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

^{CHAPTER 2} BONDED IN BLOOD

EIGHT DAYS, ALMOST TO THE HOUR, AFTER THE CEREMONIAL SIGNING of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in the Kremlin, war returned to Europe. Before sunrise on the morning of September 1, 1939, the elderly German cruiser Schleswig-Holstein—a veteran of the Battle of Jutland making a “friendship visit” to the Free City of Danzig—slipped her moorings and opened fire at close range on the Polish garrison of the nearby Westerplatte. The signal was thereby given, brutally and dramatically, for the German invasion of Poland.

The week preceding those opening salvoes had had an oppressive tenor. Although the precise details of the pact remained opaque, most contemporary commentators agreed that it marked an unprecedented shift. “It is a stunning blow,” Romanian diarist Mihail Sebastian wrote. “The whole course of world politics has suddenly changed.” Moreover, there was a grim consensus that the pact was more than just another chapter in Europe’s ongoing crisis and most likely heralded war. Thus, the world’s statesmen urged circumspection. American president Franklin D. Roosevelt sent Hitler a personal appeal, suggesting “alternative methods” in solving the crisis; French premier Édouard Daladier followed suit, urging the German dictator to step back from the brink; otherwise “Destruction and Barbarism will be the real victors.” British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, meanwhile, was disconsolate, confiding to the US ambassador that “the futility of it all is the thing that is frightful.” Britain began preparing for the worst. London’s museums began evacuating their treasures to the countryside, hospitals were cleared of nonessential cases, and railway stations installed blue lights to comply with the expected blackout. Everywhere sandbags were filled and stacked, and windows were taped. While Chamberlain prepared to move into the Central War Room, newly completed beneath Whitehall, orders were prepared for the evacuation of children from Britain’s towns and cities, to begin on the morning of September 1. The public mood was dark. “Poor weary world,” one diarist wrote, “what a mess we people have made of it.”

While the world digested the news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and considered the prospect of war, Ribbentrop had traveled back to Germany with his entourage to a rapturous reception from Hitler, who hailed his returning foreign minister as “a second Bismarck.” As Ribbentrop was being feted, Heinrich Hoffmann was busy developing his photographs of the signing ceremony in Moscow. When he met with Hitler, he was dismayed to find the Führer more interested in his impressions of Stalin than his pictures. “Does he actually issue orders?” Hitler asked eagerly, “or does he cloak them in the guise of wishes?” “What about his health?” he wondered, adding, “Does he really smoke so much?” and “How did he shake hands with you?” Bizarrely, he also asked about Stalin’s earlobes: were they “ingrown and Jewish, or separate and Aryan”? Hoffmann replied that the Soviet leader’s earlobes were separate, to Hitler’s evident satisfaction. Clearly, the Führer was most impatient to learn as much as he could about his new political partner.

When they finally came to looking at Hoffmann’s pictures, Hitler was disappointed. “What a pity,” he said. “There is not a single one that we can use.” To Hoffmann’s protests he replied that in every photograph Stalin was smoking: it was, Hitler said, “out of the question. The German people would take offence.” He explained: “The signing of a Pact is a solemn act, which one does not approach with a cigarette dangling from one’s lips. Such a photograph smacks of levity! See if you can paint out the cigarettes.” So the photographs released to the German press were all doctored by Hoffmann, with no cigarettes visible.

Other frustrations were to follow. Hitler had originally foreseen a swift campaign against Poland, but he had been forced to postpone an attack ordered for August 26 because of last-minute diplomatic maneuvers and fruitless negotiations with the British. He was also obliged to cancel the annual showpiece Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, which had been due to start on September 2. Ironically, that year’s rally had been given the theme of “peace.” Then, on August 31, Hitler issued his first “war directive,” ordering an attack on Poland to commence the following morning and stipulating that although “a solution by force” had been decided upon, it was vital to leave “responsibility for the opening of hostilities unmistakably to England and France.”

Stalin, meanwhile, had wasted little time reflecting on the niceties of the pact’s signing. Meeting his entourage the following day for a supper of freshly shot duck and “seeming very pleased with himself,” he mused on the new relationship with Hitler: “Of course, it’s all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me but actually it’s I who have tricked him.” When presented to the Supreme Soviet on the last day of August, the pact was duly applauded, with Molotov echoing Hitler’s line criticizing the “ruling classes of Britain and France,” which, he claimed, had been keen to involve Nazi Germany and the USSR in conflict. In the coming war, he stated, the Soviet Union would maintain “absolute neutrality.”

By the following morning, September 1, that conflict was already raging. In the gray light of dawn, German troops moved off from their forward positions across the 2,000 kilometer Polish-German border. Sixty divisions, incorporating over 2,500 tanks and over 1 million troops, advanced into Polish territory from Silesia in the southwest, Pomerania in the northwest, and East Prussia to the north. German armor and weaponry were comfortably superior to those of the Poles, and swift gains were registered on all fronts. In the air, the sleek Messerschmitts and screaming Stukas of the Luftwaffe were little threatened by the obsolete—if bravely flown—fighters of the Polish air force.

Outnumbered and outgunned, Polish resistance was nonetheless spirited. On the opening day, for instance, at the Battle of Mokra in southern Poland, the German advance was temporarily halted at considerable cost to the 4th Panzer Division; in the north at Krojanty, a brief engagement between Polish cavalry and German armor would spawn a durable myth about the romantic futility of Poland’s defense. Despite such actions, Polish forces were inexorably driven back by the German advance, and by the time of the campaign’s largest battle—on the river Bzura, ten days later—Warsaw itself was already being threatened. When the old tsarist forts defending the Polish capital were finally overwhelmed later that month, it was only a matter of time before the city fell.

Long before the campaign had been decided, however, the Wehrmacht’s conduct demonstrated that the world had entered a new era of warfare. Prior to the invasion, Hitler had admonished his military commanders, “Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally.” They complied. Right from the outset, Nazi forces were merciless in their treatment of Polish subject populations. Units of special forces—Einsatzgruppen—were instructed to follow the front-line troops to ruthlessly suppress any resistance in the rear areas. And, as the Poles quickly discovered, “resistance” could have an extremely broad definition and was invariably punished with summary execution. In the first five weeks of military action, German forces would burn 531 Polish towns and villages and carry out over 700 mass executions, the worst examples being at Częstochowa, where 227 civilians were murdered on September 4, and at Bydgoszcz, where as many as 400 were executed in reprisal for the alleged Polish killing of ethnic Germans. As one eyewitness recalled, the brutality could be baffling:

In truth, there was often little logic to the killing, and some atrocities were sparked by the slightest pretext. At Kajetanowice, for instance, seventy-two Polish civilians were massacred in response to the death of two German horses in a “friendly fire” incident. According to the most comprehensive study, the German military executed over 12,000 Polish citizens in September 1939 alone.

The speed and ferocity of the German advance surprised not just the Poles. Stalin, too, was caught off guard by the Wehrmacht’s swift progress. Having anticipated an active Anglo-French intervention, as well as a more protracted campaign in Poland itself—similar to the style of attritional warfare seen in World War I—he was quickly forced to revise his plans. Stalin’s hand had hitherto been stayed by fear of the West’s reaction to Soviet participation in the attack and by the ongoing operations against the Japanese on the Mongolian frontier. However, when German troops appeared on the territory earmarked for the Soviet Union on September 12 and Ribbentrop himself was urging a Soviet advance, he was obliged to act to secure those areas promised to him by the pact. Having mobilized on September 11, the Red Army was assembled beyond the Polish border in two “fronts”—the “Byelorussian” and the “Ukrainian”—to the north and south of the river Pripyat. These two army groups comprised twenty-five rifle divisions, sixteen cavalry divisions, and twelve tank brigades with a total of nearly 500,000 men. Molotov then asked Berlin to send word when Warsaw was due to fall so that the Soviet intervention could be timed accordingly.

By September 17, with the situation on the Mongolian frontier stabilized by the signing of a peace treaty with the Japanese, and with the absence of any Anglo-French offensive against Germany in the west, Stalin resolved to act. At 3 a.m. that morning the Polish ambassador in Moscow, Wacław Grzybowski, was summoned to the Kremlin, where he was presented with a note from the Soviet government outlining the grounds for its intervention. As if to emphasize the impossibility of Poland’s predicament, the note itself had been drawn up jointly by the Soviets and the German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg. It claimed, “The Polish government has disintegrated,” and “the Polish state no longer exists.” Given this apparent collapse, it went on, “the Soviet government cannot remain indifferent at a time when brothers of the same blood, the Ukrainians and the Byelorussians, residing on the Polish territory have been abandoned to their fate.” Consequently, the Red Army had been ordered to “cross the border and take under their protection the lives and property of the inhabitants of Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia.” By “Western Ukraine” and “Western Byelorussia,” the note meant eastern Poland.

Faced with this apparent fait accompli, Grzybowski gamely refused to accept the note, protesting about Soviet dishonesty and the blatant violation of international law. He also argued, quite correctly, that Poland’s dire straits had no bearing on her sovereignty. Did anyone question Russia’s existence, he asked, when Napoleon occupied Moscow? His efforts were in vain, however. Within an hour, Red Army troops would cross the border into Polish territory, and the note would simply be delivered to his office with the morning post. Now redundant in a hostile capital, Grzybowski was not accorded the usual diplomatic immunity and found himself arrested by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. By a quirk of fate, he was rescued by Schulenburg, who used his good odor with the Soviets to secure his colleague’s release and subsequent escape from the USSR. The Polish consul at Kiev, Janusz Matuszyński, was not so fortunate; arrested by the NKVD, he was never seen again.

The ensuing Soviet advance was somewhat chaotic. Eviscerated by the purges of the late 1930s and given only days rather than weeks to mobilize, the Red Army was in no state to engage in serious offensive operations, lacking vehicles, spare parts, and effective leadership. Fortunately for Moscow, Poland’s defense was by this point similarly disorganized, with the few units stationed in the east of the county devoid of heavy weapons, unsure about how to react to the Soviet advance, and lacking clear instructions from the increasingly desperate High Command. Polish indecision was not aided by deliberate Soviet deceptions and the resulting rumor that the Red Army was advancing in defense of Poland to meet the German invasion.

For civilians caught up in the Soviet advance, it could be a profoundly confusing time, with fear of the unknown tempered only by the hope that the Red Army might be coming to their aid. Most, only vaguely aware of the wider political constellation, were unsure how to react. Janusz Bardach was fleeing the Nazis, heading east, toward Rowno, when an army patrol stopped him at night: “Two men shined flashlights in our eyes, while others surrounded us. I was astonished to see Soviet military uniforms and hear the Russian language—we were still a long way from the border. I couldn’t imagine what Soviet soldiers were doing on Polish territory and could only hope that the mighty Red Army had come to fight the Nazis and expel them from Poland. I wanted to express my joy at seeing them, but someone ordered us to put up our hands.” In the months and years that followed, Bardach’s youthful enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and communism would be tested to destruction.

A minority—communists as well as some Jews, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians—had fewer doubts, however, and rushed to greet the Red Army as their liberators. One such scene was recorded in the northeastern town of Jedwabne, where a few locals not only greeted Soviet soldiers with the traditional Slavic offerings but also erected a large banner reading, “We Welcome You.” Although comparatively rare, events such as this served, in the public mind, to confirm the long-standing association between Jewishness and communism. Early-twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals had often gravitated toward the political Left, partly as a result of their rejection by the nationalist mainstream. Interwar communist parties had consequently had large Jewish representation both in membership and leadership, with Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Bela Kun in Hungary, and Leon Trotsky in the USSR being the salient examples. Right-wing parties seized on this link as a means to smear both enemies, falsely arguing that because many communists were Jews, many Jews had to be communists. The resulting concept of “Judeo-Bolshevism”—that communism itself was little more than a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world—quickly suffused the extreme right wing of politics, not least Hitler’s Nazi Party, which was the most efficient and determined propagator of the fiction. Mein Kampf made this link explicitly: “We ought to recognise in Russian Bolshevism,” Hitler wrote, “the kind of attempt being made by the Jew to secure dominion over the world.”

Those Jews and others who welcomed the Red Army in 1939 were certainly not agents of any grand conspiracy. They had a variety of motivations; some expressed a firmly held conviction; others gave voice to frustration with the perceived iniquities of the Polish state; some, perhaps, were just tacking with the political wind. However, theirs was an act that their neighbors would not forget easily. Their siding with the new oppressor and giving apparent confirmation to the grotesque Nazi caricature of “Judeo-Bolshevism” would unwittingly provoke profound and bloody consequences.

The Polish defense against the Soviet invasion was largely ad hoc, with most of the lightly armed border guards preferring to lay down their weapons or simply evade both the Soviets and the Germans and head southwest toward the Romanian border. In all, there are thought to have been about forty armed clashes between the Poles and the Soviets. One of these was the Battle of Szack on September 28, in which the eponymous small town, south of Brest, was briefly liberated from Soviet control by Polish forces, which routed a Red Army infantry division in the process. Another was the Battle of Grodno, where Polish general Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński organized a brilliantly improvised defense, which held up the Soviet advance for two days and inflicted heavy losses on the invaders. Both the general and his adjutant were among some three hundred of the town’s defenders who would pay for their temerity with their lives, being executed by the Red Army upon capture. Such actions were sadly not unique. The Red Army’s instinctive hatred for the Polish officer class, as made up of Catholics, aristocrats, and Poles, would lead to other atrocities, and the execution of captured officers quickly became the norm. At Pińsk, for instance, thirty officers of the river flotilla were separated from the other ranks after their surrender and led away for execution.

A few Polish commanders had the dubious honor of facing both sets of invaders that autumn. Perhaps the best example is General Franciszek Kleeberg, whose Polesie Independent Operational Group first confronted Guderian’s forces near Brest in the early phase of the war before pressing westward with the Soviet invasion on September 17, ostensibly to aid the besieged Warsaw. Overrun by events, however, Kleeberg’s force was attacked by Red Army units at Milanów at the very end of September, before once again engaging the Germans in early October at the Battle of Kock, the last engagement of the Polish campaign. Having run out of ammunition, the remains of the Polesie Independent Operational Group surrendered to the Germans on the morning of October 6 after a four-day battle. Kleeberg was the last to leave his post; he would not survive German captivity.

In most cases, Soviet and German forces kept clear of each other, adhering to demarcation lines and avoiding contact. Indeed, they were supposed to maintain a twenty-five-kilometer distance. Yet, despite this, there were examples of cooperation and concerted action. From the outset, for instance, the Soviet authorities agreed to allow signals to be broadcast from Minsk to aid Luftwaffe navigation. In addition, the two sides shared intelligence on the size and disposition of Polish units on the ground and collaborated in their neutralization. One example of this is the battle of Lwów, the southeastern regional capital, which was already under siege by the Germans when the Soviet 6th Army arrived on the outskirts on September 19. Despite having already taken numerous casualties in the battle, the German forces were instructed to withdraw, leaving the city’s Polish commander, General Władysław Langner, to surrender to the Soviets, under the assurance that his men would be correctly treated. Langner was misled, however, as an eyewitness recalled: “Hardly had they laid down their arms when they were surrounded by Russian troops and marched off.” Throughout, the Soviets were all smiles toward their new German allies, with one Red Army lieutenant greeting his counterpart enthusiastically with cigarettes and the hastily learned slogan “Germanski und Bolsheviki zusammen stark” (Together Germans and Bolsheviks are strong).

In the sphere of public relations there was also widespread cooperation, with both sides reporting each other’s successes and issuing joint communiqués. On September 20, for example, Izvestia carried a front-page directive—evidently passed by Berlin and Moscow—giving a cynical and disingenuous explanation of the actions of German and Soviet troops in Poland: “In order to prevent any kind of groundless rumours concerning the task of Soviet and German troops currently in the field in Poland,” it ran, “the governments of the Soviet Union and Germany announce that the function of these troops is not to pursue any particular aims conflicting with the spirit of the non-aggression pact agreed between Germany and the Soviet Union. On the contrary, the task of these troops is to maintain peace and order in Poland, which have both been compromised by the collapse of the Polish state, and to help the population rebuild the conditions necessary for the existence of the state.”

This collaborative attitude was perhaps best and most wickedly demonstrated at a meeting in Warsaw of the joint German-Soviet Border Commission in late October 1939. After a celebratory lunch hosted by Hitler’s representative in Poland, Hans Frank, he and the Soviet senior delegate, Alexander Alexandrov, smoked together. Frank remarked, “You and I are smoking Polish cigarettes to symbolise the fact that we have thrown Poland to the wind.”

ONCE INSTALLED ON POLISH TERRITORY, THE TWO REGIMES WASTED little time in formalizing arrangements between themselves. On September 27, Ribbentrop returned to Moscow to sign a supplementary agreement, the Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which tied up some of the loose ends left by the signing of the pact a month previously. In those discussions, the newfound friendship between the Nazis and the Soviets was given full expression. As Ribbentrop himself reported, it was like being in a “circle of old comrades.” Stalin stated that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union together represented such a force that no combination of powers would be able to resist them. Moreover, he promised that “should Germany unexpectedly get into difficulties, it could be sure that the Soviet people would come to Germany’s aid and would not allow it to be strangled.”

The practical business of the meeting was to regulate Nazi-Soviet relations in the wake of Poland’s looming defeat. To this end, both parties agreed not to resurrect any Polish state and to collaborate in combating any agitation to that end. They also agreed to a framework within which an exchange of populations could take place, enabling ethnic Germans to travel west and Byelorussians and Ukrainians in German-occupied areas to move east. Most importantly, perhaps, the demarcation line previously agreed between the two regimes in eastern Europe had to be revised, with the Soviet frontier in occupied Poland being moved eastward to the line of the river Bug and Lithuania being awarded to Moscow as compensation. In this way, Poland was neatly divided almost in half, with Germany taking 72,800 square miles of territory and 20 million citizens and the USSR receiving 77,720 square miles and 12 million inhabitants. Although Stalin publicly claimed that the shift was intended to remove any potential source of friction with Berlin, he clearly had one eye on London and Paris, as the revised frontier was much more readily defensible to Western opinion, coinciding as it did, very broadly, with the ethnographic limit of Polish habitation. For the sake of clarity, a map was produced from the Soviet High Command, and a black line was added to mark the new German-Soviet border. Next to it were appended the signatures of Ribbentrop and—in a flourish of thick blue crayon—Stalin. The Soviet leader quipped to his German guest, “Is my signature clear enough for you?”

Once the formalities were agreed, the two regimes set about remaking their respective parts of the conquered territory in their own image. On the German side of the line, the former Polish lands were divided into two parts: the northern and western districts were annexed directly to the Reich and renamed the Warthegau; the southern and central areas were established as a separate entity, the Generalgouvernement (General Government), which included both Warsaw and Kraków and, though nominally autonomous, was nonetheless entirely dependent on the whim of Berlin. In both areas, the native Polish population enjoyed scant civil rights, being deliberately reduced to the status of an underclass whose sole purpose was to dutifully serve the new German overlords.

The first priority for the German authorities in Poland was to ensure that the Polish elite—religious leaders, teachers, military officers, intellectuals, and even Boy Scouts—was effectively neutralized. To this end, the random killings of the early phase of occupation became more targeted and more overtly political in motivation. In the so-called Valley of Death near Bydgoszcz, for instance, in October 1939, over 1,200 priests, doctors, and others were killed by firing squads of the Einsatzgruppen and local ethnic German militias. In total, actions such as these would account for as many as 50,000 Polish deaths in that first autumn and winter of the German occupation.

November 1939 saw Sonderaktion Krakau (Special Action Kraków), when Nazi cynicism matched Nazi barbarism. At midday on the sixth of that month, the entire staff of the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Kraków, one of the oldest universities in the world, was summoned to a meeting with the new Gestapo chief for the city, Bruno Müller, to learn about the Nazis’ plans for education. Rather than hear a lecture, however, the 184 assembled professors were summarily arrested and taken for interrogation, after which they were sent, en masse, to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin. Although most of them would be released the following spring after international protests—not least from Benito Mussolini and the Vatican—some sixteen of the Jagiellonian professors would not survive their ordeal. The university itself was closed, meanwhile, as were all of Poland’s secondary and higher educational establishments, for the duration of the Nazi occupation. As far as Berlin was concerned, the Poles would require no more than the most rudimentary learning.

In the spring and summer of 1940, the Germans began another wave of repression in their zone of occupied Poland to remove so-called leadership elements from what remained of Polish society. The resulting AB Aktion, or “Extraordinary Pacification Action,” followed what would become a familiar pattern. Prisoners were removed from their cells in local jails; a charge, verdict, and sentence were read out; and they were taken by truck to nearby woods, where they were executed with a shot to the head or machine-gunned into waiting pits. In this way, 358 prisoners from Pawiak prison in Warsaw were killed in Palmiry Forest in June 1940; 400 were killed near Częstochowa in July; and 450 people were murdered near Lublin on the night of August 15, 1940. It is thought that, in total, the AB Aktion cost around 6,000 lives.

Whereas the Germans employed brute force and the dictatorial hierarchy prescribed by the Führerprinzip, or “leader principle,” in the Soviet zone the new administration adorned itself with the illusion of democratic legitimacy. A month after the Red Army’s arrival, the Soviets staged rigged elections (with a closed list of candidates) for new assemblies in the two annexed territories of Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. A week or so later, those new assemblies petitioned the Supreme Soviet in Moscow with a request to join the Soviet Union, which was duly granted in mid-November 1939. Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia were then annexed to the existing Soviet Republics of Ukraine and Byelorussia respectively, and the newly elected national assemblies were dissolved. Within two months, the Polish provinces of the eastern borderlands, or Kresy, had been seamlessly absorbed into the USSR.

From that point on, Soviet norms applied throughout. Private property was abolished, businesses were nationalized, and all former citizens of Poland had to register as Soviet citizens. The Polish zloty was withdrawn from circulation in mid-November, with no conversion to Soviet rubles permitted. These measures impoverished many among the old middle and upper classes overnight, divesting them of their property and rendering their savings worthless. Sovietization naturally had profound effects; not only was economic and social life for the majority turned on its head, but many now found themselves liable to retrospective arrest for anti-Soviet activities, such as having fought in the Polish-Soviet War two decades earlier. Membership in the former bourgeoisie or the intelligentsia suddenly became a potentially life-threatening condition.

In fact, a remarkable symmetry emerged between the occupation policies adopted by the Nazis and the Soviets, with both sides using very similar methods for dealing with their respective conquered populations. Just as the Germans were effectively decapitating Polish society in the west, the Soviets were doing the same in their area of occupation: measures adopted against the racial enemy in one half of Poland were virtually indistinguishable from those applied to the class enemy in the other. In the Soviet zone, numerous prominent personalities, military and political, were arrested in a conscious effort to remove opinion formers and commentators who might adversely affect the smooth transition to Soviet rule. Others were detained more speculatively, considered suspect after a chance conversation, perhaps, or picked up off the street. A favorite NKVD tactic was to arrest two people talking together in public and then interrogate them separately, asking specifically what they had been discussing prior to their arrest. Any discrepancies between the two accounts indicated that they were clearly hiding something, and the interrogation would continue. Most would be arrested for some minor transgression, real or imagined, which could be construed as oppositional; service to the prewar Polish regime, for instance, was enough for an individual to be branded a supporter of fascism. Of course, the irony that Stalin himself was supporting fascism via his pact with Hitler was not allowed to intrude.

Some of those detained had actually committed an offense. Czesław Wojciechowski was nineteen years old when he was arrested for distributing anti-Soviet leaflets in the northern town of Augustów. Sentenced to eight years in the Gulag labor camps of the Soviet interior, he was taken away in the clothes in which he was captured and never saw his family again. He was one of an estimated 100,000 Poles seized by the NKVD in occupied Poland for criminal offenses, half of whom were sent to the Gulag. For those sent to local jails, conditions were little better. Aleksander Wat was sent to the overcrowded main prison in Lwów in January 1940. None of the prisoners there had been incarcerated for more than three months; yet the conditions were so poor that all of them looked like old men. “I couldn’t tell the difference between 40-year-old and 70-year-old men,” Wat recalled. Little wonder that the grim joke soon began to circulate in Poland that the initials NKVD (or NKWD in Polish) stood for “Nie wiadomo kiedy wrócę do domu” (Impossible to tell when I will return home).

Perhaps the most infamous example of this process of “decapitating” Polish society takes the name of one of the sites where unfortunate prisoners were murdered: Katyn. After the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, the NKVD arrested around 400,000 Polish prisoners of war, policemen, prison officers, and others. Through a process of interrogations and political screening, this number was then whittled down, with many enlisted men being released and others being assigned to labor battalions. By the end of 1939, this left around 15,000 men, predominantly army officers, interned in the Soviet prison camps at Starobelsk, Kozelsk, and Ostashkov, where they were subjected to lengthy nocturnal interrogations to ascertain their attitude toward the Soviet Union and communism. The prisoners assumed that they were merely being screened prior to their release, but the situation was far more serious than that: their very lives were at stake. As Poles, officers, aristocrats, and Catholics, most of them were damned many times over in Soviet eyes; accordingly fewer than four hundred of them were deemed to be “of use” and were spared execution. One of these was Zygmunt Berling, later commander of the 1st Polish Army that would fight alongside the Red Army all the way to Berlin. For good measure, around 7,000 other Poles—priests, policemen, landowners, and intellectuals—from other camps were added to the execution list. Then, on March 5, 1940—the very same week that the AB Aktion was ordered in Berlin—the instruction was given in Moscow to apply “the supreme punishment: shooting.”

The following month, the 15,000 or so officers were shipped out of their camps in batches of a few hundred at a time. They all enjoyed a hearty send off in the belief that they were being released, with their fellow officers sometimes forming an honor guard through which they would pass to board the buses that would take them away. “There was not the slightest suspicion,” one eyewitness recalled, that they were “in the shadow of Lady Death.” Their journey was comparatively short, however. Taken to NKVD prisons and safe houses, they were held for a time longer while their identities were again checked. One diarist, Major Adam Solski, maintained his journal right up to that moment. “We have been brought somewhere to a forest; it looks like a summer resort,” he recorded. “Here a thorough personal search. Roubles, belt and pocket knife are taken.” It was his last entry.

Although it seems that other methods were tried, the NKVD quickly worked out the most effective technique for dealing with the prisoners. One by one they were led, arms bound behind their backs, to a cellar room with makeshift soundproofing provided by sandbags. Before the prisoner could make sense of his surroundings, he was grasped from both sides by two NKVD men, while a third approached from behind and fired a single shot into the base of his skull with a German-made pistol, the bullet generally exiting through the victim’s forehead. A skilled executioner, such as Stalin’s favorite, Vasily Blokhin, could carry out as many as 250 such executions in a single night. Working at the NKVD jail at Kalinin that spring, Blokhin wore a leather apron and gloves to prevent being sullied by his victims’ blood.

Immediately afterward, the bodies of the victims would be loaded onto trucks and driven into the nearby forests for disposal in mass graves, where they would be stacked perhaps twelve deep and limed to speed decomposition. The 7,000 or so other victims on the list were executed in NKVD prisons in Ukraine and Byelorussia. In total, at least 21,768 Polish prisoners met their end in this way, including 1 prince, 1 admiral, 12 generals, 81 colonels, 198 lieutenant colonels, 21 professors, 22 priests, 189 prison guards, 5,940 policemen—and 1 woman, Janina Lewandowska.

By such measures, and by the analogous massacres and executions carried out by the Nazis, Poland’s ruling and administrative class was effectively destroyed. In a few unfortunate families siblings divided by the war met identical fates at Soviet and Nazi hands. One such was the Wnuk family from Warsaw. Army officer Jakub Wnuk was in his mid-thirties when he was taken by the Soviets to the camp at Kozelsk and thence to Katyn, where he was murdered in April 1940. His older brother Bolesław, a former Polish member of Parliament, was arrested by the Germans in October 1939 and executed near Lublin on June 29. The latter left a farewell note: “I die for the fatherland with a smile on my lips.”

With the leadership elements thus removed and the immediate sources of possible resistance neutralized, both the Soviet and Nazi occupiers embarked on a simultaneous cleansing of Polish society, the Nazis motivated primarily by racial concerns, the Soviets mainly by class-political criteria. The German-occupied areas of Poland therefore became a vast laboratory for an extended experiment in racial reorganization. All citizens were required to register with the Nazi authorities and would be allocated to one of four categories: Reichsdeutsch (German nationals), Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans), Nichtdeutsch (non-Germans), and Juden (Jews). One’s category dictated one’s ration allocation and where one was permitted to reside. Entire populations were sifted and sorted, expropriated and expelled. Jews were confined to the newly established ghettos in Warsaw, Łódź, and elsewhere, and Poles were often shunted out of the annexed Warthegau—to make way for the arrival of ethnic Germans, Volksdeutsche, arriving from the east—and concentrated in the General Government. By the spring of 1941, around 400,000 Poles had already been deported in this way.

The procedure was that the Nazi authorities, with the aid of local Volksdeutsche, would prepare lists of deportees, which officers of the SS or Wehrmacht then presented to the affected households. Generally given an hour to pack, deportees were each permitted to take a single suitcase containing warm clothing, food, identity documents, and up to two hundred zlotys in cash. Everything else was to be left behind. As one woman recalled, the instructions she received were very particular: “The flat must be swept, the plates and dishes washed and the keys left in the cupboards so that the Germans who were to live in my house should have no trouble.” Once ready, the deportees were loaded onto trucks to be taken to the local railway station for their onward journey. The ensuing deportation process could be brutal, with little thought given to the provision of even the most basic amenities for those arriving at their destinations. In the first large-scale deportation, for instance, carried out in December 1939, some 87,000 Poles were taken by train from the Warthegau to the neighboring General Government. With many of the deportees waiting for hours in the snow or arriving at unfinished internment camps, the number of those who perished in the process was substantial; as the laconic report of the Nazi administration admitted, “Not all the deported persons, especially the infants, arrived at the destination alive.”

Those Poles who survived the process were relegated to second-class citizenship—forbidden to use public parks and swimming pools, banned from all cultural, political, and educational activities, and required to step aside to allow Germans to pass. The slightest show of dissent—a glance or an ironic smile—could bring a death sentence. As the head of the General Government, Hans Frank, boasted to a journalist early in 1940, if he had to hang out a placard for every seven Poles shot, as was done in the German Protectorate of Bohemia, “then the forests of Poland would not suffice to produce the paper.” It is little wonder, perhaps, that the Poles created the largest and most effective underground resistance organization in Europe.

Paradoxically, at the same time that Poles were being actively “cleansed” from the Warthegau, the need for labor on the Nazi home front meant that many thousands of Poles were also taken west, into the very heart of the Reich. Some volunteered, keen to improve their lot, but most were coerced, rounded up in the streets, or press-ganged from church congregations. In one instance, a village was required to provide twenty-five laborers, but none volunteered, so German gendarmes set a few houses on fire and did not permit the inhabitants to tackle the blaze until the requisite numbers of workers had “volunteered.” The able-bodied, therefore, were just as likely to end up being deported to Berlin as to Warsaw, and by the middle of 1940, some 1.2 million Polish POWs and laborers were already working in Germany. Once there, they were subjected to harsh conditions: underfed, underpaid, and, as one of their number recalled, “treated worse than dogs.”

Jews occupied the very bottom rung of the Nazis’ racial hierarchy and were treated accordingly. In the opening days of the Polish campaign, they had been subject to the same murderous caprice as their Polish neighbors, with many falling victim to arbitrary killings. At Błonie, west of Warsaw, for instance, fifty Jews were shot on September 18; four days later, another eighty were massacred at Pułtusk, to the north of the capital.

In time, other policies developed, including the expedient of simply pushing Jews eastward, into the Soviet sector. On September 11, for instance, the head of Nazi security forces, Reinhard Heydrich, was already ordering his Einsatzgruppen to “induce” Jews to flee eastward, despite the fact that the Soviet zone had not yet even been established. German forces complied. Later that month, over 3,000 Jews were transported over the river San in southern Poland (which had been intended to mark the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line) and told to “go to Russia.” In another example, a transport of 1,000 Czech Jews was unloaded in the town of Nisko, not far from the new frontier, which had briefly been intended to serve as a Jewish “reservation.” After the fittest among them had been removed for a labor detail, the remainder were simply ordered to march east and not to return. On a single day, November 13, 1939, over 16,000 Jews were thus forced across the border at various locations. In some cases, German forces fired on groups of deportees to encourage them on their way.

Most needed no such encouragement. Many thousands would voluntarily follow suit across occupied Poland, finding no obstacles to their departure. As one Jewish diarist in Warsaw recalled, enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was—initially at least—widespread among the Jews. “Thousands of young people went to Bolshevik Russia on foot,” he wrote, “that is to say, to the areas conquered by Russia. They looked upon the Bolsheviks as redeeming Messiahs. Even the wealthy, who would become poor under Bolshevism, preferred the Russians to the Germans.” That enthusiasm could be short-lived, however. Some of the 300,000 Polish Jews thought to have fled to the Soviet zone would attempt to return after a few weeks or months, because of either homesickness or disillusionment with the poor conditions they found there.

Those Jews who remained in the German-occupied regions would soon find themselves confined to ghettos. Starting in Łódź, then spreading to Warsaw, Kraków, and elsewhere, ghettos, in the Nazis’ view, were a useful way to concentrate and isolate Jewish populations while their ultimate fate was still undecided. To the Nazi mind, ghettoization had the added appeal that unsanitary conditions and disease would reduce the Jewish population through “natural wastage,” a euphemism that would conceal countless horrors. Starvation spread, with the very young and the elderly most immediately affected. “Bread is becoming a dream,” one ghetto inhabitant wrote, “and a hot lunch belongs to the world of fantasy.” Typhus, too, was soon commonplace, spurred by poor hygiene. In the Łódź ghetto, for instance—which contained 163,000 people in the spring of 1940—only 294 apartments were registered as having a toilet, and less than 400 had running water. Those who endured the ghettos could scarcely have imagined that their stay was but a prelude to an even worse fate.

In the Soviet area of occupation, meanwhile, the NKVD was rolling out a “cleansing” procedure of its own, which—in addition to the “decapitation” process already underway—sought to screen Polish society for all those perceived to be potentially antagonistic toward Soviet rule. Again, this was a category that could be extremely elastic in interpretation. In addition to teachers, businessmen, and priests, the Soviets chose to arrest many whom they damned simply for their knowledge of the outside world, including philatelists, postmasters, and even Esperantists. Others qualified for arrest as what the Soviets called beloruchki, literally, “those with white hands,” meaning those who did not do manual labor. By a particularly vicious twist of fate, the families of those killed in the Katyn massacres were also rounded up, their names and addresses having been gleaned by the NKVD through intercepted correspondence with their doomed loved ones.

For those affected, the procedure was generally the same. Households were awoken in the early hours by an urgent hammering on the door and bellowed instructions in Russian from small groups of men, usually consisting of one or two NKVD noncommissioned officers along with a couple of Red Army privates and a local militiaman. While the property was searched for any incriminating evidence, the family held at gunpoint, the NKVD officer would read a prepared decree outlining the offense and the punishment—deportation. No details were generally given of the destination: some officers were deliberately vague or misleading; others might show a flicker of sympathy. One NKVD man tried to sooth a crying child by handing her a toy doll. When she refused it, he gave it to her older sister, saying, “Take it with you, there will not be dolls like that where you’re going.”

In most cases, instructions were then given on the procedure to follow—the time allowed for packing, for instance, or suggestions for what to take on the journey—although some NKVD men were more interested in looting valuables and persecuting their victims. In one case, a family awoke to the sight of a group of soldiers already inside the bedroom: “No one dared move because he would be killed on the spot. They tied daddy up with a chain, and the others searched for weapons and at the same time stole whatever was valuable. The oldest militiaman shouts that in half an hour we have to be ready to leave. They caught mummy, tied her up and threw her on the sleigh.”

Even when instructions were given, for many of those affected the details were lost in a haze of fear and panic. As one peasant woman recalled, “He tells us to listen [to] what he will read and he read a decree that in half an hour we must be ready to leave, wagon will come. I immediately went blind and got to laugh terribly, NKVD man screams get dressed, I run around the room and laughson keeps packing what he canchildren are begging me to pack or there will be trouble, and I have lost my mind.” One mother was so traumatized that her young son had to pack for her. When she arrived in rural Kazakhstan, she found that he had included his French dictionary, a recipe book, and some Christmas decorations.

Soviet practice was generally to deport households together, according to the names on the list that accompanied the NKVD officers. Thus, extended nonresident family were usually excluded and allowed to leave, as were occasional guests, but absent family members were actively sought. Teenager Mieczysław Wartalski was on the list, and though he had already made good his escape when the NKVD arrived, he returned to his family because he feared that his mother would not cope without his help, and he remembered his father’s parting instruction to take care of his brothers and sisters. All five of them would be deported together to Kazakhstan.

The NKVD were similarly conscientious and permitted few exceptions. In one example, a man pleaded in vain that his paralyzed father and infant son should be excused deportation; neither would survive the journey. One of the only digressions allowed, it seems, was when intended deportees were absent and NKVD officers decided to find replacements to meet their quotas. In one such instance, a young woman was snatched off the street to “replace” a teenage daughter who had run away when the NKVD arrived. The woman’s screams and protests were countered with the ominous reply, “Moscow will put it right.”

After collection, the deportees were taken to their local railway stations and packed into goods carriages. Conditions were atrocious as the primitive wagons were scarcely equipped for transporting human cargo: a few were fitted with wooden bunks and stoves, but most were simply bare carriages, with barred windows and no sanitary facilities beyond a hole in the floor. Confined 60 or so to a carriage, 2,500 per train, the deportees had little room to sit.

Once the trains were underway, supplies of water and food for the deportees were intermittent at best, particularly as the carriages were often only opened days into the journey. Water supply was consistently short, with those on winter transports forced to scavenge for snow, often blackened with soot from the locomotive, from the roof of the carriage. Those deported in summer did not even have that option. Food rations were similarly meager, being supplied on average every two to three days and consisting perhaps of a thin, indistinct soup, sour bread, or sometimes simply hot water, all of which had to be collected by child volunteers from each carriage. Occasionally, a train was better supplied. One deportee recalled that Soviet soldiers would walk along the train during a stop, attempting to sell ham, fruit, and the other goods, which, it was suspected, had been provided for the passengers’ benefit.

In such difficult conditions, exhaustion and disease took a hideous toll, mainly among the elderly and the young, and the primary task whenever the train stopped was often to remove the dead bodies. One deportee remembered seeing a Red Army officer moved to tears by the sight that greeted him when the doors of the train were opened. Another, from a winter transport, recalled the grisly sight of Soviet soldiers moving from one wagon to the next, with tiny corpses under their arms, asking, “Are there any frozen children?” In summer, meanwhile, the deportees would try to push the dead out of the carriage windows themselves for fear of spreading disease. Summer or winter, requests for formal burials were routinely refused, and the bodies were left where they fell or simply stacked, anonymously, beside the tracks.

For many, the agony of deportation would last for up to four weeks, until they reached their destinations, where the new agonies of a life of hard labor and exile awaited them. Many found themselves in the Soviet Far North, in the district of Archangelsk, or in Siberia, where they were mainly put to work logging. Most of the remainder ended their journey in Kazakhstan, working on collective farms or laboring to construct railways. For all of them, the Soviet maxim ran, “Who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat.” Death tolls were substantial, with an estimated annual death rate of around 30 percent. Deportation to the wide expanses of the Russian interior was a policy with roots extending back to the time of the tsars, but the criteria applied by the Soviets were based on raw class politics. As those left behind in Poland were told, “This is how we annihilate the enemies of Soviet power. We will use the sieve until we retrieve all bourgeois and kulaks, not only here, but in the entire world. You will never see again those that we have taken away from you. Tam propadut kak rudaia mish. [They will disappear over there, like a field mouse.]”

The four main deportations from eastern Poland—in February, April, and June 1940 and June 1941—were all carried out in the same way. The precise numbers involved are unknown and have long been assumed to total over 1 million. Although recent scholarship, drawing on research from the NKVD’s own archive in Moscow, has revised this figure downward, it is suspected that the Russian archival record tells only one aspect of the story and does not include those condemned by summary courts or otherwise unregistered. For every convict or official deportee, it seems, there may have been three or four who went unrecorded, making the figure of 1 million—according to Poland’s foremost Western historian—a “very conservative estimate.” Whatever the true totals, few of the deported would ever see their homeland again.

Even those newly arrived in the Soviet zone from the west could find themselves en route to the Gulag. The Soviet authorities could be royally inhospitable, with many officials viewing refugees simply as spies or provocateurs. In one instance, a group of around 1,000 Jews was expelled across the border by the Germans, only for a nearby Soviet commander to attempt to force them back into the German zone some fifteen kilometers away, leading to a tense standoff with the local Wehrmacht units. Most refugees caught close to the frontier by the Soviet authorities were liable to arrest and a sentence in the Gulag. This would be the fate of the Dreksler family in the autumn of 1939. Having entered the Soviet zone without being apprehended, they were stopped in Lutsk, where the communist authorities asked them to fill out various forms. However, their answer to the question of where they ultimately intended to settle, Palestine, so irritated their interrogating officer that he sent them instead to a work camp in the Soviet Far North at Archangel.

Viennese Jew Wilhelm Korn was one of the few who sought to escape his fate. Expelled across the river Bug by Hitler’s SS security forces, with the instruction to “go over to your Bolshevik brothers,” he did not believe Soviet promises of work, accommodation, and good treatment and so decided to abscond. Recaptured and interrogated by the NKVD, Korn was accused of being a German spy and sent back across the border to Vienna. Remarkably, he survived the war.

Unsurprisingly, the Soviet authorities grew so frustrated by the volume of refugees entering their zone—willingly or unwillingly—that they complained to the Germans that future collaboration on the sensitive issue of population exchange was in jeopardy. With that, “wild” deportations were brought to an end, and border controls were tightened. The ethnic and political reorganization of the Polish lands required a degree of Nazi-Soviet cooperation.

Beginning in December 1939, therefore, both the Nazis and the Soviets began the process of registering those desiring to leave their respective zones of occupation. On the German side of the frontier, some 35,000 or so Ukrainians and Byelorussians, mainly former Polish POWs, were found wishing to be evacuated east into the Soviet zone, but the larger number of ethnic Germans wanting to go in the opposite direction presented more of a challenge. In the Soviet zone, therefore, joint Nazi-Soviet “resettlement commissions”—consisting of four SS officials from the Nazi ethnic German office, the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, accompanied by four members of the NKVD—began touring the towns and cities in December 1939 to oversee the registration of all those claiming to be ethnic Germans and to enable them to travel west into Germany. Over the next six months, 128,000 Volksdeutsche would successfully apply to be “repatriated” to the Reich, with the first group of settlers being welcomed at Przemyśl on the Soviet-German border by Heinrich Himmler himself.

Naturally, this process was not without complications. For one thing, the Soviets seemed committed to frustrating the operation, often vetoing applications in what appeared to their German counterparts to be an arbitrary fashion. The primary problem was that—embarrassingly for the Soviets—many more people beyond the ethnic German community evidently wanted to leave the Soviet zone, including many of the Jews who had only recently arrived. Some years later, the then Communist Party head in Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, would recall in his memoirs with incredulity the “long lines of Jews waiting to register to leave for the west.” Another account tells of a similarly incredulous German officer watching the queues and saying, “Jews, where are you going? Don’t you know that we will kill you?”

One of those who chose to return was the Jewish writer Mieczysław Braun, who had fled to Lwów with the outbreak of war but soon regretted his actions when he found himself forced to conform to the expected Soviet norms. “I have never been in such a humiliating and absurd situation,” he wrote to a friend. “Every day we have a meeting. I sit in the first row and they look at me, I hear propaganda, nonsense and lies. Whenever they mention Stalin my supervisor starts clapping and everyone present follows suit. I also clap, and I feel like a court jester. I don’t want to clap, but I am forced to. I don’t want Lwów to be a Soviet city, but a hundred times a day I say the opposite. All my life I have been myself and an honest person, and now I am playing the fool. I have become a scoundrel.” Wracked by the contortions that he was obliged to make, Braun opted to return to Warsaw and take his chances with the German occupation. He died in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941.

In fact, very few of those who applied to emigrate from the Soviet zone were granted permission, with only around 5 percent of all applicants succeeding. Those who were rejected would not be spared the self-righteous wrath of the Soviet state. Given that they had implicitly expressed their rejection of communism and been obliged to register their details to do so, they were now doubly exposed to the attentions of the NKVD. The Soviet authorities did not hesitate long in exacting their revenge. In June 1940, once the resettlement commissions had completed their work and departed, the recalcitrants were collected for transport to the Soviet interior. Some were even told to present themselves at their local railway station for emigration to the west—thereby saving the authorities the trouble of physically rounding them up—only to be loaded onto trains and deported in the opposite direction. Of those involved in the third large Soviet deportation from eastern Poland in June 1940, nearly 60 percent are thought to have been Jews, and the vast majority had unsuccessfully applied to leave the Soviet zone.

It is, of course, invidious to attempt any comparison of the Nazi and Soviet occupation regimes in this period; yet, as these accounts demonstrate, it was a comparison that many Poles and Polish Jews were forced to make. In truth, Poles of all faiths and classes faced an impossible choice: to remain where they were and accept the inevitable hardships that their occupiers would impose or to attempt to better their situation by moving to the other zone. In weighing this decision, they had little information beyond rumor and hearsay. Few made their decision on political or ideological grounds; rather they were motivated primarily by self-preservation, seeking a modicum of security for themselves and their families. The dilemma was neatly summed up in one story from the period, which told of two trainloads of Polish refugees encountering each other crossing the Nazi-Soviet frontier—one going east, the other going west—with each group astonished that the other was fleeing into the zone from which it was trying to escape.

Even Polish communists, it seems, could be less than totally enamored of life in the Soviet zone. Some were disappointed by the apolitical avarice of the Red Army. “We waited for them to ask how was life under capitalism,” one complained, “and to tell us what it was like in Russia. But all they wanted was to buy a watch. I noticed that they were preoccupied with worldly goods, and we were waiting for ideals.” Marian Spychalski’s complaints were more immediate. He had fled to Lwów in the Soviet zone in November 1939 but was so shocked by Soviet treatment of the Poles there that he lasted barely two weeks before escaping back into the German zone and heading for Warsaw. Organizing resistance in the capital, Spychalski was joined by another prominent Polish communist, Władysław Gomułka, who had also fled from Lwów to take his chances with the Germans in the General Government. For all the hardships that they endured, Spychalski and Gomułka would have counted themselves fortunate. Some 5,000 of their fellow Polish communists—practically the entire active membership of the party—had already fallen victim to Stalin’s purges. The only members spared had been those who had found themselves in Polish jails. Despite their sobering experiences, however, the two would later become senior politicians of the postwar Polish communist state: Spychalski as minister of defense, Gomułka as first secretary of the Communist Party.

Berlin would soon target other communists. Already in November 1939, Ribbentrop had stated to Molotov that the continued imprisonment of German citizens in the Soviet Union was incompatible with good political relations between Moscow and the Reich. He was referring to the five hundred or so political emigrants from Germany, mainly communists, thought to have found refuge in the Soviet Union after the Nazi seizure of power. Ironically, by 1939 many of them had also fallen afoul of the NKVD’s terror machinery, and those who had escaped execution in the purges often found themselves in the myriad labor camps of the Gulag. Now, after enduring the NKVD’s attentions, they were to be returned to the clutches of their original tormentors, the Gestapo.

German officials would provide lists to their Soviet counterparts with the details of those German, Austrian, and Czech citizens believed to have escaped to the Soviet Union. The NKVD would check its own records to determine the precise fate of the individuals in question, and any survivors would be rearrested and deported. Peculiarly, some of the prisoners were granted a period in Moscow during which they could be “fattened up” after the rigors of the Gulag. Otto Raabe recalled a sojourn in Moscow with feather pillows, bedsheets, and good food, as well as an in-house tailor and a cobbler, to prepare him for his return to Germany. Unsurprisingly, many of the prisoners did not want to leave, but they were told that they had no choice. At German insistence, they would be taken by train direct to crossing points on the new German-Soviet border in occupied Poland to prevent possible escape attempts. In total, around 350 individuals were delivered back to the Reich in this way.

One of those affected was Margarete Buber-Neumann, the wife of a prominent German communist, Heinz Neumann, who had fled to the Soviet Union in 1935. After her husband was arrested and shot by the NKVD in 1937, Buber-Neumann had been sentenced to five years labor in the Gulag before she was arrested once again in January 1940 and brought for questioning to the infamous Butyrka prison in Moscow. The following month, she was deported with a group of twenty-nine others back to Germany, being taken by train to Brest-Litovsk. “We got out on the Russian side of the Brest-Litovsk bridge,” she recalled. After a while, a group of NKVD men crossed the bridge, returning with some SS officers: “The SS commandant and the NKVD chief saluted each other. The Russian took some papers from a bright leather case and began to read out a list of names. The only one I heard was ‘Margarete Genrichovna Buber-Neumann.’” With that, she was handed back to the SS. As she was crossing the bridge, she could not resist a glance back to the communist refuge that had betrayed her: “The NKVD officials still stood there in a group watching us go. Behind them was Soviet Russia. Bitterly I recalled the Communist litany: Fatherland of the Toilers; Bulwark of Socialism; Haven of the Persecuted.” Already a veteran of the infamous Soviet camp at Karaganda, she would spend the next five years in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

One group crossing the German-Soviet frontier that is not often considered is Allied POWs. From the summer of 1940, many prisoners, mainly British, found themselves in German POW camps, some located in the eastern provinces and the Polish lands annexed directly to the Reich. For them, Soviet-occupied Poland represented the closest “neutral” territory, and therefore potential refuge, available. The prisoners of Stalag XXA at Thorn (Toruń) northwest of Warsaw are a good case in point. Fifteen of their number made successful escapes to Soviet territory, only 150 miles to the east, in 1940. One of those who attempted the feat was Airey Neave, who “dreamed of [his] triumphant arrival in Russia” and believed that, should he reach the demarcation line at Brest-Litovsk, he would be “ushered into the presence of the British ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps.” Neave would be disappointed, however. Posing as an ethnic German, he was captured en route to Brest at Iłow near Warsaw in April 1941. He might have considered himself lucky. According to the official report of MI9, the arm of British Military Intelligence responsible for POW affairs, the reception escaped prisoners received from the Soviets was “always cold,” and many were even maltreated. Most of them were subsequently sent to Siberia. Neave would later make a successful escape from the high-security POW camp at Colditz Castle in Saxony.

Although they were obliged to intern escapees, the Soviets’ treatment of escaped POWs could be positively hostile. One escapee who swam the river San to present himself to Soviet authorities in March 1941 was promptly arrested and spent the next year in a succession of NKVD jails, usually in solitary confinement. In some cases, escapees were even handed back to the Germans. Polish underground couriers, for instance, were bemused to discover that sixteen Allied airmen whom they had spirited out via Kiev in the winter of 1940 had returned to Warsaw as prisoners of the Gestapo. “Internment,” it seems, could have various definitions.

The question of coordination between the Nazis and the Soviets still raises fevered speculation in some quarters about high-level meetings between the NKVD and the Gestapo, supposedly with the likes of Adolf Eichmann in attendance. Tantalizingly, Khrushchev states in his memoir that Ivan Serov, head of the NKVD for Ukraine, had “contacts with the Gestapo.” Of course, given that both sides were united in their common efforts to exchange refugees and destroy Poland’s elite, a degree of cooperation is to be expected, and to this end it should not be surprising that a number of planning meetings would have been held. It is certainly notable in this regard that both the NKVD’s Katyn massacres and the Gestapo’s AB Aktion were ordered within a few days of each other, suggesting at least an element of imitation, if not concerted action. As yet, however, broader high-level collaboration between the Gestapo and the NKVD finds no echo in the documentary record.

Yet Nazi-Soviet collaboration found expression in other spheres. In the first week of the war, the luxury ocean liner SS Bremen found an emergency berth at Murmansk after escaping internment in New York and playing hide-and-seek with the Royal Navy in the Atlantic. With Soviet assistance, most of the ship’s complement were evacuated by train back to Germany, and the captain later sneaked the Bremen back to German territorial waters under cover of the polar night, narrowly avoiding a British submarine on the way.

The Bremen was not an isolated case. Indeed, in the opening three weeks of the war alone, eighteen German ships sought refuge from the attentions of the Royal Navy in Murmansk. Mindful, therefore, that a friendly port in the Soviet Arctic might be beneficial, in October 1939 the German admiralty submitted a request to the Soviets for a naval base in the Arctic North, for the service and supply of U-boats. After some wrangling and a few shifts of location, the request was granted, and Basis Nord (Base North) was established that December on a sheltered inlet, away from all prying eyes and all semblance of civilization. Although the base never became fully operational and was rendered superfluous by the Nazi conquest of Norway the following summer, its brief existence was fraught with difficulties. Not only was the terrain utterly inhospitable that winter, but the reflexive paranoia and secrecy of the Soviets served to exacerbate the already trying conditions for the German sailors stationed there. According to a ship’s doctor on a German supply vessel, the provision of food was “terrible,” causing cases of scurvy, while the sense of isolation and futility fostered a pervasive atmosphere of depression. Matters were not helped by the hostile attitude exhibited by Soviet liaison officers, one of whom the doctor described as “mentally malnourished, disingenuous” and “an unusually evil subject [who] mistrusts and harasses us whenever possible.”

That Soviet mistrust was not merely force of habit. As Allied seamen aboard the Arctic convoys would discover later in the war, the Soviet authorities could be astonishingly inhospitable when it came to foreign servicemen trespassing on their soil. Another factor fed the psychosis. Stalin was very eager to maintain the outward fiction of Soviet “neutrality” in the war, and any military action that openly assisted his German partners risked jeopardizing that cover. Fear of discovery, then, seems to have spurred the already unhelpful Soviet authorities to new heights of obstructionism.

Other joint ventures proved more fruitful, not least in exploiting Soviet “neutrality” to German advantage. In December 1939, for instance, the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran evaded the British naval blockade of Germany by disguising herself as a Soviet merchantman; appropriately enough, the name chosen for her was the Vyacheslav Molotov. In the following spring, Soviet assistance was more active, providing Germany with access to the Pacific via the Northern Passage, through the ice-bound Arctic North of the USSR. An ex-merchantman was duly refitted as a surface raider, complete with torpedo tubes, an array of weaponry, and a crew of 270. The Komet, as she was named, sailed from Gdynia in July 1940, skirting Scandinavia en route for the Soviet Arctic, where she was met by the icebreaker Stalin of the Red Fleet. By September, with Soviet assistance to clear a path through the ice floes, the Komet crossed the Bering Strait into the Pacific Ocean, where she attacked Allied shipping disguised as a Japanese merchant vessel, the Manyo Maru. In this guise, she would sink eight ships, totaling over 42,000 tons, including the RMS Rangitane, before being torpedoed in 1942.

This story would be remarkable by any measure, not least for the sheer chutzpah and the feats of seamanship involved. Yet the war diary of the Komet’s captain reveals an amicable collaboration with the Soviets that stands in stark contrast to the grim experience of those at Basis Nord. “The relationship was good,” he noted at the outset. “We liked them. We saw they were good people.” In due course, the connection would strengthen further still. Indeed, when the German crew celebrated a success against the British, their Soviet counterparts joined in. “You can’t fake that,” the captain recorded in his diary, “that was real. The Russians were on our side.” When the Komet’s Arctic adventure was at an end, the commander of the German navy, Admiral Erich Raeder, wrote personally to thank his Soviet opposite number, Admiral Nikolai Kuznetzov: “It falls to me to have the honour of expressing the German Navy’s sincerest thanks to you, esteemed Commissar, for your invaluable support.”

IN MID-DECEMBER 1939, ADOLF HITLER SENT BIRTHDAY GREETINGS to his new ally, Joseph Stalin, expressing his “most sincere congratulations [and] very best wishes for your personal good health and for a happy future with the peoples of a friendly Soviet Union.” Ribbentrop’s note, predictably, was more effusive and more labored, recalling the “historic hours at the Kremlin which marked the beginning of a decisive change in the relations of our two countries” and ending with his “most cordial congratulations.”

The hyperbole aside, Hitler had every reason to be pleased with the political and strategic developments of the previous few months. In collaboration with the Soviet Union, his forces had crushed and dismembered Poland, leaving his eastern frontier secure and allowing him to devote his energies to confronting the British and the French in the west. In concert with the Soviets, his forces had begun the racial reorganization of the Polish lands and set in motion exchanges of political prisoners and ethnic Germans. Economic agreements forged with Moscow would also prove beneficial, it was hoped, not least in enabling Germany to avoid the worst effects of the British blockade.

Stalin, too, would have been satisfied. Collaboration with the Germans was proceeding well. Poland, one of Moscow’s historic enemies, had been wiped off the map, and territory had been gained at her expense, which made good many of the losses sustained by the Soviet Union during the chaos of the revolution and its aftermath. Beyond that, Stalin could be well pleased with the Soviet Union’s strategic situation. From a position of almost perpetual insecurity only a few months before, he was now allied to the preeminent military and economic power on the Continent, with a freshly minted economic arrangement promising vital German military hardware in return for Soviet raw materials. What was more, the Soviet Union was at peace, having declared itself neutral in the war that had broken out between his German partner and the Western powers. In his more hawkish moments, Stalin could doubtless envisage the Germans and the West becoming embroiled in a costly, murderous rerun of World War I, after which he would be the one to pick up the pieces, remaking all of Europe in the Soviet image in the process.

Little wonder, then, that Stalin’s reply to Hitler’s birthday greeting was similarly effusive, proclaiming that “the friendship between the peoples of the Soviet Union and Germany, cemented in blood, has every reason to be solid and lasting.” He might have added that it was a friendship cemented largely in Polish blood.