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

^EPILOGUE LIFE AFTER DEATH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such chutzpah was only trumped when Soviet prosecutors insisted on having the Katyn massacres added to the Nazi indictment, claiming that the killings were “one of the most important criminal acts for which the major war criminals are responsible.” Already adept at staging “show trials” of their political enemies, they demanded that the tribunal accept the Soviet investigation into the case without demur and duly produced a Bulgarian pathologist who claimed that the forensic evidence pointed to autumn 1941 as the date of the massacres (i.e., when the region was under German control). To their credit, the British and American judges dismissed the charge as the Soviets were unable to attribute the crime convincingly to any of the defendants in the dock.

After the pact’s brief and rather inconsequential outing at Nuremberg, Stalin’s propagandists and prosecutors might have congratulated themselves on a successful exercise in damage control. However, the American publication in 1948 of a volume titled Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941 would have shaken their complacency. The book, published by the US State Department, contained transcripts of hundreds of documents seized from German sources at the end of the war, including correspondence, discussions, and negotiations, as well as the text of the commercial agreements, the Nazi-Soviet Pact itself, and the secret protocol. For the first time, it brought the relationship between Moscow and Berlin out of the shadows and into the glare of public scrutiny.

The Soviet response was swift. Later that year, the pamphlet “Falsifiers of History” appeared, giving Moscow’s case. Personally edited and given its provocative title by Stalin, it grew out of a series of articles that had appeared in Pravda and was subsequently translated and distributed across the world. It was remarkable because it was the first time that the subject of the pact with Germany had been officially addressed in the Soviet Union since 1941. It was certainly strident stuff. With tempers piqued by the ongoing tensions of the nascent Cold War, “Falsifiers of History” carried the ideological fight to the Soviet Union’s enemies, attacking the West for its own complicity in failing to stop German aggression prior to 1939, criticizing the Americans for presenting “a distorted picture of events to slander the Soviet Union,” and even denouncing the hapless Finns for being “in league with the Hitlerites” in the Winter War of 1940. It also provided Stalin’s ex post facto justification for signing the pact. It was all down to Western perfidy—to the desire harbored in Paris and London to appease Hitler and turn him eastward and the wish of the “billionaires” of Washington to profit from the ensuing conflagration. “In August 1939,” it stated, “the Soviet Union did not doubt for a moment that sooner or later Hitler would attack it.” It went on: “That was why the first task of the Soviet Government was to create an ‘Eastern’ front against Hitler’s aggression, to build up a defence line along the western frontiers of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian Republics and thus set up a barrier to prevent an unhindered advance of the German troops eastward.” This task, the pamphlet explained, necessitated the “move” of Soviet troops into eastern Poland and the signing of “pacts of mutual assistance” with the Baltic states. “Thus the foundation was laid for the Eastern Front.” Clearly, Moscow wanted to world to hear the message that Stalin’s motives in signing the pact with Hitler had been purely defensive.

With that, Moscow’s line on the Nazi-Soviet Pact—given by Stalin himself—was fixed, but it was still a subject that no Soviet historian dared to touch. By the 1960s, however, that had begun to change. Stung by what it viewed as further falsifications emerging from the West, Moscow embarked on a propaganda campaign to wrest the memory of World War II away from its ideological enemies, a campaign described by one prominent commentator as “one of the most audacious enterprises of the Soviet propaganda machine to smother reality.” Remarkably, this effort even extended to a discussion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which until that point had been a taboo subject and consequently absent from Soviet historiography. In the new Soviet histories published in the 1960s, therefore, the pact received a few pages of analysis, albeit with the expected omissions, evasions, and justifications. It would be argued, for instance, that Stalin had accepted Hitler’s offer solely as a last resort, that otherwise war with Germany would have been inevitable, and that acceptance of the pact brought the USSR numerous favorable consequences.

Even Khrushchev, whose denunciation of Stalin in 1956 echoed around the world, would loyally parrot this analysis. Writing his reminiscences two decades or so later, he was still firmly on message: “We weren’t fooling ourselves. We knew that eventually we would be drawn into the war, although I suppose Stalin hoped that the English and French might exhaust Hitler first.” The pact, he wrote, was “profitable to the Soviet Union. It was like a gambit in chess: if we hadn’t made that move, the war would have started earlier, much to our disadvantage. As it was we were given a respite.”

Ever the loyal Bolshevik, Molotov too concurred. Speaking some years later, he first denied the suggestion that Stalin had trusted Hitler: “Such a naïve Stalin? No. Stalin saw through it all. Stalin trusted Hitler? He didn’t trust his own people! Hitler fooled Stalin? And as a result of that deception Hitler had to poison himself, and Stalin became the head of half the world!” Explaining the pact, he went on, “We had to delay Germany’s aggression, that’s why we tried to deal with them on an economic level—export-import.” Stalin, he said, “wanted to delay the war for at least another half a year, or longer.”

So, the Soviet Union thus forged its postwar interpretation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact as an agreement forced on Stalin by circumstances. Importantly, however, the Soviet leader had not been taken in by Hitler’s blandishments and had managed thereby to delay the inevitable Nazi attack, saving the USSR from an even worse fate. Naturally, the fates of the millions persecuted, killed, and deported by the Soviets from eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia were not permitted to disturb the rosy narrative. Those territories had been regained by Red Army troops in 1944 and 1945 and were now safely restored to the Soviet bosom, despite the efforts of the few “nationalists” and “terrorists” who had briefly disturbed the Pax Sovietica in the first postwar decade. The region’s historians and journalists were similarly circumscribed. The pact was a verboten subject, passed over in silence, hidden from view, with even the most minimal mention forbidden to deviate from the strict line dictated from Moscow.

The ultimate taboo, however, was the secret protocol. Although the original document had presumably been destroyed in wartime Berlin, a microfilm copy had been made and found its way into American hands at the end of the war, after which it was mentioned obliquely at Nuremberg and then published for the first time in 1948. Yet, given the lack of an original—and the protocol’s embarrassing content—the Soviet Union officially denied its existence and denounced the copy circulating in the West as a forgery, a slander of the Soviet Union, and yet another falsification of history.

So, when Vyacheslav Molotov was asked in 1983 about a “secret agreement” signed in 1939 with the Germans, he was adamant that there was no truth in the allegation: “None whatever,” he said.

“There wasn’t one?” the journalist repeated.

“There wasn’t. No, that’s absurd.”

The journalist pressed a little more. “Surely we can talk about it now?”

Molotov replied, “Of course, there is no secret here. In my view these rumours were deliberately spread to damage reputations. No, no, this matter is very clean. There could not have been any such secret agreement. I was very close to this matter, in fact I was involved in it, and I can assure you that this is unquestionably a fabrication.”

Molotov certainly had been “close to” the secret protocol; in fact, he had signed it. Yet, he went to his grave in 1986 denying its existence.

Not everyone in the USSR would be so loyal to Stalin’s line. Three years after Molotov’s death, in 1989, a summer of protests in Moscow’s Baltic republics would see a quite different narrative emerging. Taking the spirit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika policies at face value, many among the Baltic peoples had by that time begun to openly rail against Soviet rule. Spurred by exiles and sympathizers who had already named August 23 as “Black Ribbon Day” and held rallies in New York, London, and elsewhere to protest human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, Baltic activists had gathered signatures and made earnest pleas for international recognition of their plight. But for the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, on August 23, 1989, they planned a protest on an unprecedented scale.

On that day, a human chain comprising as many as 2 million people snaked down main roads and byways through the three Baltic republics, linking the three capitals of Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius, a distance of over five hundred kilometers. At 7 p.m. they all linked hands in what would be known as “the Baltic Way.” It was the largest popular protest that the Soviet Union had ever witnessed. Elsewhere vigils, church services, and local gatherings were held. Five thousand came together in the center of Vilnius to sing patriotic songs and light candles. Prewar national flags were flown and black ribbons worn in memory of Stalin’s victims.

For all of them across the three republics, the protest was about human rights, Soviet occupation, and the desire for national independence. But the focal point of their grievances was very clearly the Nazi-Soviet Pact. At Šiauliai in Lithuania, for instance, a public demonstration showed three coffins draped in the flags of the prewar republics, while beside them the swastika and the hammer and sickle were crossed, tied together with a black ribbon. In Estonia and Latvia, meanwhile, banners proclaimed the illegality of the Soviet occupation or simply carried the date “August 23, 1939.” A communiqué sent by the protest’s organizers to the United Nations clarified the central significance of the pact. With its signing, the Nazi-Soviet Pact had inflicted many wounds, it stated, and “some of those wounds are still bleeding.” “The criminal pact,” it went on, “has to be voided! The essence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and its secret protocols was imperialist division of the spheres of interest between two great powers. On the basis of this criminal deal, the Soviet Union unilaterally violated all the international treaties concluded with the Baltic republics, infringed on the historical right of the Baltic nations to self-determination, presented ruthless ultimatums to the Baltic republics, occupied them with overwhelming military force, and under conditions of military occupation and heavy political terror carried out their violent annexation. The Hitler-Stalin Pact is still shaping the Europe of today.”

In the aftermath, the Soviet authorities made a few token arrests, complained about “nationalist, extremist groups” and their “anti-Soviet agendas,” and rebuked the local authorities for failing to take action to break up the protests. Beyond a few well-intentioned international comments, little changed, but the Baltic peoples were emboldened, encouraged to push again for independence.

Aside from the obvious political challenge, the Baltic Way also posed an intellectual one. After decades of exercising total control over information within the USSR, in Gorbachev’s new era the Soviet view no longer went unchallenged in the realm of ideas. The same was true of history, where Stalin’s traditional “defensive” narrative of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was increasingly being brought into question. Forced by events into a more honest reassessment of its own past, Moscow established an official commission to investigate the circumstances of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and, in particular, the existence of the secret protocol. In December 1989, the commission duly reported in the affirmative, declaring that there “could not be the slightest doubt” that the protocol existed. The Congress of the People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union then passed a resolution in support of the findings.

Other revelations followed. In the spring of 1990, after decades of official denial, the Soviet state finally acknowledged the responsibility of its secret police forces in carrying out the Katyn massacres, adding a rather hollow-sounding expression of its “profound regret.” The Soviet monolith was cracking. And just as Soviet control over eastern Europe had collapsed with spectacular suddenness that very winter, it would begin to unravel at home as well. And when it did, in 1991, the Baltic states were the first to head for the exit, spurred in large measure by the injustices of five decades earlier. Rarely, it seemed, had high politics and dark history been so closely entwined.

IN EARLY APRIL 2009, THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT IN BRUSSELS considered a resolution proposing that August 23 be thenceforth recognized as the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Drawing on the earlier Prague Declaration, tabled by the Czech government and cosigned by, among others, the former Czech president Václav Havel and the later German president Joachim Gauck, the resolution vowed “to preserve the memory of the victims of mass deportations and exterminations.” It was passed by a large majority. “Better late than never,” said one Estonian member of the European Parliament during the debate, adding, “We owe our parents and grandparents a firm parliamentary message, and that is what we have produced today.”

Of course, there were dissenting voices. Thirty-three members of the European Parliament abstained, and forty-four voted against the resolution. One of the latter was a Greek communist who waxed indignant, in an impassioned written submission, against the “indescribably vulgar” juxtaposition of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, which thereby advocated “acquitting fascism, slandering socialism and exonerating imperialism of the crimes which it committed and is committing today.” A few others concurred. One British journalist, for instance, criticized the vote as “an unpleasant effort by many Baltic and central European politicians to equate Stalinism and Nazism,” ignoring the glaringly obvious point that those who had experienced both horrors were perhaps best placed to make the judgment.

Russia, too, cried foul, with 53 percent opposing the resolution in one opinion poll and only 11 percent in favor. According to another survey, Russian popular opinion considered that the European Parliament’s decision had been adopted to “undermine Russia’s authority” and to “diminish its contribution to the victory over fascism.” A few weeks later, then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev established a Presidential Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History, along with accompanying legislation that enabled transgressors to be fined or imprisoned for up to five years. The new body, one of its members vowed, would “ensure the Russian view prevails.” Any worrying sense of déjà vu was only heightened by the presence on the commission of prominent members of the Russian military and the FSB, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

Nonetheless, on August 23 that summer—the seventieth anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact—the first European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism was solemnly marked in the Baltic states and Sweden. In subsequent years, the commemorations would spread. Wreathes would be laid, flags would be raised, and prayers would be offered across central and eastern Europe, from Poland to Crimea and from Estonia to Bulgaria. It was a small victory, perhaps, but a significant one. The Nazi-Soviet Pact had come out of the shadows. It was no longer forgotten, no longer taboo. It had become an essential part of the narrative.