessity of involvement in the war against Hitler. Consequently, though he had promised American mothers in October 1940 that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” he nonetheless persistently nudged American opinion toward outright intervention. By the summer of 1941, he had made considerable strides: the Lend-Lease Act had been signed into law in March of that year, making the United States the self-proclaimed “arsenal of democracy,” and American forces had occupied Greenland the following month to protect Atlantic sea lanes from German attack. In June, all German assets in the United States were frozen, and German consular officials were expelled en masse on charges of espionage.

But, whereas the German attack on the Soviet Union ushered in a moment of clarity in London, it did nothing of the sort in Washington, loosing instead a storm of controversy and infighting. While the interventionists around Roosevelt saw it as an opportunity to decisively get behind Churchill against Hitler, others were vehemently opposed to the implication that doing so meant supporting Stalin. Future president Harry Truman, for instance, then a senator for Missouri, voiced a somewhat Machiavellian suggestion: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” Despite Churchill’s high-flown rhetoric, Roosevelt’s urgings, and the unspeakable slaughter of the new eastern front, Americans did not yet see World War II as their fight. It would take the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to fully free them from their isolationist scruples.

ON JULY 5, 1941, AN UNUSUALLY STRAINED MEETING WAS HELD AT THE British Foreign Office in Whitehall. Arrangements had been so sensitive that intermediaries had been used, and a neutral venue had been found. It was even claimed that one of those attending had let it be known that he would be arriving precisely three minutes later than his negotiating partner, so as to clearly demonstrate the difference in their ranks. It was not merely a clash of egos or the raking over of historic injustices that caused the tension, though both undoubtedly played a part; rather, it was the fact that the government of one of those present had recently sought to erase the other’s country from the map. But with the sea change occasioned by Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union and the Polish exile government were now tasked with restoring something like diplomatic relations.

For its part, the Soviet Union was facing the worst crisis in its history. Hitler’s forces had swept all before them that summer, so much so that the USSR itself appeared to be heading for collapse. By the first week of July, when the diplomats sat down together in the comparative comfort of London, most of the western Soviet Union was already in flames. The losses suffered by Stalin’s Red Army in the opening two weeks or so of the war were staggering: over 10,000 tanks, 19,000 artillery pieces, 4,000 combat aircraft, and fully 750,000 soldiers. In addition, almost all of the lands gained in concert with the Germans had already been lost—eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bessarabia—with only Estonia still in Red Army hands. More seriously yet, Byelorussia had been occupied, along with much of Ukraine, and the invaders had already advanced six hundred kilometers along the road to Moscow. Those meeting in London would have been forgiven for wondering if the USSR would still exist by the time the negotiations were completed.

Poland’s future was also in grave doubt. Now wholly occupied by the Germans, with its government in exile in Britain, it endured a shadowy existence that, were it not for the collective memory of 123 years of foreign occupation prior to 1918, might have been considered terminal. Of course, the outbreak of war between the two powers that had invaded and divided the country in 1939 was to be welcomed, as it held at least the possibility that Poland’s suffering might be brought to an end. But Poland’s predicament was more complex than that. Unlike the British, the Poles had considered themselves to be at war with both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union prior to June 1941, and few relished the prospect of now finding an accommodation with the latter. Moreover, Poland itself was not at one remove from the fighting. The Soviet and German occupations had already unleashed unprecedented brutality on their helpless populations, and Polish politicians and military leaders in exile in Britain were acutely aware that the new phase of the conflict had recently raged over the former Polish eastern territories—lands that, for many of them, were very familiar indeed. Far from edging toward its end, therefore, Poland’s calvary seemed to have entered a new, darker chapter.

So, when the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, sat down in Whitehall to meet the Polish premier, General Władysław Sikorski, the tension was palpable. The plump, avuncular Maisky and the stern, vain Sikorski were in some sense polar opposites. In his later memoir, Maisky was much amused to relate the story of how Sikorski had arrived preceded by an entourage of adjutants who swept through the building “pushing aside those whom they met” and shouting, “The General is coming! The General is coming!” Upon entering the room, Maisky wrote, Sikorski—in full dress uniform—had glanced toward him, and “a slight grimace of surprise, almost of indignation, passed over his face.” He told himself that the general’s reaction was due to the “light-heartedness” of his summer suit, but Sikorski’s look of contempt was almost certainly not sartorial in origin.

That chilly disdain set the tone for the negotiations that followed. Sikorski had believed that, given the Soviet Union’s new predicament, Poland was entitled to expect Stalin to cancel the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Indeed, he had been aggrieved that Churchill had not demanded some sort of quid pro quo along these lines, before pledging British assistance to Moscow two weeks earlier. In the circumstances, Sikorski saw that it fell to him not only to try to undo the profound harm that nearly two years of Soviet occupation, persecution, and deportation had wrought on his people but also to secure some guarantee of Poland’s future existence. These principles, then, formed the essence of his opening demands to Maisky: the Soviet Union was to formally renounce the Nazi-Soviet Pact and to free all Polish military and civilian prisoners still held in Soviet jails and gulags. In return, normal diplomatic relations would be restored between the two, and he would authorize the formation of a Polish army from the 300,000 soldiers still thought to be in Soviet hands.

Inevitably, the talks were fraught. For one thing, Sikorski was not above bluntly airing a few grievances. “You hate the Germans as much as we,” he said to Maisky during their first meeting. “You ought never to have made agreement with them in 1939.” In reply, Maisky could only laugh nervously and counter, “All that is past history.” In addition, the negotiations were certainly not helped by the logistics required of holding their discussions in London; Maisky needed to refer back to Stalin in Moscow regularly, which could require a few days for messages to pass both ways. Sikorski, too, was obliged to report back to his cabinet, which could be an uncomfortable experience. Consequently, the two would hold only two meetings in London in July, thereafter using Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden as an intermediary, and so were still little closer to agreement when Sir Stafford Cripps and Molotov signed the Anglo-Soviet Agreement—pledging mutual assistance in the war against Hitler—on July 12 in Moscow.

The primary sticking point in London was Poland’s frontiers. The two sides naturally had rival conceptions of what Poland’s—at that point rather theoretical—geographical extent should be. Sikorski suggested that, given the demise of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Polish eastern border should revert to that of August 1939. Moscow meanwhile instructed Maisky to view Poland within what he called her “ethnographical” limits, which very broadly approximated to the border agreed on by Molotov and Ribbentrop. Although both parties would eventually negotiate a compromise position—effectively postponing any decision on frontiers to an unspecified later date—the issue would overshadow further talks, becoming a touchstone of Poland’s understandably limited trust in its new Soviet partner.

The second obstacle was the issue of the many Poles—civilian and military—still detained in the Soviet Union. Sikorski demanded the release of all Polish prisoners of war and deportees under Soviet control as an essential condition of any agreement. But this put Maisky in a difficult position because to free such prisoners would not only imply that their arrest and deportation had been illegal but also cast the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in a very dubious light. He therefore countered that he saw no reason why a Pole convicted of a crime by the Soviets should now have his conviction quashed. Sikorski tersely retorted that the Soviets regarded Poles as criminals simply for being Polish citizens and added that not demanding their release would be tantamount to accepting Moscow’s right to judge them. Realizing the seriousness of the impasse, Eden, who chaired the meeting, sought to postpone any decision until the broader diplomatic framework had been agreed—as had been done with the issue of frontiers—but neither side was willing to give.

At this point, the talks were close to collapse. Sikorski faced a revolt from within his own cabinet on July 25, when three ministers resigned in protest of their premier’s handling of the negotiations. The British, meanwhile, were eager for agreement and desperately tried to reassure both sides while seeking to delay the discussion of all contentious issues until some future undefined date. The British government, as Churchill would later recall, was on the horns of a dilemma. Having gone to war in defense of Poland, he wrote, “we had a strong obligation to support the interests of our first ally [and]could not admit the legality of the Russian occupation of Polish territory in 1939.” However, in the maelstrom of summer 1941, “we could not force our new and sorely threatened ally [the USSR] to abandon, even on paper, regions on her frontiers which she had regarded for generations as vital to her security. There was no way out.” In consequence, he lamented, “we had the invidious responsibility of recommending that General Sikorski rely on Soviet good faith in the future settlement of Russian-Polish relations.” As Churchill well knew, the problem for the Poles was that the phrase “Soviet good faith” was not one that they recognized.

The breakthrough came on July 27. In his memoir, Maisky predictably praised the “insistence and flexibility of the Soviet government” in bringing the “long arguments and acute polemics” to a successful conclusion. Eden credited Sikorski’s statesmanship while acknowledging Britain’s role as one of “patient diplomacy tinged with anxiety for what the future must hold for the Poles.” Cripps, meanwhile, congratulated himself for his extended negotiations with Stalin in Moscow and, crucially, for “persuading him to grant an immediate amnesty to every Polish citizen detained in this country.” The idea of an amnesty was controversial—and has even been considered an error—but it neatly sidestepped the divisive issue of the legality of the Soviet occupation, allowing the Soviets to release the prisoners while saving face. It certainly broke the deadlock, but it has rankled with many Poles ever since; how could those countless thousands of Poles be “amnestied,” they would ask, when they had committed no crime?

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.”